Business & Finance Rising Labor Costs & Automation Affordability

[History Learner]

Typically Progressive stupidity at its finest.

Yes, Progressive, Socialist/Communist and Fascist are all born of the same toxic stew of elitism, racism, classism, and authoritarianism. Simply waving your arms really hard doesn't change that. You are utterly incapable of rational thought as a typical prog NPC. Your arguments are always incompetent, substituting condescension for argument.

In short, you have no clue.

You wish to control that which you could never build yourself.

Notably, you still can't explain them and rely on personal attacks to hide that. Tell me again what's the difference between a "Progressive" and yourself? You even immediately went to racial attacks lol.

But yes, do go on about building things; perhaps start with how to build a second term for Trump.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHHAAHHAAA!!!!!

Stunning and brave defense.

 

[History Learner]

There are certainly cases where an employer did bad things. In your example, that's illegal activity. So MUCH of what's going on would be helped if we just executed the laws that are on the books.

And how exactly are you supposed to do that when we have lobbying and campaign donations? When you're against Unions and Government regulation, what other defense do workers have against exploitation or, in the case of customers, being denied service? All the theory in the world goes right out the door when you actually look at the facts. Case in point being the proliferation of mandatory arbitration and non compete agreements among industries, where they conspire to prevent workers from taking them to court and prevent said workers from being able to achieve better wages/working conditions by working with their competitors to ensure none is to be had.

This line of thinking just doesn't work, hasn't worked and never will work in reality because of Human Nature being what it is. You can either have strong Unions, like in Scandinavia, Government regulation or eventually you reach the point we're starting to reach here in the States in terms of worker militancy being the unspoken "third avenue" of securing worker's rights.

Blaming the rise of automation on peasants daring to want a livable wage is ridiculous, the robots were coming anyway. Automation is an existential threat for everyone who isn't an idle rich robotics company executive.

"We're for the workers, raising their wages will result in automation and poverty! So our solution for that is.....keeping wages low and thus ensuring said workers stay in poverty."

Beyond that though, a reminder that automation is an excuse by our ruling elites to justify these kind of actions. From The Terminator Myth: It’s Not Robots That Hurt Workers, by Oren Cass:

Compare that period to the 21st century, when America has lost nearly five million manufacturing jobs. Was any of this because of extraordinary technological breakthroughs that caused productivity to surge, allowing firms to do much more with many fewer workers? No. In fact, the average rate of productivity growth in manufacturing this century has been 3.1%—lower than 1947–72 and no different than 1972–2000. But output growth has been only 1.3%, less than a third the rate of the earlier period. We’ve gone from the world where firms use a doubling of productivity to double output, to one where they use it to lay off half their workers. Had output growth this century equaled that of 1950–2000, manufacturing employment today would be near an all-time high. So when policymakers blame automation for job losses, they are looking in the wrong place. Productivity gains have always been with us—in fact, they used to come faster. If anything, the American economy is suffering from insufficient automation—as reflected in declining productivity growth, stagnant wages, and remarkably little use of robots. American manufacturers use only 200 industrial robots per 10,000 workers, the standard measure of adoption. In both Germany and Japan, that level exceeds 300. In South Korea, it exceeds 700. With greater automation and higher productivity, American firms would likely be more competitive in the international economy.​

MANUFACTURING THE FUTURE: Why Reindustrialization Is the Road to Recovery by Mark Levinson, New Labor Forum, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Fall 2012), pp. 10-15

Those like Reich and Goolsbee-who think manufacturing is healthy and the employment decline is due to productivity increases point to the fact that the change in real manufacturing value added, relative to GDP, is stable. But what's obscured is that, in 2010, thirteen of the nineteen manufacturing sectors were actually producing less than in 2000. But, more importantly, when corrected for the problems identified by Mishel-overestimation of output in the computers and electronics sector, and problems with how inputs are measured-manufacturing output actually fell over the last decade, while GDP increased by 17 percent. Employment in manufacturing is declining mainly because of reduced output.Productivity growth, rather than being the cause of declining manufacturing employment, is the prerequisite for manufacturing employment growth. This should not be surprising. Only highly efficient factories can survive in todays global economy. William Nordhaus has shown that, within each manufacturing industry, increases in the rate of productivity growth were associated with increases in the rate of job growth from 1948 to 2003. A Brookings Institution study extended the Nordhaus study until 2009 and concluded that "there is no evidence that productivity increases were significantly correlated with job loss." It is not inevitable that manufacturing will decline. Many nations with higher manufacturing wages than the United States- including Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway-have seen either stable or increasing manufacturing output as a share of GDP. Other countries-Korea, Austria, Poland, Finland, the Czech Republic, and the Slovak Republic- have actually seen their manufacturing sectors grow as a share of their economy.​

 

[The Whispering Monk]

Stunning and brave defense.

I'll say it once.

If you chose to willfully ignore a great deal of evidence that's very easy to find in order to schill your opinion then I will treat you like I treat every schill I run into now. I will laugh in your face and move on. For I am not going to be the one arguing with the fool.

 

[LordSunhawk]

Notably, you still can't explain them and rely on personal attacks to hide that. Tell me again what's the difference between a "Progressive" and yourself? You even immediately went to racial attacks lol.

But yes, do go on about building things; perhaps start with how to build a second term for Trump.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Sietch, I present to you the Progressive in all of its glory.

Smirking condescension? CHECK
Assumption of superiority? CHECK
Utter inability to actually address anything of substance? CHECK
Feeble attempts at verbal dancing? CHECK
Inability to create an argument? CHECK

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Sietch. See how the Progressive tries, and fails, to turn arguments around? See how they attempt to allege racism on the part of those pointing out their own flagrant racism? See how they attempt to shift the subject?

This, Ladies and Gentlemen, is how a Progressive acts. They never defend, because what they are is indefensible. Instead they attempt to always attack.

Don't be a Progressive, for it is proof that you are weak minded, a coward, and a racist buffoon.

Note. Progressives believe in the inherent inferiority of racial minorities. American Conservatives believe that all men are created equal. They will point at you and scream 'RACIST' not because you are one, but because they are, and all a Progressive can do is project their own weaknesses and flaws onto others.

The minimum wage laws, as enacted by the Wilson administration, were enacted on an explicitly racist platform of excluding 'unfit minorities' from the job market. If History Learner had ever bothered to learn actual History, he would have easily found the congressional records from the era, the speeches given by Woodrow Wilson on the topic, and the books, pamphlets, magazine articles, and newspaper columns penned by his supporters in which this is made clear to all.

But as a Progressive he cannot do that, because the risk that he might be confronted with actual truth of one of his heroes is too much for him to stand.

Oh, and History Learner? The Great Society was designed and implemented by senior members of the Ku Klux Klan, including LBJ who hosted KKK meetings in the White House while he was in office. Makes you wonder what the actual purpose of the Great Society actually was, no?

 

[The Whispering Monk]

@LordSunhawk said it more eloquently than I did.

+1

 

[Terthna]

There are certainly cases where an employer did bad things. In your example, that's illegal activity. So MUCH of what's going on would be helped if we just executed the laws that are on the books.

You have a point there; one could argue that a minimum wage might be unnecessary, if certain other regulations were actually enforced. It's been so long since they have, that it's easy to forget that they exist.

 

[History Learner]

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Sietch, I present to you the Progressive in all of its glory.

Smirking condescension? CHECK
Assumption of superiority? CHECK
Utter inability to actually address anything of substance? CHECK
Feeble attempts at verbal dancing? CHECK
Inability to create an argument? CHECK

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Sietch. See how the Progressive tries, and fails, to turn arguments around? See how they attempt to allege racism on the part of those pointing out their own flagrant racism? See how they attempt to shift the subject?

This, Ladies and Gentlemen, is how a Progressive acts. They never defend, because what they are is indefensible. Instead they attempt to always attack.

Don't be a Progressive, for it is proof that you are weak minded, a coward, and a racist buffoon.

Note. Progressives believe in the inherent inferiority of racial minorities. American Conservatives believe that all men are created equal. They will point at you and scream 'RACIST' not because you are one, but because they are, and all a Progressive can do is project their own weaknesses and flaws onto others.

This is a long winded way to say you can't explain what the difference between a Communist, a "Progressive" and a Fascist is. Let's also remember this conversation started because I said we should nationalize businesses lmao. North Dakota has State Run-banking, for example; does this mean North Dakota and its *checks notes* Republican controlled State Government are the REAL RACIST PROGRESSIVES??!!

The minimum wage laws, as enacted by the Wilson administration, were enacted on an explicitly racist platform of excluding 'unfit minorities' from the job market. If History Learner had ever bothered to learn actual History, he would have easily found the congressional records from the era, the speeches given by Woodrow Wilson on the topic, and the books, pamphlets, magazine articles, and newspaper columns penned by his supporters in which this is made clear to all.

But as a Progressive he cannot do that, because the risk that he might be confronted with actual truth of one of his heroes is too much for him to stand.

Would come as a hell of a shock to everyone involved, given the Minimum Wage wasn't enacted until 1938. Wilson had been dead since the 1920s lol.

Oh, and History Learner? The Great Society was designed and implemented by senior members of the Ku Klux Klan, including LBJ who hosted KKK meetings in the White House while he was in office. Makes you wonder what the actual purpose of the Great Society actually was, no?

Remember this when you complain about Critical Race Theory being taught in schools.

I'll say it once.

If you chose to willfully ignore a great deal of evidence that's very easy to find in order to schill your opinion then I will treat you like I treat every schill I run into now. I will laugh in your face and move on. For I am not going to be the one arguing with the fool.

Maybe because the onus of proving your argument relies on you? If the evidence is easily found, why not cite it? That's how a good faith debate actually works; you submit your evidence and then I submit mine.

 

[LordsFire]

Except all the studies say otherwise, we have never found increase unemployed, barriers to entry or the like. Instead, we improved the lives of everyone by doing such. Here's a video that goes over the evidence of this:



And if you want the same from a conservative slant like Sowell:

So yeah, I watched the opening on both of these. The first only took 1:10 to get into the lies and nonsense, the second I got 2:18 into before it became clear that this 'conservative' was just reiterating standard leftist propaganda nonsense. The second just dropped a bunch of leftist assertions, and then started talking personal politics, 'ohhh, nasty conservative Heritage Foundation intimidating people into not talking about how wonderful progressive policies really are!'

There's no actual argument for how the minimum wage is supposed to actually help rather than hurt.

The old 'CEOs used to make 20 times average salary, now they make 300-something time' canard is particularly annoying. It just states a set of numbers, and pushes you to assume that means that bad and evil things are happening.

First off, they don't say where they're taking the numbers from. My guess would be they're comparing a broad spectrum of companies from ~1950's or so, and now they're comparing it to the Fortune 500. That's just a guess though, so let's look at other possible reasons that someone vaguely economically and historically literate could give, when they're not just looking for the first excuse to leap to the conclusion they've actually already come to:

1. There is a lot more wealth in the world than there was 70 or 100 years ago. This means that not only has the bell curve of people in the wealth distribution been raised overall, but the extreme edges also go further out now.
2. Increased regulation (and a variety of other factors) has encouraged massive numbers of mergers and consolidations within industries. 40 years ago, there were something like a dozen major aerospace companies producing aircraft for the US military. Now they've practically all been merged and consolidated down into just Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. I vaguely remember there being one other left, but we're still at either a quarter or a sixth of what it used to be. This means a larger company with more low-level employees earning similar wages, while there's still just one CEO at the top of this larger company. This pattern has been seen in many companies.
3. The mass-entry into the workforce on the part of women. When you almost double the size of your workforce, this depresses wages; basic supply and demand.
4. Economy of scale, ease of reproducibility, and technological advances of the digital era. There is nothing remotely like what has been possible in the digital era. One person can write and record a song, then put it on a digital network and sell it to not just millions, but billions of people. A video game, a piece of office software, a movie, the ease and incredible cheapness of digital distribution since the infrastructure of the post-~2005 internet has been established is immense. This means that a company employing 600 people can be selling to as many people as a company employing 60,000 people, and making better margins per-sale, because they're working with digital 'goods.'

This is just off the top of my head, reasons beyond just 'Nasty unregulated capitalists are greedily holding on to the money.'


But you know what? Nasty greedy people holding on to the money is part of the problem. Some of them are even capitalists and businessmen.

You know what has no track record of helping, ever, with solving this problem?

Onerous government regulation and restriction on free enterprise. Not coerced enterprise, but free enterprise.

When a company crosses the line into becoming the de-facto government somewhere, like the infamous 'company towns' of the second industrial revolution, then that is absolutely the proper time and place for the legitimate government to step in and smack them down. Anti-trust regulation is the only form of regulation that I support.

Otherwise, when you look at all the groups of people that things like minimum wage, rent controls, 'the great society,' strict regulation on hiring practices, etc, are supposed to help?

They're worse off relative to the rest of society than they were sixty years ago before most of those policies were put into place. Just look at the slums and 'projects' of Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Flint, LA, San Francisco, and any number of East Coast or southern cities.

 

[History Learner]

So yeah, I watched the opening on both of these. The first only took 1:10 to get into the lies and nonsense, the second I got 2:18 into before it became clear that this 'conservative' was just reiterating standard leftist propaganda nonsense. The second just dropped a bunch of leftist assertions, and then started talking personal politics, 'ohhh, nasty conservative Heritage Foundation intimidating people into not talking about how wonderful progressive policies really are!'

There's no actual argument for how the minimum wage is supposed to actually help rather than hurt.

By your own admission you only watched a literal minute out of a 15 minute video, so how can you say there is no argument when you didn't even watch to see if there was one? The first dives into it really well and does exactly as I said by going over the 1966 FLSA Amendment Study, which reviewed the impact of minimum wage increases in the 1960s. Bottom line?

The earnings difference between white and black workers fell dramatically in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This article shows that the expansion of the minimum wage played a critical role in this decline. The 1966 Fair Labor Standards Act extended federal minimum wage coverage to agriculture, restaurants, nursing homes, and other services that were previously uncovered and where nearly a third of black workers were employed. We digitize over 1,000 hourly wage distributions from Bureau of Labor Statistics industry wage reports and use CPS microdata to investigate the effects of this reform on wages, employment, and racial inequality. Using a cross-industry difference-in-differences design, we show that earnings rose sharply for workers in the newly covered industries. The impact was nearly twice as large for black workers as for white workers. Within treated industries, the racial gap adjusted for observables fell from 25 log points prereform to 0 afterward. We can rule out significant disemployment effects for black workers. Using a bunching design, we find no aggregate effect of the reform on employment. The 1967 extension of the minimum wage can explain more than 20% of the reduction in the racial earnings and income gap during the civil rights era. Our findings shed new light on the dynamics of labor market inequality in the United States and suggest that minimum wage policy can play a critical role in reducing racial economic disparities.​

Remember kids, @LordSunhawk says the minimum wage is just a dastardly racist plot to screw over Blacks lol.

The old 'CEOs used to make 20 times average salary, now they make 300-something time' canard is particularly annoying. It just states a set of numbers, and pushes you to assume that means that bad and evil things are happening.

First off, they don't say where they're taking the numbers from. My guess would be they're comparing a broad spectrum of companies from ~1950's or so, and now they're comparing it to the Fortune 500. That's just a guess though, so let's look at other possible reasons that someone vaguely economically and historically literate could give, when they're not just looking for the first excuse to leap to the conclusion they've actually already come to:

1. There is a lot more wealth in the world than there was 70 or 100 years ago. This means that not only has the bell curve of people in the wealth distribution been raised overall, but the extreme edges also go further out now.

Except all of that wealth has accrued at the top, not spread out as you suggest:

Looking the development of U.S. wealth distribution since 1989, the rich have in fact gotten richer, with the top 1 percent expanding their wealth share from 24 percent to 32 percent. The next 9 percent has remained more steady at around 37 percent of wealth held, while the 50-90 percentile has been holding less wealth - 28 percent in 2019, down from 35 percent in 1989.​

2. Increased regulation (and a variety of other factors) has encouraged massive numbers of mergers and consolidations within industries. 40 years ago, there were something like a dozen major aerospace companies producing aircraft for the US military. Now they've practically all been merged and consolidated down into just Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. I vaguely remember there being one other left, but we're still at either a quarter or a sixth of what it used to be. This means a larger company with more low-level employees earning similar wages, while there's still just one CEO at the top of this larger company. This pattern has been seen in many companies.

The development of Corporate Monopolies is indeed bad, but they absolutely did not arise out of increased regulation. Quite the opposite in fact, with the recent supply chain difficulties being traced to Clinton de-regulating shipping back in the late 1990s for example. If you feel otherwise, what's the evidence?

3. The mass-entry into the workforce on the part of women. When you almost double the size of your workforce, this depresses wages; basic supply and demand.

Men's wages, on average, declined by 50-60% but Women on average are 20-40% of Men's. This isn't because of them getting paid less then men in the same fields, but because they choose careers that tend to pay less. That also means, however, that women can't explain the decline in wages because they were not/are not competing with women in the same fields. Women becoming secretaries and nurses in large numbers can't explain the drop in pay for manufacturing workers, for example.

4. Economy of scale, ease of reproducibility, and technological advances of the digital era. There is nothing remotely like what has been possible in the digital era. One person can write and record a song, then put it on a digital network and sell it to not just millions, but billions of people. A video game, a piece of office software, a movie, the ease and incredible cheapness of digital distribution since the infrastructure of the post-~2005 internet has been established is immense. This means that a company employing 600 people can be selling to as many people as a company employing 60,000 people, and making better margins per-sale, because they're working with digital 'goods.'

Okay? That still doesn't explain why wages have declined because if a company is making "digital goods", they're not competing with a company making computer chips so why should one be effecting the other's wages? They're not in competition over market share because they aren't even in the same market.

This is just off the top of my head, reasons beyond just 'Nasty unregulated capitalists are greedily holding on to the money.'

But it is exactly that.

But you know what? Nasty greedy people holding on to the money is part of the problem. Some of them are even capitalists and businessmen.

You know what has no track record of helping, ever, with solving this problem?

Onerous government regulation and restriction on free enterprise. Not coerced enterprise, but free enterprise.

Except for all the times it does and did, nor do these have to be exclusive. Scandinavia is routinely rated as one of the best places to do business and they have strict regulation and social safety nets in place.

When a company crosses the line into becoming the de-facto government somewhere, like the infamous 'company towns' of the second industrial revolution, then that is absolutely the proper time and place for the legitimate government to step in and smack them down. Anti-trust regulation is the only form of regulation that I support.

You mean like Amazon wanting to start company towns? A common argument I've seen people repeating in here is that if you don't like the wage an employer is giving you should go somewhere and that's why we don't need a minimum wage; well, what happens when all the employers get together and agree to not hire each other's workers? Enter the proliferation of non-compete agreements:

Noncompete agreements are employment provisions that ban workers at one company from going to work for, or starting, a competing business within a certain period of time after leaving a job. It is not difficult to see that noncompetes may be contributing to weak wage growth, given that changing jobs is how workers often get a raise. And given that noncompetes limit the ability of individuals to start businesses or take other jobs, it also is not difficult to see that noncompetes may be contributing to the declines in dynamism in the U.S. labor market. But how common are they? This report uses data from a national survey of private-sector American business establishments to investigate the extent of noncompete usage. We find:​

​

Roughly half, 49.4%, of responding establishments indicated that at least some employees in their establishment were required to enter into a noncompete agreement. Nearly a third, 31.8%, of responding establishments indicated that all employees in their establishment were required to enter into a noncompete agreement, regardless of pay or job duties.​

So the old Libertarian points of "just find a new job" or "start your own business" go out of the window here for many, because they legally can't do any of that. How about if you're subjected to abuse, illegally or otherwise? Well, you can't sue either because mandatory arbitration agreements have also proliferated:

One recent case illustrates the difficulties employees now face when trying to enforce their rights under basic employment statutes. In 2008, Stephanie Sutherland was hired by Ernst & Young to work as a “staff/assistant.”2 Her work involved relatively routine, low-level clerical work, for which she was paid a fixed salary of $55,000 per year. She routinely worked 45 to 50 hours per week, but because she was classified by her employer as exempt from overtime, she did not receive any additional compensation for overtime. By the time Ms. Sutherland was terminated in 2009, she had worked 151 hours of overtime, for which she should have been paid about $1,867, had the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)3 and New York state labor laws been observed. She filed a class-action lawsuit seeking to recover overtime pay for her work in excess of 40 hours a week and for other current and former nonlicensed Staff 1 and Staff 2 employees of the firm who worked overtime.​

​

When Ms. Sutherland was hired, she was given an offer letter that also provided that “if an employment related dispute arises between you and the firm, it will be subject to mandatory mediation/arbitration under the terms of the firm’s alternative dispute-resolution program, known as the Common Ground Program, a copy of which is attached.” The arbitration agreement specified that claims arising under state and federal labor statutes, including the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, were subject to the arbitration program. It further specified that any dispute must be brought to arbitration and not to a court, and that all disputes must be brought on an individual basis.​

​

In her lawsuit, Ms. Sutherland attempted to enforce her rights under state and federal minimum-wage and overtime laws. The federal Fair Labor Standards Act has a provision that expressly permits lawsuits for minimum-wage and overtime violations to be brought on a collective basis. Mr. Sutherland sought to use that provision, but to do so, she had to avoid the force of the arbitration clause that said she could only bring a case on an individual basis. To this end, she argued that if she had to arbitrate her claim on an individual basis, it would cost her $160,000 in attorney fees, more than $6,000 in other costs, and more than $25,000 in expert testimony. Overall, she claimed, she would have to spend nearly $200,000 to recover less than $2,000 in unpaid overtime. She argued that because she was unemployed and had substantial college debt, she could not afford to arbitrate on an individual basis, and thus should not be subject to the arbitration provision or the class-action waiver because together they operated to deprive her of rights under the FLSA.​

​

The lower court was sympathetic to Ms. Sutherland’s arguments, and held that the class-action waiver did not apply because it would prevent her from vindicating her rights under the Fair Labor Standards Act. However, the U.S. Court of Appeals reversed, relying on the 2013 Supreme Court decision in American Express Co. v. Italian Colors, 133 U.S. 2304, an antitrust case, in which the Supreme Court held that a class-action waiver in an arbitration clause was enforceable despite the high cost of bringing an individual action. In that case, Justice Scalia, speaking for the majority, wrote that “the fact that it is not worth the expense involved in proving a statutory remedy does not constitute the elimination of the right to pursue that remedy.” On the basis of this precedent, the Court of Appeals denied Ms. Sutherland’s right to bring her dispute to a court or arbitration on a collective basis, thereby effectively eliminating her right to overtime pay under the federal statute.​

Otherwise, when you look at all the groups of people that things like minimum wage, rent controls, 'the great society,' strict regulation on hiring practices, etc, are supposed to help?

Why are you grouping them all together when the thing we're specifically talking about is the minimum wage? I support a high minimum wage, indexed to inflation, but I don't support rent controls or the like nor are they tied together even.

They're worse off relative to the rest of society than they were sixty years ago before most of those policies were put into place. Just look at the slums and 'projects' of Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Flint, LA, San Francisco, and any number of East Coast or southern cities.

Or maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with this:

Real wages have been stagnant for decades and the minimum wage actually peaked in the late 1960s. Today's wages are actually almost half, when adjusted for inflation, of what workers were making in the 1960s:

Low-wage workers actually saw their purchasing power peak while Johnson was in office. Adjusting for inflation, minimum wage workers earn less today than they did in the late 1960s.​

​

In 1968, workers on the bottom rung of the economic ladder that year earned the equivalent of well over $10 an hour in today's money. But purchasing power of the minimum wage fell sharply in the 1980s, and it still hasn't recovered lost ground. Devonte Yates, who works at a McDonald's in Milwaukee, says he sometimes struggles to pay for groceries and other bills.​

 

[Simonbob]

Real wages have been stagnant for decades and the minimum wage actually peaked in the late 1960s. Today's wages are actually almost half, when adjusted for inflation, of what workers were making in the 1960s:

Agreed. How will a minimum wage fix the problem of inflation, anyway?

Noncompete agreements

You make some interesting points.

What have these got to do with Minimum Wage, exactly? And, why are people working for such shitholes, anyway? And, what's stopping people just ignoring their bullshit?


Please note, as an Australian, in a country that's had a minimum wage for literal decades, there are a large number of jobs who just vanished soon after.

There was a point in Australian history where a Prime Minister almost got removed because the Unemployment rate hit 2%. But, that was a long time ago.

The Unemployment rate in Australia hasn't gotten below 5%, officaly, in decades. And, it's well known to be massively inacurate. (For example, being unemployed for long periods often ends up with a diagnosis of depression, and a medical pension, that conveniantly isn't listed as unemployed any more. We have a total welfare state, and that really doesn't help.)

I ask, why is it so hard to start a new company, hmm? Sure, Google and the like will try to stop you, but that's really a small part of the problems.

If you try to start a new company in Australia, you're going to need Federal, State and Local agencies, in different ways, to approve. If any of the agencies involoved say no, you're screwed.


Heck, talking about even rich folk being unable to get things done, there's a guy, one of the biggest developers in the nation, who wants to re-develop a industrial area into a few thousand appartments. He's been lining up this deal for more than 15 years. And, from 6 months in, he's had a massive law suit with the Council. This is a guy who can throw over a hundred million dollars at a problem, and he can't get any traction at local or state level.


15 years, law suits, offers to fix major issues for the Council for free, and town planning doesn't care. Litteral millions of dollars of inducements, and not a thing. And they're just as bad for my little sister wanting to do a renovation.




Getting back to automation, I generally approve. But, I also think a lot of people over-estimate what labor has, actualy been replaced, when a lot has just been offshored instead.

 

[LordsFire]

By your own admission you only watched a literal minute out of a 15 minute video, so how can you say there is no argument when you didn't even watch to see if there was one? The first dives into it really well and does exactly as I said by going over the 1966 FLSA Amendment Study, which reviewed the impact of minimum wage increases in the 1960s. Bottom line?

The earnings difference between white and black workers fell dramatically in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This article shows that the expansion of the minimum wage played a critical role in this decline. The 1966 Fair Labor Standards Act extended federal minimum wage coverage to agriculture, restaurants, nursing homes, and other services that were previously uncovered and where nearly a third of black workers were employed. We digitize over 1,000 hourly wage distributions from Bureau of Labor Statistics industry wage reports and use CPS microdata to investigate the effects of this reform on wages, employment, and racial inequality. Using a cross-industry difference-in-differences design, we show that earnings rose sharply for workers in the newly covered industries. The impact was nearly twice as large for black workers as for white workers. Within treated industries, the racial gap adjusted for observables fell from 25 log points prereform to 0 afterward. We can rule out significant disemployment effects for black workers. Using a bunching design, we find no aggregate effect of the reform on employment. The 1967 extension of the minimum wage can explain more than 20% of the reduction in the racial earnings and income gap during the civil rights era. Our findings shed new light on the dynamics of labor market inequality in the United States and suggest that minimum wage policy can play a critical role in reducing racial economic disparities.​

That's a nice claim they make, but the actual body of the article requires an account on their site, and the summary doesn't actually demonstrate the assertions made here.

When we look at the actual relative unemployment rates though:

Unemployment Rate by Race

This interactive chart compares the historical unemployment rate for the three largest ethnic groups in the United States. Note: Statistics for Asian unemployment are not included here as the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not start including this measure until 2000 and does not provide a...

www.macrotrends.net

E-16. Unemployment rates by age, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino ethnicity

www.bls.gov

Unemployment Rates

www.dol.gov

We find that yes, the unemployment rate among blacks is higher, and it's especially higher among young blacks, as Sowell talks about in his various works. Unfortunately, none of the graphed and easily-understandable rate displays I've been able to find track distributed percentages back before the Great Society and mass expansion of the Welfare state, much less the New Deal or initial implementation of Minimum Wage laws.

However, as the actual unemployment rate by ethnicity tracks to the claim that minimum wage laws were in part designed to hit blacks the hardest, you're going to need to give us some substance, not just a summary of a study where the actual study is on the members-only part of the site.

Remember kids, @LordSunhawk says the minimum wage is just a dastardly racist plot to screw over Blacks lol.



Except all of that wealth has accrued at the top, not spread out as you suggest:

Looking the development of U.S. wealth distribution since 1989, the rich have in fact gotten richer, with the top 1 percent expanding their wealth share from 24 percent to 32 percent. The next 9 percent has remained more steady at around 37 percent of wealth held, while the 50-90 percentile has been holding less wealth - 28 percent in 2019, down from 35 percent in 1989.​

The development of Corporate Monopolies is indeed bad, but they absolutely did not arise out of increased regulation. Quite the opposite in fact, with the recent supply chain difficulties being traced to Clinton de-regulating shipping back in the late 1990s for example. If you feel otherwise, what's the evidence?

...So the article talks about how shipping companies manipulating the regulatory environment have allowed them to establish a de-facto oligopoly, which is the 'alliance rather than sole-power' version of a monopoly. Gee, it's almost like (as I said earlier) high levels of regulation encourage mergers and consolidation to result in fewer and fewer companies controlling an industry. Which is exactly what it describes as having happened.

I think he's right in advocating that publicly-traded companies operating in public ports should not be allowed to have private agreements in which prices are secret. Publicly-posted prices and rates that apply to everyone is entirely appropriate.

However, it advocates price-fixing, but completely fails to address the problems with it. Price fixing has caused all kinds of problems whenever it is implemented.

It also completely fails to address how decades of the Longshoreman's union controlling activity in ports, especially the West coast ports, and steadily increasing onerous and absurd regulation by local governments has heavily contributed to problems.

Starting pay for Longeshoreman is 20 dollars an hour or more, on the west coast, where the primary shipping snarl is, and it's a semi-skilled labor job. By that I mean there is certainly skill to it, and experience makes one better at it, but someone with a high school education and a single day's training can immediately start contributing productively to the work done, which means the natural barrier to entry for the job is low. That's an absurdly high wage, and that kind of wage scale was even more ridiculous before the general rise in starting wages over the last 5 years.

Longeshoreman Union monopolistic control of labor in ports has been key to keeping levels of automation in major US ports low, to keeping ports from running night shifts (which they especially should have as fewer and fewer ports were handling more and more of the traffic), and generally being a choke-hold on cost-saving and throughput-increasing measures.

He does indirectly mention, but doesn't really focus on, the issues of poor port management that are also a major factor. He references how Peterson has brought attention to some ridiculous regulations that have crippled port activity, such as the ridiculous 2-high limit on container stacking, as laid out here.

There are a huge number of factors that have gone into the shipping issue, and while removing anti-trust laws from applying to the shipping industry is part of the problem, it is only one part, and while price transparency is good, price-fixing has a host of problems that we do not want to deal with.

Men's wages, on average, declined by 50-60% but Women on average are 20-40% of Men's. This isn't because of them getting paid less then men in the same fields, but because they choose careers that tend to pay less. That also means, however, that women can't explain the decline in wages because they were not/are not competing with women in the same fields. Women becoming secretaries and nurses in large numbers can't explain the drop in pay for manufacturing workers, for example.

Okay? That still doesn't explain why wages have declined because if a company is making "digital goods", they're not competing with a company making computer chips so why should one be effecting the other's wages? They're not in competition over market share because they aren't even in the same market.

Because the labor market as a whole is one market, even if there's distinct sub-divisions that have very different pressures on them, and semi-rigid boundaries between them. If you double the work force as a whole, with women entering very nearly all parts of it, there's now directly more competition for jobs in all those parts, and indirectly more competition for the parts that women enter either not at all or nearly so (like sewage work).

But it is exactly that.

The problem that you (and pretty much every 'more government interference' types have, is that you fail to recognize that greedy nasty people who want your vote to give them power, influence, and wealth, are also a problem. And specifically, they're a more dangerous problem, because once in office, they will have more power and more force than almost any businessmen will, and historically, in the rare example where businessmen briefly have more power than government officials, the government breaks that power.

I'm not sure how your next section is supposed to relate to the minimum wage argument, so I haven't bothered replying to it.

Real wages have been stagnant for decades and the minimum wage actually peaked in the late 1960s. Today's wages are actually almost half, when adjusted for inflation, of what workers were making in the 1960s:

Low-wage workers actually saw their purchasing power peak while Johnson was in office. Adjusting for inflation, minimum wage workers earn less today than they did in the late 1960s.​

​

In 1968, workers on the bottom rung of the economic ladder that year earned the equivalent of well over $10 an hour in today's money. But purchasing power of the minimum wage fell sharply in the 1980s, and it still hasn't recovered lost ground. Devonte Yates, who works at a McDonald's in Milwaukee, says he sometimes struggles to pay for groceries and other bills.​

I've heard this argument, and it's patently absurd. I don't know what 'purchasing power' metric they're using, but I do know that over the last sixty years, ownership (or rental properties people live in having) of the following things has drastically increased:

1. Refrigerators.
2. Televisions, then large-screen televisions.
3. Microwaves.
4. Air conditioning.
5. Automobiles.
6. Personal Computers.
7. Cell phones.
8. Washing and drying machines.

Obviously, a couple of these things didn't even exist sixty years ago, but all of these things have gone from things only for the rich, to for the rich and upper class, to the middle class, to the poor, to everyone except for the destitute.

Hell, I've known homeless people with smartphones.

Quality of living as measured by number of amenities has drastically increased over the last six decades, as has life expectancy. Where the idea that 'purchasing power parity' has overall declined comes from, I really don't know, because I can speak from demonstrated personal experience that it is possible to live comfortably working part time on a minimum-wage or just over job in the food service industry. Granted, if you don't live in a low cost-of-living area like I have, you're probably going to need to do full rather than part time, but that's still eminently manageable.


None of this is to say that there aren't problems with current corporate culture and the like. There are, and they need to be dealt with, but minimum wage laws are not the solution.

 

[LordSunhawk]

Did I say that Wilson *succeeded* at passing a minimum wage?

The Eugenics Plot of the Minimum Wage | Jeffrey A. Tucker

The minimum wage has a dark, racist history. And the great irony is that its malicious intent is unwittingly being realized today.

fee.org

 

[History Learner]

That's a nice claim they make, but the actual body of the article requires an account on their site, and the summary doesn't actually demonstrate the assertions made here.

Because the summary isn't supposed to do that, but rather explain their conclusions? If you want the methodology, you can read the article; see it here. Let's be intellectually honest, however, and say that if you're not even willing to watch a video beyond one minute then you're not going to read a full economic paper.

When we look at the actual relative unemployment rates though:

Unemployment Rate by Race

This interactive chart compares the historical unemployment rate for the three largest ethnic groups in the United States. Note: Statistics for Asian unemployment are not included here as the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not start including this measure until 2000 and does not provide a...

www.macrotrends.net

E-16. Unemployment rates by age, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino ethnicity

www.bls.gov

Unemployment Rates

www.dol.gov

We find that yes, the unemployment rate among blacks is higher, and it's especially higher among young blacks, as Sowell talks about in his various works. Unfortunately, none of the graphed and easily-understandable rate displays I've been able to find track distributed percentages back before the Great Society and mass expansion of the Welfare state, much less the New Deal or initial implementation of Minimum Wage laws.

However, as the actual unemployment rate by ethnicity tracks to the claim that minimum wage laws were in part designed to hit blacks the hardest, you're going to need to give us some substance, not just a summary of a study where the actual study is on the members-only part of the site.

black unemployment rate being higher =/= impact of minimum wage. The onus is on you to prove the linkage, given it is your argument.

...So the article talks about how shipping companies manipulating the regulatory environment have allowed them to establish a de-facto oligopoly, which is the 'alliance rather than sole-power' version of a monopoly. Gee, it's almost like (as I said earlier) high levels of regulation encourage mergers and consolidation to result in fewer and fewer companies controlling an industry. Which is exactly what it describes as having happened.

But you didn't argue you that, you stated that regulation specifically encouraged monopoly. We only saw monopoly explode, in the case of shipping, after regulations upon them were removed.

I think he's right in advocating that publicly-traded companies operating in public ports should not be allowed to have private agreements in which prices are secret. Publicly-posted prices and rates that apply to everyone is entirely appropriate.

However, it advocates price-fixing, but completely fails to address the problems with it. Price fixing has caused all kinds of problems whenever it is implemented.

Really? Then explain why ports have become congested after the removal of price fixing. This problem didn't exist before the 1990s, so why is it now?

It also completely fails to address how decades of the Longshoreman's union controlling activity in ports, especially the West coast ports, and steadily increasing onerous and absurd regulation by local governments has heavily contributed to problems.

Because there's no evidence of that.

Starting

pay for Longeshoreman is 20 dollars an hour or more, on the west coast, where the primary shipping snarl is, and it's a semi-skilled labor job. By that I mean there is certainly skill to it, and experience makes one better at it, but someone with a high school education and a single day's training can immediately start contributing productively to the work done, which means the natural barrier to entry for the job is low. That's an absurdly high wage, and that kind of wage scale was even more ridiculous before the general rise in starting wages over the last 5 years.

Okay, so your argument isn't really making much sense now; how exactly does the wage prevent productivity or serve as a barrier? How exactly is cutting the wages supposed to help anything?

Longeshoreman Union monopolistic control of labor in ports has been key to keeping levels of automation in major US ports low, to keeping ports from running night shifts (which they especially should have as fewer and fewer ports were handling more and more of the traffic), and generally being a choke-hold on cost-saving and throughput-increasing measures.

Except they don't in most ports and they have been running 24/7 for awhile now? The Port of Los Angeles, which is Longshoreman controlled, actually increased its daily output by double and we're still having issues; it's not because of the Longshoreman, it's because of other factors.

He does indirectly mention, but doesn't really focus on, the issues of poor port management that are also a major factor. He references how Peterson has brought attention to some ridiculous regulations that have crippled port activity, such as the ridiculous 2-high limit on container stacking, as laid out here.

There are a huge number of factors that have gone into the shipping issue, and while removing anti-trust laws from applying to the shipping industry is part of the problem, it is only one part, and while price transparency is good, price-fixing has a host of problems that we do not want to deal with.

Except we did, successfully, for all of the 20th Century. I agree Price Fixing isn't a solution to everything, but in the case of shipping the evidence speaks for itself.

Because the labor market as a whole is one market, even if there's distinct sub-divisions that have very different pressures on them, and semi-rigid boundaries between them. If you double the work force as a whole, with women entering very nearly all parts of it, there's now directly more competition for jobs in all those parts, and indirectly more competition for the parts that women enter either not at all or nearly so (like sewage work).

Which literally makes no sense, because a sudden increase in hair stylists, for example, has no effect on the amount of sewage workers and thus their pay. Further, you're coming at this from the weird position of arguing the job market is static-it is increasing, on average.

The problem that you (and pretty much every 'more government interference' types have, is that you fail to recognize that greedy nasty people who want your vote to give them power, influence, and wealth, are also a problem. And specifically, they're a more dangerous problem, because once in office, they will have more power and more force than almost any businessmen will, and historically, in the rare example where businessmen briefly have more power than government officials, the government breaks that power.

And there's also plenty of examples of the opposite, case being the aforementioned Scandinavian countries. If you've got an underlying culture of corruption, there's no reason you can't tackle that in conjunction with establish a beneficial society. If you can't, that speaks more to the nature of your society than anything else.

I've heard this argument, and it's patently absurd. I don't know what 'purchasing power' metric they're using, but I do know that over the last sixty years, ownership (or rental properties people live in having) of the following things has drastically increased:

1. Refrigerators.
2. Televisions, then large-screen televisions.
3. Microwaves.
4. Air conditioning.
5. Automobiles.
6. Personal Computers.
7. Cell phones.
8. Washing and drying machines.

Obviously, a couple of these things didn't even exist sixty years ago, but all of these things have gone from things only for the rich, to for the rich and upper class, to the middle class, to the poor, to everyone except for the destitute.

Hell, I've known homeless people with smartphones.

The lower of the costs of good doesn't not constitute a rebuttal that the purchasing power of existing wages has decreased because you're comparing unlike things. If you really believe this argument, you wouldn't complain about inflation or government spending.

Quality of living as measured by number of amenities has drastically increased over the last six decades, as has life expectancy. Where the idea that 'purchasing power parity' has overall declined comes from, I really don't know, because I can speak from demonstrated personal experience that it is possible to live comfortably working part time on a minimum-wage or just over job in the food service industry. Granted, if you don't live in a low cost-of-living area like I have, you're probably going to need to do full rather than part time, but that's still eminently manageable.

Except well being and life expectancy have both collapsed. You've also contradicted your previous points here; somehow it is supposed to be "eminently manageable" to get a minimum wage full time job that can support you but earlier you were arguing the introduction of women and changes to the economy have reduced the possibilities therein, so which way is it?

None of this is to say that there aren't problems with current corporate culture and the like. There are, and they need to be dealt with, but minimum wage laws are not the solution.

In of itself, no, the minimum wage isn't the only solution; we need to ban mandatory arbitration agreements, non-compete agreements and re-empower Unions in addition to that.

 

[History Learner]

Did I say that Wilson *succeeded* at passing a minimum wage?

The Eugenics Plot of the Minimum Wage | Jeffrey A. Tucker

The minimum wage has a dark, racist history. And the great irony is that its malicious intent is unwittingly being realized today.

fee.org

Yes you did, right here in fact:

The minimum wage laws, as enacted by the Wilson administration, were enacted on an explicitly racist platform of excluding 'unfit minorities' from the job market. If History Learner had ever bothered to learn actual History, he would have easily found the congressional records from the era, the speeches given by Woodrow Wilson on the topic, and the books, pamphlets, magazine articles, and newspaper columns penned by his supporters in which this is made clear to all.

So either you don't understand what the word "enacted" means, or you shifted the goalposts here. Your decision, dude.

 

[LordsFire]

Because the summary isn't supposed to do that, but rather explain their conclusions? If you want the methodology, you can read the article; see it here. Let's be intellectually honest, however, and say that if you're not even willing to watch a video beyond one minute then you're not going to read a full economic paper.

Thanks for linking the paper directly.

Now, did you read it?

Because there's this very important sentence in the opening abstract:

"
Exploiting differences in the “bite” of the minimum wage due to regional variation in the standard of living and industry
composition, this paper finds that the 1966 FLSA increased wages dramatically but reduced
aggregate employment only modestly. However, the disemployment effects were significantly
larger among African-American men, forty percent of whom earned below the new minimum
wage in 1966. "

It's almost like the 'summary' that you linked to fits very conveniently to the popular contemporary leftist narrative...

...But uses linguistic sophistry to try to pretend it isn't directly contradicting what's actually in the paper itself?

And this lines up exactly with what I've said, it increases unemployment, and what Sunhawk said, it specifically hit Blacks harder, and many advocates intended for it to do exactly that.

 

[History Learner]

Thanks for linking the paper directly.

Now, did you read it?

Because there's this very important sentence in the opening abstract:

"
Exploiting differences in the “bite” of the minimum wage due to regional variation in the standard of living and industry
composition, this paper finds that the 1966 FLSA increased wages dramatically but reduced
aggregate employment only modestly. However, the disemployment effects were significantly
larger among African-American men, forty percent of whom earned below the new minimum
wage in 1966. "

It's almost like the 'summary' that you linked to fits very conveniently to the popular contemporary leftist narrative...

...But uses linguistic sophistry to try to pretend it isn't directly contradicting what's actually in the paper itself?

And this lines up exactly with what I've said, it increases unemployment, and what Sunhawk said, it specifically hit Blacks harder, and many advocates intended for it to do exactly that.

You read an entire 48 page economic paper in 17 minutes lol? If you had, you would realize you're quoting that out of context:

In terms of hiring and hours, the March CPS shows that employment during the year fell by a modest 0.7 percent more in lower earning states and annual hours worked by 0.4 percent more, even though the 1966 FLSA increased wages significantly more in these areas. The implied demand elasticities are −0.14 for employment (a one-sided test rejects zero at the 5-percent level; 95-percent confidence interval (CI) is −0.29 to 0.02) and −0.07 for annual hours worked, which cannot be distinguished from zero. Interestingly, employment in the reference week fell little in response to the 1966 FLSA, suggesting that the legislation’s impact on employment was concentrated among workers with less attachment to the labor force (i.e., workers less likely to be employed for the full year).​

 

[LordsFire]

You read an entire 48 page economic paper in 17 minutes lol? If you had, you would realize you're quoting that out of context:

In terms of hiring and hours, the March CPS shows that employment during the year fell by a modest 0.7 percent more in lower earning states and annual hours worked by 0.4 percent more, even though the 1966 FLSA increased wages significantly more in these areas. The implied demand elasticities are −0.14 for employment (a one-sided test rejects zero at the 5-percent level; 95-percent confidence interval (CI) is −0.29 to 0.02) and −0.07 for annual hours worked, which cannot be distinguished from zero. Interestingly, employment in the reference week fell little in response to the 1966 FLSA, suggesting that the legislation’s impact on employment was concentrated among workers with less attachment to the labor force (i.e., workers less likely to be employed for the full year).​

It's their own conclusion. I'm not quoting it out of context at all.

 

[History Learner]

It's their own conclusion. I'm not quoting it out of context at all.

Except it's not, you're not even quoting from the conclusions section lol. You literally cited off the third page of a 48 page report, while ignoring that they gave context higher up on said page which is where I pulled mine to show what you were leaving out.

 

[LordsFire]

"this paper finds that the 1966 FLSA increased wages dramatically but reduced
aggregate employment only modestly. However, the disemployment effects were significantly
larger among African-American men, forty percent of whom earned below the new minimum
wage in 1966."

Obviously I added the emphasis here.

Do you see those words?

Those words that directly confirm what I have been saying, and Sunhawk's point about it disproportionately affecting blacks?

Yes, the people who wrote this paper clearly do it with the attitude that 'the gain was worth the cost,' as shown by how they attach the subjective modifiers 'drastically' to 'increased wages' and 'modestly' to 'reduced aggregate employment.'

That does not change that they directly say that their findings support my point.

To draw another chunk out, this time from the 'conclusion' rather than the 'abstract' section:

"For instance, substantial decreases in employment and annual hours for African-American men suggest that large changes in the minimum wage could shift the composition of employment and harm certain groups of workers. "


Another chunk from the last paragraph before the conclusion:

"In summary, we find that the employment of African-American men and, perhaps, younger men
fell with implementation of the 1966 FLSA. Broadly speaking, the magnitude of the demand elasticities
and disemployment effects suggest that—although the aggregate effects are not large—the 1966 FLSA may
have had adverse consequences for some workers. "


It's not just the abstract that supports my point.

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

Except it's not, you're not even quoting from the conclusions section lol. You literally cited off the third page of a 48 page report, while ignoring that they gave context higher up on said page which is where I pulled mine to show what you were leaving out.

Ummm... Research papers regularly put their conclusions in the first few pages though? Then they go through their data collection, then the discussion of the data, then restate conclusions.

Here's a question, why does Amazon support the $15 minimum wage?

EDIT: lot's of minimum wage advocates think jobs are all boats, and some are, but many of the most important jobs for getting people into the workforce in the first place are more like houses. A rising tide lifts all boats, and drowns houses.