PordFrefect wrote:Seth wrote:
Very aware. There's at least 12 million jobs for Americans to take that are now held by illegal aliens. Problem is the laid-off unemployed aren't going to get off their fat asses and go take those jobs because they are "beneath" their dignity. They would much rather cut back and enjoy regular unemployment checks than go work at the jobs that are available.
Hunger is a great motivator to the indolent and idle, we should make use of it.
... Those who will not work and instead prefer to suck at the public teat can starve in a ditch for all I care. I have no moral obligation to support them in their idleness.
I take it you support Mrs. Romney's statement that the unemployment problem could be solved by removing the minimum wage and other labour laws?
No, not both, just minimum wage laws, which have the practical effect of shutting low and unskilled workers out of the labor market when the economy is bad.
Because these 'jobs that are available', but are being taken by illegal immigrants, are not subject to minimum wage or any labour laws. It's pure exploitation.
Wrong. All workers in the US are covered by the same laws regarding health, safety and welfare, regardless of whether they are illegals or not. Moreover, while there are differences in what the minimum wage is for certain types of jobs, all jobs fall under both federal and state minimum wage laws.
You will not see an illegal alien working at McDonald's for minimum wage and an 8 hour shift with lunchbreaks.
How strange, because I had to learn to order my Wendy burger in Spanish just to get it the way I want it. But I have noticed that since the Obama administration started cracking down on illegals and going after employers for violating employee identification and citizenship verification laws as well as minimum wage violations, that it's less and less likely that I'll have to give my order in Spanish, although it turns out that even with native English speakers "half-pound double with cheese, sandwich only, light ketchup and light mustard ONLY" is only understood about 50 percent of the time. I put that off to poor education and job-skills preparation in our public schools. Perhaps burger joint ordering window simulators would be a useful addition to the curriculum in urban high schools.
I've thought for some time that public schools should be funded by taxes on business, given the fact that the whole reason for educating our youth from the beginning was to prepare them for a working career and provide employers with more skilled and better educated employees. Perhaps the Dave Thomas Vocational and Trade High School would better prepare students for life than the ineffective, propagandistic Marxist claptrap they get served up today.
You'll see them driving a taxi for 80 hours a week under someone else's license (who sits at home, drinks and smokes crack with his mates) for $2.00 an hour.
Which is $1.75 more than they were making in Mexico.
You'll see them putting up fences and doing grounds maintenance work for 12 hours a day with a 15 minute break for $1.50 an hour.
Not legally you won't. In Colorado the mandatory minimum wage is $7.64, with premium (time and a half) over 12 hours per day and over 40 hours per week. The federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr. There are exceptions in some states for agricultural workers, servers and other specific jobs/trades that may reduce that amount.
Sure it's better than where they came from, but do you really want to turn your country into where they came from?
I want them to go back where they came from and give their jobs up to Americans. They should then work within their own countries to improve working conditions and wage scales, rather than running away and displacing Americans from their jobs.
Because that's what will happen with this sort of dimwitted fucktardery line of reason.
Sorry, but the people of the United States do not owe any foreigner a living. Our citizens come first, just as they do in every other country, like Mexico, where they arrest and jail Americans who illegally emigrate and work in Mexico.
These 'jobs that are available' (provided you kick all the illegal immigrants out - how you'd do that without going all military state would be interesting to know) would be filled, provided you cut all income support across the board (except for the disabled and veterans I assume), and the unemployment rate would barely have a dent put into it. Very soon you'd find the payscale of all formerly minimum wage jobs dropping dramatically causing a domino effect that would see income across the board from the poor to the middle class falling decreasing terribly.
Wrong. Ninety four percent of wage workers are paid above the federal minimum wage.
Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers: 2010
In 2010, 72.9 million American workers age 16 and over were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.8 percent of all wage and salary workers.1 Among those paid by the hour, 1.8 million earned exactly the prevailing Federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 2.5 million had wages below the minimum.2 Together, these 4.4 million workers with wages at or below the Federal minimum made up 6.0 percent of all hourly-paid workers. Tables 1-10 present data on a wide array of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics for hourly-paid workers earning at or below the Federal minimum wage. The following are some highlights from the 2010 data.
Minimum wage workers tend to be young. Although workers under age 25 represented only about one-fifth of hourly-paid workers, they made up about half of those paid the Federal minimum wage or less. Among employed teenagers paid by the hour, about 25 percent earned the minimum wage or less, compared with about 4 percent of workers age 25 and over. (See table 1 and table 7.)
About 7 percent of women paid hourly rates had wages at or below the prevailing Federal minimum, compared with about 5 percent of men. (See table 1.)
The percentage of workers earning the minimum wage did not vary much across the major race and ethnicity groups. About 6 percent of White hourly-paid workers earned the Federal minimum wage or less, compared with about 7 percent of Blacks and about 5 percent of Asians. Among hourly-paid workers with Hispanic ethnicity, about 6 percent earned the minimum wage or less. (See table 1.)
Among hourly-paid workers age 16 and over, about 13 percent of those who had less than a high school diploma earned the Federal minimum wage or less, compared with about 5 percent of those who had a high school diploma (with no college) and about 3 percent of college graduates. (See table 6.)
Never-married workers, who tend to be young, were more likely than married workers to earn the Federal minimum wage or less (about 11 percent versus about 3 percent). (See table 8.)
Part-time workers (persons who usually work less than 35 hours per week) were more likely than full-time workers to be paid the Federal minimum wage or less (about 14 percent versus about 3 percent). (See table 1 and table 9.)
By major occupational group, the highest proportion of workers earning at or below the Federal minimum wage was in service occupations, at about 14 percent. About 6 in 10 workers earning the minimum wage or less in 2010 were employed in service occupations, mostly in food preparation and serving related jobs. (See table 4.)
The industry with the highest proportion of workers with hourly wages at or below the Federal minimum wage was leisure and hospitality (23 percent). Nearly one-half of all workers paid at or below the Federal minimum wage were employed in this industry, primarily in restaurants and other food services. For many of these workers, tips and commissions supplement the hourly wages received. (See table 5.)
The States with the highest proportions of hourly-paid workers earning at or below the Federal minimum wage included Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, and West Virginia (between 9 and 10 percent). The States with the lowest percentage of workers earning at or below the Federal minimum wage included Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and California, all at or below 2 percent. It should be noted that some States have minimum wage laws establishing standards that exceed the Federal minimum wage. (See table 2 and table 3.)
The proportion of hourly-paid workers earning the prevailing Federal minimum wage or less rose from 4.9 percent in 2009 to 6.0 percent in 2010. This remains well below the figure of 13.4 percent in 1979, when data were first collected on a regular basis. (See table 10.) (emphasis added)
Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). These data on minimum wage earners are derived from the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly nationwide survey of households. Data in this summary are 2010 annual averages.
1 Data are for wage and salary workers age 16 and over and refer to earnings on a person's sole or principal job. All self-employed persons are excluded whether or not their businesses are incorporated.
2 The presence of a sizable number of workers with wages below the Federal minimum does not necessarily indicate violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act, as there are exemptions to the minimum wage provisions of the law. The estimates of the numbers of minimum and subminimum wage workers presented in the accompanying tables pertain to workers paid at hourly rates; salaried and other non-hourly workers are excluded. As such, the actual number of workers with earnings at or below the prevailing Federal minimum is undoubtedly understated. Research has shown that a relatively small number and share of salaried workers and others not paid by the hour have earnings that, when translated into hourly rates, are at or below the minimum wage. However, BLS does not routinely estimate hourly earnings for non-hourly workers because of data concerns that arise in producing these estimates.
The legs of your economy now cut out from beneath you you'd find that corporate profits would go into a freefall, offices, factories, retailers, and service industries would cut back operations dramatically or close outright. The people formerly employed at those places would soon find themselves and their families starving on the streets or fighting over jobs which would put some food in their tents in the public parks. The housing market would crash. Loans would be defaulted and mortgages foreclosed en masse. You'd have mass starvation, mass civil unrest, and open rebellion. The military would need be deployed in force (fuck the Posse Comitatus act) to stop a full scale rebellion, curfews enacted, travel and communications restricted, and your country would become everything you've always feared - run by a government of tyrants and oppressors of the people until its inevitable collapse into total anarchy and ruin as the funds to pay for your infrastructure expire.
Nah. If all the illegals go home there will be a significant drop in the availability of workers, particularly in the unskilled or semi-skilled labor classes, and the scarcity of workers will drive up wages, just as it did during the last economic boom. Labor is just another commodity, like widget parts, that responds to market conditions in a free market. More workers, lower wages. Fewer workers, higher wages. Therefore, fewer illegal aliens occupying American jobs, fewer workers and higher wages as competition by employers for jobs increases.
You can see this dynamic at work in the entry-level minimum wage burger flipping jobs. When the economy is on fire, businesses need employees and are willing to hire and train less skilled and entry level workers to meet the demand for labor. This leaves entry level businesses like fast food in the cold as skilled and reliable workers flee to higher paid jobs. Soon, the fast food joints are competing for any pimply-faced teenager willing to work 10 hours a week after school, even if they are the worst employees ever.
I've personally seen examples of this in the form of a disgruntled angry teenager spitting a wad of chewing tobacco in a customer's Burrito Supreme at Taco Bell. When the customer complained, the manager fired the teen, and the NEXT DAY the same teen was working at the Arby's right next door to the Taco Bell. It's commonplace in such times for fast food managers to put up with all sorts of shit from juvenile workers because if they don't, and fire them for their antics (like taking a bath in the dish sink or spitting in the food) they will have to close the store for lack of workers.
As you can see, only six percent of workers are at or below minimum wage, and of those who are not in exempt trades where tips supplement income, like restaurant servers, or agriculture, those people stay at minimum wage for less than one year typically.
Minimum wage jobs are INTENDED to be entry-level jobs for unskilled and new workers so they can learn practical job skills and behavior without constituting an unreasonable cost to the employer who must spend much more time training up a first-time employee than is required for seasoned employees.
When the minimum wage is increased by government fiat, first-time and unskilled workers (specifically teenage high school youth) are SHUT OUT of the labor market (in many areas the unemployment rate for black male teenagers is more than 50 percent) because given a choice in a glutted labor market where workers are willing to work for minimum wage so they can eat, even a fast-food joint manager will choose a seasoned worker in just about any trade over a first-time high schooler, since they have to pay them both the same amount and will have greater skills and reliability from the seasoned worker and fewer training needs in eschewing the first-time teenage worker.
Minimum wage laws are BAD for first-time workers for this reason, particularly in a recession where there is a glut of unemployed but seasoned workers.
The point of eliminating minimum wage laws is to give the employer a reason to hire unskilled new workers under an apprenticeship arrangement where the employee is paid according to his or her actual productivity, which increases with time as the employee learns new skills and becomes of greater value to the employer. Any employer values a trained employee more than an untrained one, and the vast majority of businesses pay much higher wages than minimum (ninety four percent in fact) in order to attract and retain skilled employees because the costs of training an employee to fill the job need can be substantial, and they don't want to waste the time or the investment in money in training a good employee just so they can cut wages.
It's a very delicate balancing act on the part of employers in paying high enough wages to attract skilled, reliable, honest, loyal employees who will stay at the job and be an asset to the company while keeping labor costs low enough to produce a reasonable profit margin. That calculus responds very quickly to the supply and demand balance in the skilled labor market, and as we can see, very few workers actually stay in minimum wage jobs for long. If they do, it's because their job skills are deficient or they are in an unskilled trade where their labor is not worth more to the employer. But they are always free to educate themselves and improve their skills set and seek a better-paying job. No one is bound to servitude, and indentured servants do not exist in the US, by law.
All because some nitwits thought the unemployment problem could be solved by cutting the bottom out of the tin can that contains your workforce.
You really don't understand free market economics at all, do you...
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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Whew! 
