[Yogi]

[quote="andyt"]

(Actually no asswipe is produced in Canada.) quote]




Purex® tissue is 100% Canadian-made by Kruger Products L.P. at our mill in New Westminster, British Columbia and our converting facility in Calgary, Alberta.
http://www.purex.ca

As in most of your posts, you have done little, to no research to back anything!( I highlight the above as a slight example) What little surfing you do is to find info that you manipulate so that it appears to substantiate your claims. And Khar has clearly called you on that,again!

You obviously have very little real experience in running a business that employs people.

We have, here in Ab. one of the largest cookie bakeries in Canada. They mostly employ immigrants as well as other under-educated Canadians. Most are paid minimum wage. Everytime min wage goes up, two things happen.
1- People get laid off; thusly requiring them to go on welfare, and;
2- The manufacturer raises their prices.

Just how the hell does this help the economy, or anyone on min wage, as their wage increase goes directly towards paying higher prices right across the board???

[Bruce_the_vii]

There's job growth in Alberta, or will be. So when a sweat shop goes out of business because of wages increase workers move down the street. These sweat shop workers don't pay much tax, the sweat shops are highly subsidized. If they get better jobs they carry more of their weight. That, in a nutshell, is progress.

[andyt]

$1:

Positive Economic Effects of a Federal Minimum Wage Increase

http://www.ehow.com/list_7330012_positive-federal-minimum-wage-increase.html#ixzz1Gy3mivFM

$1:

Increased Productivity
One key economic benefit of a minimum wage increase is increased productivity. According to the Economic Policy Institute, when the minimum wage is increased, it makes workers less likely to leave current positions, forcing employers to fill positions with new hires. Vacant positions result in less productive companies which slows the economy. For this reason, a rise in the minimum wage leads to a reduction in vacancies, thereby increasing productivity.

$1:

Reduction of Government Support
When the minimum wage is raised, fewer households are in need of government assistance designed for people with low incomes. These can include government-sponsored health programs and food stamps. Together, these programs cost federal and state governments hundreds of billions of dollars each year. By increasing wages, fewer will be forced to take advantage of this government assistance. The money saved on these programs can either be returned to taxpayers in the form of tax decreases, or spent on economic stimulus programs.

$1:

Increased Consumer Spending
One positive economic effect of a minimum wage increase is that workers will have more money to spend. Except for money that employees save, the bulk of the money that workers receive in their paychecks finds its way back into the economy through consumer spending. A spending increase leading to increased product sales can result in company expansions and more jobs.

$1:

Lower Training Costs
The cost of training workers on procedures specific to jobs are generally considered an economic inefficiency. Although training that improves a worker's skills is considered an economic benefit because it leads to a more highly trained work force, training specific to a company lends no skills to the workers, but costs employers money in lost work time. By decreasing turnover, minimum wage hikes also decrease the amount of job-specific training time, leading to a more efficient use of resources by the employer.

[2Cdo]

Based on posting history I think Shep nailed it on page one. Here's to andys pay raise!

[herbie]

Bruce_the_vii Bruce_the_vii:

herbie herbie:

Aside from maybe raising the price of a hamburger 5c, the poor bastard at minimum wage will be able to afford 25% more hamburgers for a net gain.
Employers like me will just be pickier, there were enough people who didn't deserve $8 an hour. I won't be training anyone how to run a till or stock a shelf, your resume will go in the round file if you don't already know.

An interesting side note: If you serve liquor the minimum wage only goes up to $9.00hr
A bribe to the exclusively Liberal bar owners?
Or punishment for not serving liquor in your restaurant?
You decide.

(Hah! The question reminds me of a headline I saw decades ago: "Communism: Threat or Menace?")

The employer market won't last forever. The population is aging and the labour force shrinking, they may get immigration tamed - unemployment may fall one day. At that time you'll have to deal with wage pressure at the bottom. Nothing lasts forever.

It doesn't exist now. I've had to offer at least $10 hr the last few years just to attract applicants who can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Have a posting out now for a Network Tech (of course not for shitty $10hr) and only one single resume in the stack even mentions any computer skills.
Some 35 yr old doofus pedals up to the door on a BMX bike and tells me "I gotta get a job cuz I got 4 kids, here's my 're-zoom'... fucks off out the door.
9 years at a gas station
6 mos as a labourer
TWO FUCKING WEEKS for a company I've never heard of (obviously fired)
No refs at all, "Went to High School" under education.
Yeah fuck, I wouldn't hire him on the $6 an hour for 500 hours student rate.

[Bruce_the_vii]

Oh, my. Only I believe it. At The bottom you get all types.

[martin14]

herbie herbie:

It doesn't exist now. I've had to offer at least $10 hr the last few years just to attract applicants who can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Have a posting out now for a Network Tech (of course not for shitty $10hr) and only one single resume in the stack even mentions any computer skills.
Some 35 yr old doofus pedals up to the door on a BMX bike and tells me "I gotta get a job cuz I got 4 kids, here's my 're-zoom'... fucks off out the door.
9 years at a gas station
6 mos as a labourer
TWO FUCKING WEEKS for a company I've never heard of (obviously fired)
No refs at all, "Went to High School" under education.
Yeah fuck, I wouldn't hire him on the $6 an hour for 500 hours student rate.

ahhh, thank you Herbie

[Bruce_the_vii]

Actually it's not too funny. I work as a courier (despite a degree in computer science) and some of the staff are one foot away from being unemployable, being on welfare or disability. The bottom 2% are not too good but should be accommodated by employers for society. I work with these guys, I wish them well.

The riptose from the left is how dysfunctional is head office. We know that the worlds best banker CEO's don't know the ABC's of writing a mortgage, the bread and butter of the loans business since loans were first made.

[Khar]

No one here has yet denied there are potential benefits of an increase in the minimum wage.

However, the question is whether or not these benefits come at a cost which Canadians can stomach. For example, the paper you just noted mentions that it does not help those in the lowest-income bracket, and in fact, increases inequality. These problems are not helped by the fact that a reduced amount of hours and a minor negative impact on unemployment also exists. It causes a load on our education system and is, at best, the most blunt of all instruments at our disposal. Typically, the larger organizations gain a lot more than the smaller ones, simply because the larger ones can absorb these sort of impacts a lot better than smaller ones.

Indeed, again, your source provides a beautiful example in the form of the fragility of the restaurant business (which is pretty frail to begin with without labour problems). There are many other methods which work far better than this one. The most widely sourced one now is the Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC, since it is the most adequately directed. It's worth noting in this thread, as I did in the other, than many of the more egalitarian states in the world do not have a statutory minimum wage, nor do some of the major economic powers, like Germany. Rather, they have sector by sector negotiation between workers and employers for a sizable portion of their population.

[andyt]

Great Khar. If there's something that works better than minimum wage, lets go with that. But, in this country we don't seem to have that sort of conversation, gotta go with whatever is out there. I mean are you proposing the Tim Horton's sector negotiate a living wage with Timmies? Or the fast food sector as a whole. It would take a much more regulated economy to pull that off - which has it's own downside.

My understanding is that Sweden has managed to free up capital to work efficiently, reducing regulations on it, allowing people to easily be fired, etc (not true in Germany) while also have much less income inequality and poverty than we do. Maybe there's a lot we could learn from them, and make a made in Canada solution to the problem, same as we could learn from Europe in how to run healthcare systems.

But look at this forum - you're the only one that's brought up this idea. The rest of the red meaters out there just seem to be concerned about paying a bit less for asswipe, and fuck the poor. Even Lemmy, whom you adulate, sees the working poor as deserving of their lot because they are lazy, stupid or young.

Unlike you, I'm not interested in the minutae of how we get somewhere. I'm interested in how me get along as a society. It's great that there's people like you around to sweat the details, but first we need a vision of where we're tying to head. And we seem to be blinded by the bling of the US, mostly. Not what I grew up believing in.

[Khar]

Lemmy has mentioned EITCs in the past. Indeed, you actually disagreed with that position at the time. That's pretty interested in the minutiae, too. You are sounding more like Lemmy now than you did a page ago. There are ways for us to free up capital, there just is not the political will for that to occur.

The sectors within those Scandinavian countries cover from 75 to 90% of the entire working population. I am not sure how it works nation by nation, or industry by industry. I know that even when I was at my lowest paying job, however, as a pet store clerk, I was still part of a union. Collective bargaining is still capable at those levels, it simply does not happen now and, to be honest, there is limited ability to really give a group a wage which reflects the typical qualification of "I plan to go to university when high school ends." Where it does not happen, things like the EITC system can take it's place. It's worth noting Canada has a limited version of this system now, so it's not as if we cannot form the infrastructure.

... and you are right, regulated industries do have their downsides. British Leyland anyone? That's one of the reasons why not a lot happens in finding the right direction -- how can we be sure that this would work well for Canada? How can we make this work for Canada? Being as close as we are to nations like the UK, US and Japan, can we successfully make that transition easily? Is it something which is good to Canada, or will it be a massive deadweight cost to our economy? These are a lot of questions I am 100% clueless on and it's far more in depth than I have ever gone to read on for a thread on CKA. I have to admit, I am not that dedicated on this topic to do that.

I mean, there are a few glaring differences between us and Norway. To be honest, I'd prefer to live in Canada. I like having a home which, while small by our standards, is larger than I'd have there. I like easy access to cutting edge technology at pretty good prices. I like being in a nation where I don't have to cross international boundaries to be in the Rockies, in Sand Dunes, or in a Rainforest. I like being in a nation where I may have to work hard, but it shows by what is produced.

I "adulate" any respected expert in any field when discussing their field. Lemmy has just been mentioned more because I tend to get caught in these threads and he is a labour economics expert. Likewise why, in other threads, I have pointed out SheperdDogs' knowledge of things relating to China, and Eyebrock's knowledge of military matters (I did nominate him for that medal). We've got some great minds on this site who have demonstrated great knowledge in the area they claim to be experts in, why not give their opinion a bit more weight?

[andyt]

Thinking about the EITC, and not knowing what it involves, you can't spend a tax credit, can you? If you're making $8/hr, you're not paying a lot of taxes in the first place, so what good does a tax credit do you. Unless it's some form of negative income tax. Lemmy did propose something like that. But, doesn't that just subsidized the employers. Without a minimum wage, they could pay even worse wages, and the government would just make up the diff.

Good subsidies for the working poor in Vancouver would be free transit, free community center access, freedom from all the various fees that are out there. (Medicare is already free for them). Finding an effective way to bring housing costs down would be a big one. But again, if there's no minimum wage, employers would just grind down wages for the lowest paid even more, so seems to me people would wind up where they were. With a higher minimum wage they've got more real money in their pocket. Seems like a good thing to me.

I wrote this before I read your latest post.

[andyt]

Response to your last post - we definitely need to find our own solutions that work for us in Canada. And while I've lost a lot of respect for my country (Native issues, immigration etc) it's still a very good place to live. I just don't see us as a country having the sort of conversation you're bringing up here. As I say, what I see on this forum mostly seems to involve wanting to go further down the road of inequality, wanting more to emulate the US. And I see the same in the media and politics. I think it will make us a poorer country, in the sense of social capital. I think immigration plays a role, because I see most immigrants being very self focused, or at best focused on helping their little community, instead of any identification with Canada as a whole. While I wouldn't want to live in Japan for the long run, I'm sure, I sure envy their social cohesion, sense of communal trust and co-operation. I wish we had more of that here. If we get a quake or tsunami in Vancouver, I know we're going to react much worse, both as individuals and the government than I see in Japan.

[Khar]

The way an EITC (more commonly called a refundable tax credit) works is that, at first, it reduces the amounts of tax owed and then, at the point where none is owed, goes further and provides a net "payment" to the person involved dependent on various factors (children, and so forth).

The payment system suggested for the EITC works in a plateau. That means that for those working at the lowest possible pay, a "living income" level will be provided to some extent. For a period of increased pay, the EITC will also increase the tax credit, until it reaches a plateau. This is to ensure economic incentives remain and people continue to try and get better jobs. After that the amount received by people diminish as you move up the pay scale. Is this necessary, or would this work? Are there other methods which would work better? I don't really know, since as I mentioned, I'm not that dedicated to the topic right now (spent all weekend traveling and now I just want my bed).

In this way it's very much like the Fome Zero program I mentioned as a living wage example. You might remember this thread because it's where you encouraged me to argue my more moderate points strongly. The Fome Zero was a poverty-eradication strategy introduced in Brazil with a small cost to the country which dramatically reduced extreme poverty (something we don't have in Canada) but did not actually reduce economic incentives because even minimum wage was better than what they got. They still HAD to work. This just improved their lot and had a surprisingly minor impact on inflation. Would something like that work in Canada? I'm no expert.

I think I'll just leave your second post above and have it be the last word on those topics, if that's alright.

[bootlegga]

andyt andyt:

Great Khar. If there's something that works better than minimum wage, lets go with that. But, in this country we don't seem to have that sort of conversation, gotta go with whatever is out there. I mean are you proposing the Tim Horton's sector negotiate a living wage with Timmies? Or the fast food sector as a whole. It would take a much more regulated economy to pull that off - which has it's own downside.

My understanding is that Sweden has managed to free up capital to work efficiently, reducing regulations on it, allowing people to easily be fired, etc (not true in Germany) while also have much less income inequality and poverty than we do. Maybe there's a lot we could learn from them, and make a made in Canada solution to the problem, same as we could learn from Europe in how to run healthcare systems.

But look at this forum - you're the only one that's brought up this idea. The rest of the red meaters out there just seem to be concerned about paying a bit less for asswipe, and fuck the poor. Even Lemmy, whom you adulate, sees the working poor as deserving of their lot because they are lazy, stupid or young.

Unlike you, I'm not interested in the minutae of how we get somewhere. I'm interested in how me get along as a society. It's great that there's people like you around to sweat the details, but first we need a vision of where we're tying to head. And we seem to be blinded by the bling of the US, mostly. Not what I grew up believing in.

Many of us who don't feel minimum wage helps are not against because it will increase prices of toilet paper, coffee or a Big Mac. That's you twisting someone's words and mis-representing what they said.

The problem with minimum wage hikes is that they don't help as much as proponents like you think they do.

Just for shits and giggles, let's do some math on this minimum wage hike (from $8 to $8.75, then from $8.75 to $9.50, and finally from $9.50 to $10.25). The first increase is a jump of 9.38%, the following increase is 8.57% over the first increase, and the last one is an increase of 7.89% - for a grand total of 25.84% in just over a year ($10.25 by May 2012).

So what is an employer to do when faced with a sudden increase of 25% in labour cost next year? They have two options - cut staff (and make those remaining work harder) or increase prices. Most employers usually incorporate a mix of the two, mostly because they know that customers will never stomach a 25% increase on their cup of coffee, their grocery bill, their gas bill, or pretty much anything else.

And as prices increase to match this wage increase (aka inflation), how much of gain do minimum wage earners get to keep? Some, but probably not much. And who do you think feels an increase of 25 cents more for a pack of toilet paper - someone earning $10.25/hour or someone earning $40/hour?

Lots of studies have also shown that increases in minimum wages directly impact employment numbers in people in those industries;

$1:

We find the traditional result that neoclassical theory would predict: minimum wage increases create employment losses that are concentrated among less valued workers. Minimum wage increases have an insignificant effect on the employment of prime age workers (aged 25 to 61), but they have large and significant negative employment effects on teenagers, young high school dropouts, and young blacks. Hence, the very people minimum wage policies claim to help are most likely to be adversely affected.

Bolding mine

http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/cpr_publicat ... 0increases

BTW, that's only one of many you can find with Google Scholar...

I'd be all for minimum wage increases if they actually helped rather than hurt those they are targeted towards.

I'll admit I don't have a surefire solution to the problem, but I think spending money on helping those who want better skills (funding grants/loans/bursaries for education, training, whatever) would probably be more effective than forcing employers to deal with a 25% jump in costs in the space of a year.