Minimum wage not enough to beat poverty, research says
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I read about this in the Examiner a couple days ago. The owner of Borderlands is completely full of shit.
In the past year the city's minimum wage rose from $10.74 an hour to $11.05. If that $0.31 an hour increase is really what caused the store to go under then they were doomed to fail in the first place.
They could have absorbed that cost and then some buy selling ONE extra book per day. Failing that the store owner could stop buying a daily Starbucks latte.
All of this in a city where the average studio goes for $1,800 a month.
I read about this in the Examiner a couple days ago. The owner of Borderlands is completely full of shit.
In the past year the city's minimum wage rose from $10.74 an hour to $11.05. If that $0.31 an hour increase is really what caused the store to go under then they were doomed to fail in the first place.
They could have absorbed that cost and then some buy selling ONE extra book per day. Failing that the store owner could stop buying a daily Starbucks latte.
All of this in a city where the average studio goes for $1,800 a month.
Inept business owners have used the minimum wage as scapegoat for their incompetence.
Workers have gotten sick and tired of getting the blame for terrible business decisions.
Robots vs. the Underclass
Robots vs. the Underclass
Pundits say automation is decimating the middle class. The truth is even crueler.
By John B. Judis
February 28, 2015
Ever since General Electric installed the first industrial robot in 1961, Americans have been worrying that automation could destroy the country's labor force. During the Great Recession and its aftermath, these voices grew even louder. "We're not going to have a jobless recovery," business writer Jeff Jarvis predicted in 2011. "We're going to have a jobless future." "Smart machines won't kill us all, but they'll definitely take our jobs and sooner than you think," Mother Jones warned in 2013.
But which jobs, exactly, are going to disappear? To hear many pundits tell it, the advance of technology is specifically threatening the middle ranks of the workforce. Automation, warned The Economist last October, will lead to "the further erosion of the middle class." "Robots won't destroy jobs, but they may destroy the middle class," a Vox story was titled. The Associated Press produced a series of articles headlined, "What's destroying the middle class? Not taxes. Not China. Think technology."
Of the two political parties, Democrats have most loudly echoed the fears about automation and the middle class. Three major Democratic-aligned policy groups—the Third Way, the Center for American Progress, and the Hamilton Project—sponsored research in recent years arguing that the middle class was being harmed by automation.
But in the past year or two, some of the economists who study this issue have begun to veer in a different direction: They have produced research suggesting that automation is going to be relatively good to the middle class—creating new opportunities not only for professionals and managers but also for what MIT economist David Autor describes as "relatively well-remunerated, middle-skill" workers. These workers have attended some college or have bachelor's degrees, and they make at or above the median wage. They are the heart of what Americans consider the middle class—and it now appears they aren't disappearing at all.
This doesn't mean automation is cost-free, however. According to this new line of thinking, the main victims of automation will not be middle-income workers but rather those with lower levels of income and education—that is, Americans who make less than $35,000 a year and have only a high school degree.
On the surface, the question of which demographic group is being most harmed by automation may sound like just a highly technical argument among economists. But, in fact, it sheds light on the utter inadequacy of U.S. politics and policy. While Democrats worry that the middle class is being threatened by robots, and Republicans woo the middle class with tax cuts, neither party is doing nearly enough to address the technology-driven disaster facing lower-income, less-educated Americans.
BROADLY SPEAKING, automation arrived in the U.S. economy in three overlapping waves. The first wave began in the 1960s with the introduction of the mainframe computer, the transistor, and the silicon chip. Firms started installing computer-coded robots and machine tools that took over much of the work of the factory floor—from the production of a physical good to its packaging for sale. The objective eventually became the creation of a "lights-out" factory, in which production would take place 24 hours a day without human supervision. While no American firm has yet achieved this for its entire operation, many now boast unlit, unheated, football-field-size areas where coded machines have taken over the tasks that humans used to perform.
The effects of this first wave on the economy were profound. From 1979 to 2013, U.S. manufacturing employment fell 37 percent, from 19.3 million to 12.1 million. Some of that was due to outsourcing—one study estimates that Chinese-import competition accounted for a quarter of the loss of manufacturing employment between 1990 and 2007—but a great deal of the rest was due to the automation of basic, repetitive factory labor, the kind you would find on an automobile assembly line. Indeed, largely because of automation, American manufacturers today produce far more goods with far less labor than they did just a few decades ago. (Productivity in manufacturing increased 75 percentage points between 1987 and 2007.)
The second wave of the automation revolution came in the 1980s. This time, the key change was the introduction of the personal computer, which gradually began to replace lower-level office staff: secretaries, tax-preparers, typesetters, and file clerks.
You can see evidence of both waves at companies like Conveyers & Automation—a Towson, Maryland, firm that uses robots to create lights-out packaging facilities for Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Corning Glass, and other big manufacturers. When I visited recently, what was most striking was not only the way the large yellow robots picked up and put down cans and bottles, but also the fact that at the firm's headquarters, I couldn't spot a single clerical or blue-collar worker.
The third wave arrived in the early 1990s with the rise of the Internet. It transformed the distribution as well as the production of goods and services, creating what economist W. Brian Arthur calls a "secondary economy." "Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically," Arthur writes. "They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital." The secondary economy can make financial decisions, do inventory, diagnose illnesses, wage war, regulate electricity use, and sell everything from books to automobiles to machine tools.
Amazon began as the archetypical third-wave firm. It sold books and later other goods through the Internet, threatening the existence of bookstores and shopping malls. But it has also become a pioneer in fulfilling the promise of automation's first wave. The company bought Kiva Systems, which produces orange robots the size of ottomans that roam unlit, unheated sections of Amazon's warehouses all day and night, transporting shelves of goods to stations where they are packed and sent off. Amazon won't discuss how much labor these devices have saved, but a manager of Amazon's subsidiary Zappos has estimated that they cut labor in half. Moreover, the robots are supposed to speed up packaging by 400 percent.
In all these respects, automation has cut a wide swath through the economy. Like electricity, it's a general-purpose technology; its effects are pervasive and not confined to a single industry. But while it has eliminated the jobs of clerical staff at firms like Conveyors & Automation, as well as the jobs of workers who used to scurry around Amazon warehouses grabbing packages off shelves, automation has not eliminated mid-skill, median-wage, middle-class positions.
That, at least, is the conclusion now drawn by MIT's Autor and by two researchers at Oxford, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne. In a presentation last summer to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Autor, drawing on categories he had developed earlier with Harvard's Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, set out the ways that automation has eliminated, added, modified, or left untouched various jobs. His categories (which I'll use with minor variations) provide a useful way to see how automation has changed rather than destroyed the middle class.
First, there are the parts of the economy where automation has supplemented the human role—but not made it obsolete. These occupations fall into roughly three categories: complex abstract tasks (surgeons, dentists, lawyers, engineers, scientists, editors, architects, stock brokers, loan officers, therapists, school teachers, sales representatives, and a bevy of different kinds of technicians, especially in health care); jobs involving nonroutine personal interactions (specialized store clerks and technical-support personnel, home health aides, personal trainers, police, paramedics, and firefighters); plus those skilled crafts that cannot easily be reduced to routine instructions and now often require computer training (computer, utility, or telecommunications repair personnel, truck drivers, pilots, electricians, mechanics, and machinists).
Of course, some of these occupations may eventually fall victim to automation. Google, for instance, has developed a driverless car that could eventually be used to transport goods. But for now, none of these jobs are likely to be eliminated by technology.
So what jobs are in danger? Autor defines them as "routine tasks … that follow an exhaustive set of rules and hence are readily amenable to computerization." These include low-level clerical and secretarial work, rule-driven interpersonal encounters at banks, stores, and anywhere tickets are sold, and much blue-collar work in factories and warehouses.
In other words, the occupations that are safe from automation are all over the map in terms of income and education level—ranging from home health aides to telecom repair personnel to surgeons. But the jobs most threatened by automation are disproportionately unskilled and low-wage, requiring only a high school degree. In fact, nine of the 10 jobs that Autor and another MIT economist, David Dorn, cite as the most susceptible to computerization are low-skill and low-wage.
As recently as 2013, Autor had maintained that automation was polarizing the job market—creating a situation in which there was little middle zone between low-skilled service work and professional or managerial work. But last summer, in his presentation to the Federal Reserve Bank, he took a different tack. He now argues that "employment polarization will not continue indefinitely. While many middle-skill tasks are susceptible to automation, many middle-skill jobs" include tasks that are not. Many of these jobs, he explains, "will combine routine technical tasks with the set of nonroutine tasks in which workers hold comparative advantage—interpersonal interaction, flexibility, adaptability and problem-solving."
Frey and Osborne reached a similar conclusion. In a 2013 paper in which they ranked occupations on the basis of whether they were computerizable, they concluded that the jobs "least susceptible" to computerization are high-skill professional and managerial jobs, but they also predicted that a host of middle-income occupations would survive. "Rather than reducing the demand for middle-income occupations," they wrote, "our model predicts that computerization will mainly substitute for low-skill and low-wage jobs in the near future."
Autor still maintains that, in the past, automation was destroying the middle class. But economist Stephen Rose argues that the middle class was never being destroyed, only gradually transformed. The difference lies partly in how they count the loss of many blue-collar production jobs. Autor defines these jobs as middle-income and middle-skilled—and sees their loss as evidence of the destruction of the middle class. Rose, on the other hand, sees these jobs as middle-income (because of fleeting corporate acquiescence to union wages) but lower-skilled. That changes the whole calculation of what has happened over the past few decades.
Rose has created an extensive database of occupations based not on Labor Department classifications, but on a job's specific function, the skill required to perform it, and its place in the chain of output. According to his figures, from 1967 to 2007—roughly the period during which the automation revolution took hold—the share of managerial and professional jobs in the labor force grew from 22 to 35 percent; the share of mid-skill jobs declined only slightly from 39 to 36 percent; and the share of low-skill jobs fell from 39 to 29 percent.
As Rose describes it, the trend has been gradually moving, with some stops and starts—for instance, during the last recession—toward an upgraded rather than a polarized workforce. It's hard for me to say conclusively who is right, but Rose's picture fits more with what I've seen as I've traveled around the United States over the years covering campaigns. The very wealthiest have become even wealthier; but below them, many Americans have gradually been moving upward. The middle class has not disappeared but edged ahead in education, income, and responsibility on the job. Americans' standard of living has steadily risen—and that shows up in how they spend their money: According to Rose, Americans spent 46 percent of their income in 1947 on food, drink, and clothing. By 2007, they were only spending 18 percent. Much more of their money is now devoted to what John Maynard Keynes described as "relative" rather than "absolute" needs.
But amidst this improvement in Americans' standard of living, there are also pockets of high unemployment and poverty throughout the country—in cities like Detroit or East St. Louis, in much of West Virginia or eastern Kentucky, and in rural parts of the Deep South. The people in these places have not benefited from the promise of automation, and if the economists are right about the rapid disappearance of low-skill jobs, things are only going to get much worse. The question, then, is: What should be done to help these people? And it's a question that neither Democrats nor Republicans—both of whom would rather talk about the middle class than the poor—seem especially eager to face.
IN TRUTH, THERE is little disagreement among economists about how to help the victims of automation. "Our findings … imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerization, that is, tasks requiring creative and social intelligence," Frey and Osborne write. "For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills." And the first place they must do that is in school.
As the automation revolution has developed, it has steadily raised workers' educational requirements—and workers have responded by going to school more than they had. According to the census, in 1967, only about half of Americans over 25 had graduated from high school; by 2009, that number was 87 percent. In 1967, less than 10 percent over 25 had graduated from college; by 2009, it was 30 percent.
But that still leaves a lot of workers unprepared for today's job market. Currently, 34 percent of the labor force over the age of 25 has not made it beyond high school. Many of these workers are falling through the cracks: The labor participation rate of high school graduates is 17 percentage points lower than the participation rate of four-year-college graduates.
The problem is, in part, the wide disparity in the quality of public schools. And the challenge is starkest in the states where high school and college graduation rates are the lowest—states such as Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, West Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Nevada. In these locales, many children don't have a chance to move up the ladder of the new workforce that automation is creating.
What's needed is obvious: an enormous, sustained, and probably expensive effort to increase the quality of the country's worst schools. That would include money to attract outstanding teachers and to make it possible for lower-income children to go to college. (It would also involve revitalizing the communities around the schools.) Yet so far, Republicans and Democrats have mustered only half-measures—and even those half-measures have proved astoundingly difficult to implement.
In George W. Bush's first year in office, for instance, Democrats and Republicans passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which imposed minimum standards on all states. Each state would administer standardized tests, and students would have to show progress for a school to receive federal funding. But the content of the tests was left up to the states, and some of the states that most needed to improve their school systems balked at doing so.
Then, in 2009, with the support of the Obama administration, 44 states and Washington, D.C., adopted common standards for math and reading; known as the Common Core, the benchmarks were designed to prepare students for college and the new economy. "These parsimonious standards give greater weight to today's foundational skills than the weight given by most state standards," Levy and Murnane wrote recently.
But the proposal has become a major source of controversy on the right, generating enormous opposition from Republican governors and from tea-party groups. Nineteen states—all with GOP governors at the time—have either rejected outright or downgraded the Common Core standards. These include many of the states—such as Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina—for which the proposal was designed. While former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush remains supportive, two other Republican presidential aspirants who had previously backed Common Core—Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie—now either oppose or express "grave concerns" about the program.
President Obama and many Democratic policymakers continue to back the Common Core, but some Democratic politicians, moved in part by teachers' wariness of standardized tests, have begun to distance themselves. Last fall, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo claimed he had "nothing to do with Common Core" and promised to "disregard Common Core scores for at least five years." In Washington state, the Democratic Party passed a resolution rejecting Common Core. Hillary Clinton has yet to take a clear position on the issue.
The Common Core standards certainly don't represent a final answer to the question of what to do about the 34 percent of Americans who are going to suffer most from automation. These standards are merely a small starting point, but the fact that they are being rejected where they are most needed—and that some Democrats are joining the many Republicans who have backed away from them—says much about our political system's inability to address the social challenge of automation.
One element of the problem may be Americans' traditional aversion to government, but part of it may also be structural. In a parliamentary system with proportional representation, the 34 percent might have a party that would summon them to the polls and represent their distinct interests. By contrast, in America's two-party, winner-take-all system, these voters are inevitably ignored in favor of larger, wealthier groups that are more likely to vote.
And so, Democrats bemoan the destruction of a middle class that actually remains quite vibrant, and Republicans cater to middle-class complaints about taxes and spending, while trying to lure poor whites with rhetoric about abortion and gun control. In the meantime, the revolution in automation will continue—and the 34 percent of Americans who are not prepared to join it will be lost in the shuffle.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/robots-vs-the-underclass-20150227
Robots vs. the Underclass
Pundits say automation is decimating the middle class. The truth is even crueler.
By John B. Judis
February 28, 2015
Ever since General Electric installed the first industrial robot in 1961, Americans have been worrying that automation could destroy the country's labor force. During the Great Recession and its aftermath, these voices grew even louder. "We're not going to have a jobless recovery," business writer Jeff Jarvis predicted in 2011. "We're going to have a jobless future." "Smart machines won't kill us all, but they'll definitely take our jobs and sooner than you think," Mother Jones warned in 2013.
But which jobs, exactly, are going to disappear? To hear many pundits tell it, the advance of technology is specifically threatening the middle ranks of the workforce. Automation, warned The Economist last October, will lead to "the further erosion of the middle class." "Robots won't destroy jobs, but they may destroy the middle class," a Vox story was titled. The Associated Press produced a series of articles headlined, "What's destroying the middle class? Not taxes. Not China. Think technology."
Of the two political parties, Democrats have most loudly echoed the fears about automation and the middle class. Three major Democratic-aligned policy groups—the Third Way, the Center for American Progress, and the Hamilton Project—sponsored research in recent years arguing that the middle class was being harmed by automation.
But in the past year or two, some of the economists who study this issue have begun to veer in a different direction: They have produced research suggesting that automation is going to be relatively good to the middle class—creating new opportunities not only for professionals and managers but also for what MIT economist David Autor describes as "relatively well-remunerated, middle-skill" workers. These workers have attended some college or have bachelor's degrees, and they make at or above the median wage. They are the heart of what Americans consider the middle class—and it now appears they aren't disappearing at all.
This doesn't mean automation is cost-free, however. According to this new line of thinking, the main victims of automation will not be middle-income workers but rather those with lower levels of income and education—that is, Americans who make less than $35,000 a year and have only a high school degree.
On the surface, the question of which demographic group is being most harmed by automation may sound like just a highly technical argument among economists. But, in fact, it sheds light on the utter inadequacy of U.S. politics and policy. While Democrats worry that the middle class is being threatened by robots, and Republicans woo the middle class with tax cuts, neither party is doing nearly enough to address the technology-driven disaster facing lower-income, less-educated Americans.
BROADLY SPEAKING, automation arrived in the U.S. economy in three overlapping waves. The first wave began in the 1960s with the introduction of the mainframe computer, the transistor, and the silicon chip. Firms started installing computer-coded robots and machine tools that took over much of the work of the factory floor—from the production of a physical good to its packaging for sale. The objective eventually became the creation of a "lights-out" factory, in which production would take place 24 hours a day without human supervision. While no American firm has yet achieved this for its entire operation, many now boast unlit, unheated, football-field-size areas where coded machines have taken over the tasks that humans used to perform.
The effects of this first wave on the economy were profound. From 1979 to 2013, U.S. manufacturing employment fell 37 percent, from 19.3 million to 12.1 million. Some of that was due to outsourcing—one study estimates that Chinese-import competition accounted for a quarter of the loss of manufacturing employment between 1990 and 2007—but a great deal of the rest was due to the automation of basic, repetitive factory labor, the kind you would find on an automobile assembly line. Indeed, largely because of automation, American manufacturers today produce far more goods with far less labor than they did just a few decades ago. (Productivity in manufacturing increased 75 percentage points between 1987 and 2007.)
The second wave of the automation revolution came in the 1980s. This time, the key change was the introduction of the personal computer, which gradually began to replace lower-level office staff: secretaries, tax-preparers, typesetters, and file clerks.
You can see evidence of both waves at companies like Conveyers & Automation—a Towson, Maryland, firm that uses robots to create lights-out packaging facilities for Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Corning Glass, and other big manufacturers. When I visited recently, what was most striking was not only the way the large yellow robots picked up and put down cans and bottles, but also the fact that at the firm's headquarters, I couldn't spot a single clerical or blue-collar worker.
The third wave arrived in the early 1990s with the rise of the Internet. It transformed the distribution as well as the production of goods and services, creating what economist W. Brian Arthur calls a "secondary economy." "Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically," Arthur writes. "They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital." The secondary economy can make financial decisions, do inventory, diagnose illnesses, wage war, regulate electricity use, and sell everything from books to automobiles to machine tools.
Amazon began as the archetypical third-wave firm. It sold books and later other goods through the Internet, threatening the existence of bookstores and shopping malls. But it has also become a pioneer in fulfilling the promise of automation's first wave. The company bought Kiva Systems, which produces orange robots the size of ottomans that roam unlit, unheated sections of Amazon's warehouses all day and night, transporting shelves of goods to stations where they are packed and sent off. Amazon won't discuss how much labor these devices have saved, but a manager of Amazon's subsidiary Zappos has estimated that they cut labor in half. Moreover, the robots are supposed to speed up packaging by 400 percent.
In all these respects, automation has cut a wide swath through the economy. Like electricity, it's a general-purpose technology; its effects are pervasive and not confined to a single industry. But while it has eliminated the jobs of clerical staff at firms like Conveyors & Automation, as well as the jobs of workers who used to scurry around Amazon warehouses grabbing packages off shelves, automation has not eliminated mid-skill, median-wage, middle-class positions.
That, at least, is the conclusion now drawn by MIT's Autor and by two researchers at Oxford, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne. In a presentation last summer to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Autor, drawing on categories he had developed earlier with Harvard's Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, set out the ways that automation has eliminated, added, modified, or left untouched various jobs. His categories (which I'll use with minor variations) provide a useful way to see how automation has changed rather than destroyed the middle class.
First, there are the parts of the economy where automation has supplemented the human role—but not made it obsolete. These occupations fall into roughly three categories: complex abstract tasks (surgeons, dentists, lawyers, engineers, scientists, editors, architects, stock brokers, loan officers, therapists, school teachers, sales representatives, and a bevy of different kinds of technicians, especially in health care); jobs involving nonroutine personal interactions (specialized store clerks and technical-support personnel, home health aides, personal trainers, police, paramedics, and firefighters); plus those skilled crafts that cannot easily be reduced to routine instructions and now often require computer training (computer, utility, or telecommunications repair personnel, truck drivers, pilots, electricians, mechanics, and machinists).
Of course, some of these occupations may eventually fall victim to automation. Google, for instance, has developed a driverless car that could eventually be used to transport goods. But for now, none of these jobs are likely to be eliminated by technology.
So what jobs are in danger? Autor defines them as "routine tasks … that follow an exhaustive set of rules and hence are readily amenable to computerization." These include low-level clerical and secretarial work, rule-driven interpersonal encounters at banks, stores, and anywhere tickets are sold, and much blue-collar work in factories and warehouses.
In other words, the occupations that are safe from automation are all over the map in terms of income and education level—ranging from home health aides to telecom repair personnel to surgeons. But the jobs most threatened by automation are disproportionately unskilled and low-wage, requiring only a high school degree. In fact, nine of the 10 jobs that Autor and another MIT economist, David Dorn, cite as the most susceptible to computerization are low-skill and low-wage.
As recently as 2013, Autor had maintained that automation was polarizing the job market—creating a situation in which there was little middle zone between low-skilled service work and professional or managerial work. But last summer, in his presentation to the Federal Reserve Bank, he took a different tack. He now argues that "employment polarization will not continue indefinitely. While many middle-skill tasks are susceptible to automation, many middle-skill jobs" include tasks that are not. Many of these jobs, he explains, "will combine routine technical tasks with the set of nonroutine tasks in which workers hold comparative advantage—interpersonal interaction, flexibility, adaptability and problem-solving."
Frey and Osborne reached a similar conclusion. In a 2013 paper in which they ranked occupations on the basis of whether they were computerizable, they concluded that the jobs "least susceptible" to computerization are high-skill professional and managerial jobs, but they also predicted that a host of middle-income occupations would survive. "Rather than reducing the demand for middle-income occupations," they wrote, "our model predicts that computerization will mainly substitute for low-skill and low-wage jobs in the near future."
Autor still maintains that, in the past, automation was destroying the middle class. But economist Stephen Rose argues that the middle class was never being destroyed, only gradually transformed. The difference lies partly in how they count the loss of many blue-collar production jobs. Autor defines these jobs as middle-income and middle-skilled—and sees their loss as evidence of the destruction of the middle class. Rose, on the other hand, sees these jobs as middle-income (because of fleeting corporate acquiescence to union wages) but lower-skilled. That changes the whole calculation of what has happened over the past few decades.
Rose has created an extensive database of occupations based not on Labor Department classifications, but on a job's specific function, the skill required to perform it, and its place in the chain of output. According to his figures, from 1967 to 2007—roughly the period during which the automation revolution took hold—the share of managerial and professional jobs in the labor force grew from 22 to 35 percent; the share of mid-skill jobs declined only slightly from 39 to 36 percent; and the share of low-skill jobs fell from 39 to 29 percent.
As Rose describes it, the trend has been gradually moving, with some stops and starts—for instance, during the last recession—toward an upgraded rather than a polarized workforce. It's hard for me to say conclusively who is right, but Rose's picture fits more with what I've seen as I've traveled around the United States over the years covering campaigns. The very wealthiest have become even wealthier; but below them, many Americans have gradually been moving upward. The middle class has not disappeared but edged ahead in education, income, and responsibility on the job. Americans' standard of living has steadily risen—and that shows up in how they spend their money: According to Rose, Americans spent 46 percent of their income in 1947 on food, drink, and clothing. By 2007, they were only spending 18 percent. Much more of their money is now devoted to what John Maynard Keynes described as "relative" rather than "absolute" needs.
But amidst this improvement in Americans' standard of living, there are also pockets of high unemployment and poverty throughout the country—in cities like Detroit or East St. Louis, in much of West Virginia or eastern Kentucky, and in rural parts of the Deep South. The people in these places have not benefited from the promise of automation, and if the economists are right about the rapid disappearance of low-skill jobs, things are only going to get much worse. The question, then, is: What should be done to help these people? And it's a question that neither Democrats nor Republicans—both of whom would rather talk about the middle class than the poor—seem especially eager to face.
IN TRUTH, THERE is little disagreement among economists about how to help the victims of automation. "Our findings … imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerization, that is, tasks requiring creative and social intelligence," Frey and Osborne write. "For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills." And the first place they must do that is in school.
As the automation revolution has developed, it has steadily raised workers' educational requirements—and workers have responded by going to school more than they had. According to the census, in 1967, only about half of Americans over 25 had graduated from high school; by 2009, that number was 87 percent. In 1967, less than 10 percent over 25 had graduated from college; by 2009, it was 30 percent.
But that still leaves a lot of workers unprepared for today's job market. Currently, 34 percent of the labor force over the age of 25 has not made it beyond high school. Many of these workers are falling through the cracks: The labor participation rate of high school graduates is 17 percentage points lower than the participation rate of four-year-college graduates.
The problem is, in part, the wide disparity in the quality of public schools. And the challenge is starkest in the states where high school and college graduation rates are the lowest—states such as Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, West Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Nevada. In these locales, many children don't have a chance to move up the ladder of the new workforce that automation is creating.
What's needed is obvious: an enormous, sustained, and probably expensive effort to increase the quality of the country's worst schools. That would include money to attract outstanding teachers and to make it possible for lower-income children to go to college. (It would also involve revitalizing the communities around the schools.) Yet so far, Republicans and Democrats have mustered only half-measures—and even those half-measures have proved astoundingly difficult to implement.
In George W. Bush's first year in office, for instance, Democrats and Republicans passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which imposed minimum standards on all states. Each state would administer standardized tests, and students would have to show progress for a school to receive federal funding. But the content of the tests was left up to the states, and some of the states that most needed to improve their school systems balked at doing so.
Then, in 2009, with the support of the Obama administration, 44 states and Washington, D.C., adopted common standards for math and reading; known as the Common Core, the benchmarks were designed to prepare students for college and the new economy. "These parsimonious standards give greater weight to today's foundational skills than the weight given by most state standards," Levy and Murnane wrote recently.
But the proposal has become a major source of controversy on the right, generating enormous opposition from Republican governors and from tea-party groups. Nineteen states—all with GOP governors at the time—have either rejected outright or downgraded the Common Core standards. These include many of the states—such as Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina—for which the proposal was designed. While former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush remains supportive, two other Republican presidential aspirants who had previously backed Common Core—Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie—now either oppose or express "grave concerns" about the program.
President Obama and many Democratic policymakers continue to back the Common Core, but some Democratic politicians, moved in part by teachers' wariness of standardized tests, have begun to distance themselves. Last fall, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo claimed he had "nothing to do with Common Core" and promised to "disregard Common Core scores for at least five years." In Washington state, the Democratic Party passed a resolution rejecting Common Core. Hillary Clinton has yet to take a clear position on the issue.
The Common Core standards certainly don't represent a final answer to the question of what to do about the 34 percent of Americans who are going to suffer most from automation. These standards are merely a small starting point, but the fact that they are being rejected where they are most needed—and that some Democrats are joining the many Republicans who have backed away from them—says much about our political system's inability to address the social challenge of automation.
One element of the problem may be Americans' traditional aversion to government, but part of it may also be structural. In a parliamentary system with proportional representation, the 34 percent might have a party that would summon them to the polls and represent their distinct interests. By contrast, in America's two-party, winner-take-all system, these voters are inevitably ignored in favor of larger, wealthier groups that are more likely to vote.
And so, Democrats bemoan the destruction of a middle class that actually remains quite vibrant, and Republicans cater to middle-class complaints about taxes and spending, while trying to lure poor whites with rhetoric about abortion and gun control. In the meantime, the revolution in automation will continue—and the 34 percent of Americans who are not prepared to join it will be lost in the shuffle.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/robots-vs-the-underclass-20150227
‘Routine’ jobs are disappearing
Is Your Job ‘Routine’? If So, It’s Probably Disappearing
By Josh Zumbrun
12:03 pm ET Apr 8, 2015
The American labor market and middle class was once built on the routine job–workers showed up at factories and offices, took their places on the assembly line or the paper-pushing chain, did the same task over and over, and then went home.
New research from Henry Siu at the University of British Columbia and Nir Jaimovich from Duke University shows just how much the world of routine work has collapsed. The economists released a paper today, published by the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, showing that over the course of the last two recessions and recoveries, a period beginning in 2001, the economy’s job growth has come entirely from nonroutine work.
To derive this data, Mr. Siu and Mr. Jaimovich classified jobs by whether their tasks are routine or nonroutine and also whether the work is cognitive or manual. Examples of routine manual jobs in their classification system include rules-based and physical tasks, such as factory workers who operate welding or metal-press machines, forklift operators or home appliance repairers. Routine cognitive jobs include tasks done by secretaries, bookkeepers, filing clerks or bank tellers. Nonroutine manual jobs include occupations like janitors or home-health aides. Finally, nonroutine cognitive jobs include tasks like public relations, financial analysis or computer programming.
While many jobs have a mix of routine and nonroutine tasks, the basic classification that Mr. Siu and Mr. Jaimovich use is clear, and the results when jobs are sorted along these lines are striking. In the most recent recession, routine jobs collapsed and simply have not recovered, with employment in both cognitive and manual jobs down by more than 5% if the tasks are mostly routine.
“Historically these occupations rebounded,” Mr. Siu said. “It suggests a startling fundamental shift in the way the labor market is behaving.”
In recessions of the 1960s and 1970s, routine jobs would fall during the recession but quickly snap back. But after the recession in 1990, something changed. Routine jobs fell and, as a share of the population, never recovered. In the recessions in 2001 and in 2007-09 they fell even further. The snapback never occurred, suggesting that many firms began coping with recessions by scrapping tasks that could be automated or more easily outsourced.
For his part, Mr. Siu thinks jobs have been taken away by automation, more than by outsourcing. While some manufacturing jobs have clearly gone overseas, “it’s hard to offshore a secretary.” These tasks more likely became unnecessary due to improving technology, he said.
In the late 1980s, routine cognitive jobs were held by about 17% of the population and routine manual jobs by about 16%. Today, that’s declined to about 13.5% and 12%. (The figures are not seasonally adjusted and so are displayed in the chart as 12-month moving averages, to remove seasonal fluctuations).
Mr. Siu and Mr. Jaimovich see no reason the trend would abate. “Many of the routine occupations that were once commonplace have begun to disappear, while others have become obsolete,” they write. “This is because the tasks involved in these occupations, by their nature, are prime candidates to be performed by new technologies.”
But they are not among the labor market’s pessimists who fear that robots will render humans obsolete. Their work shows the economy has continued to generate jobs, but with a focus on nonroutine work, especially cognitive. Since the late 1980s, such occupations have added more than 22 million workers.
“Technological progress has only done wonders for human standards of living,” Mr. Siu said. “It’s really hard to say in the long run that technology is immiserating and I’m certainly not one of those people who is a technological pessimist. We’ll do what we’ve always done. Human skills will adapt. We’ll move toward our comparative advantage.”
Even as robots become more skilled at more complex tasks, for decades to come it will be the province of humans to program and manage these machines. Many more jobs have critical elements that are creative, interpersonal, social and persuasive.
Jim Kessler, the senior vice president for policy at Third Way, said he believes the lesson for policy makers is clear.
“There’s a debate going on right now–it’s certainly going on within the Democratic Party–which is does human capital matter?” he said. “This paper says human capital really does matter. The recessions are hurting those the most whose skills can be easily automated away.”
Mr. Kessler sees two policy responses as critical: First, to improve the quality and availability of college and job-training programs to focus on raising the skills of the workforce so that more people are positioned to benefit. And second, when there is a recession, to respond aggressively because the labor market no longer snaps back.
These responses may do little to arrest the climb of the wealthiest 1% of Americans who have driven so much of the rise in measurements of inequality, but they could help the other 99% avoid falling behind.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015...ine-if-so-its-probably-disappearing/?mod=mktw
Is Your Job ‘Routine’? If So, It’s Probably Disappearing
By Josh Zumbrun
12:03 pm ET Apr 8, 2015
The American labor market and middle class was once built on the routine job–workers showed up at factories and offices, took their places on the assembly line or the paper-pushing chain, did the same task over and over, and then went home.
New research from Henry Siu at the University of British Columbia and Nir Jaimovich from Duke University shows just how much the world of routine work has collapsed. The economists released a paper today, published by the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, showing that over the course of the last two recessions and recoveries, a period beginning in 2001, the economy’s job growth has come entirely from nonroutine work.
To derive this data, Mr. Siu and Mr. Jaimovich classified jobs by whether their tasks are routine or nonroutine and also whether the work is cognitive or manual. Examples of routine manual jobs in their classification system include rules-based and physical tasks, such as factory workers who operate welding or metal-press machines, forklift operators or home appliance repairers. Routine cognitive jobs include tasks done by secretaries, bookkeepers, filing clerks or bank tellers. Nonroutine manual jobs include occupations like janitors or home-health aides. Finally, nonroutine cognitive jobs include tasks like public relations, financial analysis or computer programming.
While many jobs have a mix of routine and nonroutine tasks, the basic classification that Mr. Siu and Mr. Jaimovich use is clear, and the results when jobs are sorted along these lines are striking. In the most recent recession, routine jobs collapsed and simply have not recovered, with employment in both cognitive and manual jobs down by more than 5% if the tasks are mostly routine.
“Historically these occupations rebounded,” Mr. Siu said. “It suggests a startling fundamental shift in the way the labor market is behaving.”
In recessions of the 1960s and 1970s, routine jobs would fall during the recession but quickly snap back. But after the recession in 1990, something changed. Routine jobs fell and, as a share of the population, never recovered. In the recessions in 2001 and in 2007-09 they fell even further. The snapback never occurred, suggesting that many firms began coping with recessions by scrapping tasks that could be automated or more easily outsourced.
For his part, Mr. Siu thinks jobs have been taken away by automation, more than by outsourcing. While some manufacturing jobs have clearly gone overseas, “it’s hard to offshore a secretary.” These tasks more likely became unnecessary due to improving technology, he said.
In the late 1980s, routine cognitive jobs were held by about 17% of the population and routine manual jobs by about 16%. Today, that’s declined to about 13.5% and 12%. (The figures are not seasonally adjusted and so are displayed in the chart as 12-month moving averages, to remove seasonal fluctuations).
Mr. Siu and Mr. Jaimovich see no reason the trend would abate. “Many of the routine occupations that were once commonplace have begun to disappear, while others have become obsolete,” they write. “This is because the tasks involved in these occupations, by their nature, are prime candidates to be performed by new technologies.”
But they are not among the labor market’s pessimists who fear that robots will render humans obsolete. Their work shows the economy has continued to generate jobs, but with a focus on nonroutine work, especially cognitive. Since the late 1980s, such occupations have added more than 22 million workers.
“Technological progress has only done wonders for human standards of living,” Mr. Siu said. “It’s really hard to say in the long run that technology is immiserating and I’m certainly not one of those people who is a technological pessimist. We’ll do what we’ve always done. Human skills will adapt. We’ll move toward our comparative advantage.”
Even as robots become more skilled at more complex tasks, for decades to come it will be the province of humans to program and manage these machines. Many more jobs have critical elements that are creative, interpersonal, social and persuasive.
Jim Kessler, the senior vice president for policy at Third Way, said he believes the lesson for policy makers is clear.
“There’s a debate going on right now–it’s certainly going on within the Democratic Party–which is does human capital matter?” he said. “This paper says human capital really does matter. The recessions are hurting those the most whose skills can be easily automated away.”
Mr. Kessler sees two policy responses as critical: First, to improve the quality and availability of college and job-training programs to focus on raising the skills of the workforce so that more people are positioned to benefit. And second, when there is a recession, to respond aggressively because the labor market no longer snaps back.
These responses may do little to arrest the climb of the wealthiest 1% of Americans who have driven so much of the rise in measurements of inequality, but they could help the other 99% avoid falling behind.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015...ine-if-so-its-probably-disappearing/?mod=mktw
^^^ Point?
Everyone knows about automation. Business owners have and will continue to automate where they can. That has nothing to do with employees demanding better wages. In fact, it means employees need to push harder to get that money while it's there to be had.
Everyone knows about automation. Business owners have and will continue to automate where they can. That has nothing to do with employees demanding better wages. In fact, it means employees need to push harder to get that money while it's there to be had.
The point is it's not rocket science what will happen if you present yourself as more expensive than cutting-edge and unproven technology. You want $15/hour for a job designed for a teenager? For no other reason than you had 3 kids by the time you're 20? OK. I'll see your nonsense and raise you a robot arm and a tablet that won't complain.
Business owners have and will continue to automate where they can if it makes sense from a cost/benefit point of view. Someone convinced low-skilled people to present employers with the choice of long-term uncertainty associated with automation or double the pay for a job not structured to merit it.
Good luck with that even though you've already lost.
Just peeping this thread for the first time
dont know if its a repost but.... when folks like ceo's lose
the gluttony... it would be a win win for everyone...
CEO Slashes $1 Million Salary To Give Lowest-Paid Workers A Raise
Three weeks ago, Dan Price took a $930,000 pay cut.
Growing income inequality had been on his mind for months. But as he went for a hike with a friend one afternoon and listened to her describe her struggle with rising rent prices, he realized he had to do something for his own employees.
So Price, the founder and CEO of Gravity Payments in Seattle, decided to raise the minimum salary at his 120-person payment processing company to $70,000. At a company where the average pay was $48,000 per year, the move -- which was first reported by The New York Times on Monday -- affected 70 workers, 30 of whom saw their salaries double.
Most of the money for these raises will come from cutting Price's salary -- which is now $70,000 per year rather $1 million. The rest will come out of the $2.2 million the company expects to earn in profit this year.
“There’s greater inequality today than there’s been since the Great Recession,” Price told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. “I’d been thinking about this stuff and just thought, ‘It’s time. I can’t go another day without doing something about this.’”
The $70,000 figure is just below the $75,000 salary pegged in a 2010 Princeton University study as an ideal benchmark for achieving happiness. About 28 percent of Americans said they would feel successful earning at most $70,000 per year, according to a 2012 survey from the jobs site CareerBuilder.
The pay cut won’t affect Price's lifestyle much. He has saved a lot of the money he has earned since starting Gravity in 2004. He said he has no plans to replace his 12-year-old Audi, which has clocked more than 140,000 miles. And his new salary will still allow him to pick up the bar tab for his friends once a month, he said.
“There will be sacrifices,” said Price, 30. “But once the company’s profit is back to the $2.2 million level, my pay will go back. So that’s good motivation.”
In the U.S., the average CEO earns more than 350 times what the average worker does. Seattle has become a hotbed in the fight for higher wages as the city phases in a $15 minimum wage, one of the highest in the country. The city is also home to wealthy investor Nick Hanauer, a self-styled champion for higher pay who has warned his fellow billionaires that pitchfork-wielding mobs will follow them to their private jets if income inequality isn’t addressed.
Rather than see this as a charitable offer to his workers, Price sees the pay raises as an investment. In theory, workers motivated by higher salaries will ultimately attract more business and handle clients better.
“This is a capitalist solution to a social problem,” Price said. “I think it pays for itself, I really do.”
dont know if its a repost but.... when folks like ceo's lose
the gluttony... it would be a win win for everyone...
CEO Slashes $1 Million Salary To Give Lowest-Paid Workers A Raise
Three weeks ago, Dan Price took a $930,000 pay cut.
Growing income inequality had been on his mind for months. But as he went for a hike with a friend one afternoon and listened to her describe her struggle with rising rent prices, he realized he had to do something for his own employees.
So Price, the founder and CEO of Gravity Payments in Seattle, decided to raise the minimum salary at his 120-person payment processing company to $70,000. At a company where the average pay was $48,000 per year, the move -- which was first reported by The New York Times on Monday -- affected 70 workers, 30 of whom saw their salaries double.
Most of the money for these raises will come from cutting Price's salary -- which is now $70,000 per year rather $1 million. The rest will come out of the $2.2 million the company expects to earn in profit this year.
“There’s greater inequality today than there’s been since the Great Recession,” Price told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. “I’d been thinking about this stuff and just thought, ‘It’s time. I can’t go another day without doing something about this.’”
The $70,000 figure is just below the $75,000 salary pegged in a 2010 Princeton University study as an ideal benchmark for achieving happiness. About 28 percent of Americans said they would feel successful earning at most $70,000 per year, according to a 2012 survey from the jobs site CareerBuilder.
The pay cut won’t affect Price's lifestyle much. He has saved a lot of the money he has earned since starting Gravity in 2004. He said he has no plans to replace his 12-year-old Audi, which has clocked more than 140,000 miles. And his new salary will still allow him to pick up the bar tab for his friends once a month, he said.
“There will be sacrifices,” said Price, 30. “But once the company’s profit is back to the $2.2 million level, my pay will go back. So that’s good motivation.”
In the U.S., the average CEO earns more than 350 times what the average worker does. Seattle has become a hotbed in the fight for higher wages as the city phases in a $15 minimum wage, one of the highest in the country. The city is also home to wealthy investor Nick Hanauer, a self-styled champion for higher pay who has warned his fellow billionaires that pitchfork-wielding mobs will follow them to their private jets if income inequality isn’t addressed.
Rather than see this as a charitable offer to his workers, Price sees the pay raises as an investment. In theory, workers motivated by higher salaries will ultimately attract more business and handle clients better.
“This is a capitalist solution to a social problem,” Price said. “I think it pays for itself, I really do.”
Of course I aint see too many brothers in the company photos ^^^
but at least its a start....
Im sure that made the decision a little easier for him to make...
but at least its a start....
Im sure that made the decision a little easier for him to make...
Can you automate office cleaning and home personal care for the aged?
More of your spurious arguments.
When you go through this thread you'll see that people equate a voluntary act like the one you posted and the minimum wage. They'll go see, WalMart raised the wage. A minimum-wage raise wouldn't had hurt them. As if WalMart and giant corporations were the only ones that employed low-skilled work.
The minimum wage is a completely arbitrary wage level imposed by nothing but the wish-list type thinking of the political process. Everyone has to follow it no matter the cost structure of the company or the current pay of the owner.
What's wrong thoughtone? You even put what I said in red and still had the nerve to misrepresent it. I said it was designed for a teenager, then I proceeded to give an example of someone who wasn't a teenager actually working the job.Can you automate office cleaning and home personal care for the aged?
More of your spurious arguments.
You bored? What's going on?
Regardless, productive has gone though the roof over the last 40 years and wages have remained stagnate for the overwhelming majority of people.
Automation and streamlining is nothing new.
The main issues is that the wealth is not being distributed equitably to all that have a part in creating it.
Corporate, libertarian influence over the peoples government has allowed laws to skew toward the capitalists.
Trickle down has ruined the economy!
Ok but your screen name is greed so, you have
to be a gordan gecko lookingassmahfucka!!!!
The wealthy parasites amongst us ruin the economy, they take their money
overseas and bury it..
The poor help the economy, they stand on line to buy
shit ere black friday damn near killing each other...
helping to keep money circulating, fine they dont realize
it, but its fact, their money stays, wealthy folks money
runs!!!
One is the enemy to the american economy sucking it dry, and the other is a real american in true financial support of their country!!
Ok, let's play the mature responsible adult game. All it takes is to ask why.
All you have to do is ask why, then assess whether your terrible solutions would produce a good result.
I've done that because I view it as irresponsible to pretend that I care about an issue but not think about it at all.
Split productivity growth and wage growth? Unstable money is the why. Stable money is the answer.
Automation being targeted at a specific group at an historic pace? High labor cost is the why. Stop voting in random wage levels, with no economic basis, is the answer.
Wealth inequality is growing? Rich people control politicians is the why. Make government subject to the same principle that the rest of us are held to, not using force or threatening someone that's not hurting you or doing something wrong is the answer.
Laws benefit a well-connected sub-segment of the population? Rich people control politicians is the why. Make government subject to the same principle that the rest of us are held to, not using force or threatening someone that's not hurting you or doing something wrong is the answer.
Trillions of dollars going to rich people using the marketing that it helps everyone in the long run? Rich people control politicians is the why. Make government subject to the same principle that the rest of us are held to, not using force or threatening someone that's not hurting you or doing something wrong is the answer.
EZ PZ lemon squeezey.
Why thoughtone?
Why thoughtone?
Why thoughtone?
Why thoughtone?
Why thoughtone?
All you have to do is ask why, then assess whether your terrible solutions would produce a good result.
I've done that because I view it as irresponsible to pretend that I care about an issue but not think about it at all.
Split productivity growth and wage growth? Unstable money is the why. Stable money is the answer.
Automation being targeted at a specific group at an historic pace? High labor cost is the why. Stop voting in random wage levels, with no economic basis, is the answer.
Wealth inequality is growing? Rich people control politicians is the why. Make government subject to the same principle that the rest of us are held to, not using force or threatening someone that's not hurting you or doing something wrong is the answer.
Laws benefit a well-connected sub-segment of the population? Rich people control politicians is the why. Make government subject to the same principle that the rest of us are held to, not using force or threatening someone that's not hurting you or doing something wrong is the answer.
Trillions of dollars going to rich people using the marketing that it helps everyone in the long run? Rich people control politicians is the why. Make government subject to the same principle that the rest of us are held to, not using force or threatening someone that's not hurting you or doing something wrong is the answer.
EZ PZ lemon squeezey.
Which sounds like you're fine with how I framed it.
well yeah it puts your screen name into perspective...
How could you be proud of your country, when you send
your money overseas, instead of keeping it home??
I don't think you can derive an American Pride from my post, this thread or any thread. We aren't free.
And sending it overseas or keeping it at home is just xenophobia.
America makes it harder to make money than some other place? Solution, send your money to some other place. America wants the money to say home? Stop being stupid.
I'll just add, you're a sucker if you think you owe it to America to buy products that you can get cheaper somewhere else.
You sound like the one with a self-destructive level of pride in America.
I forgot how tedious this could be. You argue ideology with no regards to reality.
We know about automation. It's been around longer than any of us have been alive.
What is your suggested alternative for low wage workers? Take whatever your employer offers and pray he never hears about computers and robots?
This is completely untrue.
Fast food and retail jobs aren't designed for teenagers. If that were true, they wouldn't be open for breakfast or during school hours but they are.
When I worked fast food, the teenagers didn't work until later in the afternoon and we had already been open 10 hrs by then. I was on a shift full of adults, many of whom worked more than one job or as much overtime as they could.
Once again, knowing that technology exist isn't why employers automate. They automate because it passes a cost/benefit analysis. You call that ideology. A business calls that, already fired your ass.
And these are workers that already took what the employers offered. Now they are demanding more. They have every right to demand more. You also have every right to ignore that the employer doesn't have to give in. He can think it makes sense or not. If you think he's cheap, then leave. Go find a job that values you at double your current pay. I dare you.
Something is wrong with you and thoughtone. Fast food jobs, especially, are designed so that when your adult ass leaves for the day, an ignorant no-skilled teenager can do the job for his shift. Saying the job is designed for teenagers in mind doesn't mean that only teenagers will work it.
The fast food Mcdonalds type job has been around since the 50's, at least. It has never been promoted by businesses or workers that it should be able to support a family until this decade when people didn't see themselves as having better options elsewhere. That has nothing to do with the fact that the job was not designed as a middle-class job that can support middle class goals.
That's just people whining about their lot in life that they want to be paid $15/hour. Your bad decisions have nothing to do with a job that was structured decades ago.
In other words he really didn't cut his pay at all! I'd call him a snake, but snakes only look slimy.
The problem is Wall Street that steers a worker into investing like a billionaire. All they care about is profits to get higher dividends and stock buybacks. You probably benefit more when a company increases pay which boosts your retirement savings.
The stock price might not go up as high with two opposing strategies, however, it will put pressure on companies to boost pay to maximize shareholder value.
The stock price might not go up as high with two opposing strategies, however, it will put pressure on companies to boost pay to maximize shareholder value.
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I do. It's like you're answering a question no one is asking when you throw in automation like it's some kind of rebuttal.
Employers will automate. Whether an employee asks for a raise or not, employers will automate where they can. But many, if not most, of these jobs can't be automated or outsourced. They will need people to work them.
Those people should demand better wages and benefits.
We as taxpayers should demand to stop subsidizing major employers with our social spending.
People do that every day so that's a pretty empty dare.
The jobs will still need filling and the people working them still should be paid better.
So we both agree and understand that it's an adult working those day shifts. So it's in reality not a job designed for a teenager.
The jobs weren't designed for teenagers back then either but adults had better options back then so they didn't have to take those jobs and younger people, who often lived at home, made up a greater number of employees.
You're stuck on fast food workers. Those are not the only people in these protests. There are also child and health care workers protesting.
I agree it is tedious. Having to put up with your New Math where cost/benefit analysis is trump by your political belief. Employers do not automate as the default option and will not automate independent of the cost of automation relative to the cost of the worker.
Also, I think it's great if you want romanticize your efforts while working a minimum-skill job, but that doesn't change the fact that a job is worth the productivity of the most incompetent worker able to do it. If a teenager can walk in and do the job you just finished, then that job is worth shit and should be paid like its shit. If going someone else for double the pay happens everyday, then this thread and demands for government intervention would never have happened.
And there it is.
The elitism that really drives the anti-minimum wage proponents.
There's no actual economic backing to their beliefs just that they feel there's some "less than" about people that work service jobs.
But they know it's not socially or morally okay to think or say that out loud so they come up with a thousand strawmen to hide their true nature.
Children used compete with grown men to work in factories and mines so the fact that a young person can do a job means nothing when evaluating the value of the job.
Ah yes, the celebration of classism!
Is there any difference between this and slavery?
Russell Kirk: author of the seminal 1953 manifesto, The Conservative Mind
http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/detail/ten-conservative-principles/
YES! The police don't hunt down runaway McDonald's employees and chop off their feet.
True!
I usually don't respond to your arguments anymore, but this is too ridiculous. This current environment has everything to do with lawmakers who bailed out and continued to subsidize the irresponsible moneymen who got us here in the first place. Libertarians started the protest against this. The Tea Party started the protest against government policy that ended up morphing into the occupy movement. The liberals were clamoring for the bailouts, just like many "conservetatives".
Wealth will be apportioned "unequally", just like physical strength, intelligence and capability is.
This cause for this mess rests squarely with the Government policies that folks like you have begged for, and now denounce because you have it.
yup its all mindfuckery son, from the courts to corporate
finance..
its all bullshit to mindfuck the masses...
hey it could work for you, stay focused stick to
a plan..
just be careful what you
ask for..