The $70,000-a-Year Minimum Wage

[I Push Buttons]

Yes. Because I am not a fucking baby.

Any other stupid questions, or do you want to leave the thread now?

Because valuing yourself makes you a baby.

Yikes.

[therealstegblob]

Because valuing yourself makes you a baby.

Yikes.

Valuing yourself =/= being mad other people get paid money "because they don't deserve it compared to you".

Baby want ba-ba?

[Ealyssa]

Cute story. Too bad this model isn't sustainable in any type of economy that wants to floirish.

Blatantly wrong. Salary distribution doesn't impact the company at all as long as the salary part doesn't increase in the budget.

And having more people able to consume is a direct improvement to any economy who wants to florish. Something even the very socialist Henri Ford understood...

[Deianeira]

You should be paid by your productivity and value

People who take responsibility and have worked hard to get where they are should be paid more than people that take no responsibility and have no skills

I agree that people should be paid for their productivity, so i guess EVERYONE that works on minimum wage should have a raise to around 20$/hr atleast if you look at inflation and the rate at what productivity has risen during the last few decades.

[Vash The Stampede]

Yeah and the U.S. has the best doctors in the world because we don’t have socialized healthcare. Doctors want to work in the U.S. because they get paid more.

Best Doctors but the average health is not as good as other countries. We're not ranked #1 in healthcare, not even close.

[Klingers]

A lot of you are still very young so you won't be able to understand this, but there is this law in all fields of productivity that is a variant of Zipf's law, and a generalization of price's law that states, "50% of the work is performed by the square root of the size of the domain." This means if we have a business with 100 employees, 50% of the work done is performed by 25 employees. If we restrict that domain to the 75 remaining workers, 50% of the remaining work is performed by 9 workers. If we further restrict that domain to the 66 remaining workers, again, 50% of the work is performed by 8 workers.

"What does this mean?"

For the sake of simplification Let's say that we have 100 work points.

the top 25 workers will handle 50 work points.
The remaining top 9 workers will handle 25 work points
The remaining top 8 workers will handle 12.5 work points.
The remaining top 8 workers will handle 6.25 work points.

This means, that the top 50 workers, within an organization, on average, across all professions, including creating college papers, will perform ~95 work points.

The remaining 50 workers, will perform about 5 work points.

"What does this mean?"

Within a given corporation, there are always overachievers who dedicate 100% of their time at work, to work, and often goes the extra mile to dedicate more of their free time to work.

Imagine if at University you have to write a paper on the effects of x on y. You are in the 66th percentile and you wrote a 20 page paper because you felt as if that is what is required of the assignment. You score a 90%.

Someone in the 5th percentile decides to write a 1 page paper, because they felt as if that was all that was required of the assignment. They score a 89%.
How would you feel knowing this? And why would anybody offer up 20x the effort, 2000% the amount of work, if at the end of the day they receive the same reward?

Do none of you understand the benefit of properly rewarding outstanding employee behavior? Why would someone accept the role of a manager, that requires 2x the work, and the added nightmare of interpersonal relationship management for a $1,000 pay increase?

Really good post, but I think the fact is that it's not about percentiles or individual employees insofar as it is compensation is falling out of step with productivity for rank and file workers.

[Asrialol]

Implying low paid people don't work hard or have no skill... even then, a brain surgeon doesn't even come close to what a CEO earns, and they have the literal responsibility of a person's life in their hands... compared to some pencil pusher that has some charisma for their company.

You think all CEO's does is sign papers?

[Elegiac]

Let's say you work in a small office. You are invested in your work, but you don't have enough resources, but you decide to work extra hours to get work done. Let's say that you develop a system that leads of better preprocessing and structuring of work, which now means that you can perform 40 hours of work in only 10 hours. But you still work your 40 hours.

Tim also works in this small office. He barely even does his base job right. You constantly have to interrupt your work in order to help him with his issues. When you introduced the new system, he flat out refused and decided to stick to the old system, wasting resources (in this case, time) working through an old system.

Tomorrow, it was announced that everybody's getting a raise! You went from making 60k to 70k. Tim went from making 40k to 70k. Does that really seem fair to you, given the amount of work and dedication you offered to this hypothetical company?

Chances are most people would go and ask for an increase in pay owing to their now vastly stronger bargaining position relative to other earners, meaning that a minimum wage hike would translate into an upwards cascade of wage increases to a certain point.

This is a known phenomenon and is considered one of the strongest arguments in favour of government mandated minimum pay rate. Did you actually have a point?

- - - Updated - - -

You think all CEO's does is sign papers?

Do you really think a CEO puts in a thousand times the work per hour as a minimum wage employee?

[munkeyinorbit]

It seems as though every company that ever went bust didn't pay their employees enough. All of them. This companies example will not work every where as inflation would probably cancel it out but maybe a rule that sets the maximum pay could be used. That won't fix it either but it would be nice to share the wealth around.

[Elegiac]

It seems as though every company that ever went bust didn't pay their employees enough. All of them. This companies example will not work every where as inflation would probably cancel it out but maybe a rule that sets the maximum pay could be used. That won't fix it either but it would be nice to share the wealth around.

Generally speaking I think we need to start making a push towards alternative business organization models that aren't quite so serf-like.

[PaladinBash]

I mean that's not bad for starting out but I sure as fuck wouldn't work at a place that paid me the same as the peasants there. No fucking chance. Would I do peasant work there? Yeah, I'd sit around and fuck about, absolutely. Would I lower myself to the level of others? Nope. You pay peanuts and you get monkeys.

[Captain N]

Generally speaking I think we need to start making a push towards alternative business organization models that aren't quite so serf-like.

You have to convince people thing like Collective Bargaining aren't the devil they've been taught for years.

I mean you've seen it right here in this thread people who thinking paying people identical wages for their position will somehow cause a company to tank -- completely disregarding union scale wages.

[Elegiac]

You have to convince people thing like Collective Bargaining aren't the devil they've been taught for years.

I mean you've seen it right here in this thread people who thinking paying people identical wages for their position will somehow cause a company to tank -- completely disregarding union scale wages.

Not just collective bargaining; people need to be taught that there are organizational models for private entities besides "corporation".

[Theodarzna]

Yeah. And we can use spherical cows to calculate the aerodynamics of biological creatures flying through a universe without the higgs field. We live in the REAL world with REAL effects that can actually measured; not your hypothetical, "obviously this company has infinite cash flow" bullshit. You don't seem to understand that for many growing companies, it is cheaper to give everybody on their staff below a cap a raise, than to give people working above a threshold a raise.

"Oh. We can't give you a raise because we just raised the minimum pay for all employees. Sorry. You know? It's really selfish of you to be upset that everybody got a raise but you didn't. Why are you so selfish?"

I had to deal with manipulative bullshit like the above before and it is the worst fucking thing ever. CEOs that do this shit do it to save money by limiting the amount of available cash flow they have to compensate their high end employees. Maybe this company is different; But we will have to wait to see the CEO's bonuses before we come to this conclusion.

Everytime i post here, i am reminded of the ignorance of the average poster and the futile effort it is to have a conversation based in reality.

Actually that isn't wrong. Take your typical retail outfit, typically the lowest level workers get min. wage and say shift supervisors or managers or whatever get maybe 14 an hour. If everyone is paid 14 than the supervisors might as well step down for an easier job and the same pay. Everyone else would either have to get a pay bump or the appeal of less to do and more pay will draw people out of high stress jobs in say mid level to low level management.

[Elegiac]

Yeah. And we can use spherical cows to calculate the aerodynamics of biological creatures flying through a universe without the higgs field. We live in the REAL world with REAL effects that can me actually measured; not your hypothetical, "obviously this company has infinite cash flow" bullshit.

And what I have described is a REAL phenomenon that has occurred as a consequence of minimum wage hikes in the United States and elsewhere. Businesses find the capital to offer performance or onboard incentives, or they go bust and get replaced by businesses that can.

I'm curious why your issue is with projects that try to raise worker pay rather than the system that permits business owners to use pay raise policies and regulations as an instrument of exploitation.

[avx81]

Do you really think a CEO puts in a thousand times the work per hour as a minimum wage employee?

They don't. For reference Jeff Bezos makes something like $150k every minute of his life. He makes between 2-3x what the average person makes in an entire year of work in 1 minute. There is no doubt he is a busy guy making very big decisions but is 1 minute of his time worth what it would take the average person 2-3 years to make?

Also for reference the CEO of the company that I work at is compensated +50 million. It is true that a lot of it is in stock. At the same time thousands of employees were put out of work and new hires are starting at lower base pay than before. He makes more in 3-4 hours than the average employee in the company in an entire year. 1 Day of work is equal to about 2 years of work for the average employee. I do not think that 4 hours of his time has more worth than an entire year of work that my coworkers or myself put in.

Most people are not going to be the CEO of a big company on a 6 figure salary. That is totally understandable. But when you have a CEO making more money in the time it takes to take a piss (Jeff Bezos) than someone does in 2-3 years something is wrong. Meanwhile my tax dollars go to supporting his employees that are on food stamps because his employees are not paid enough. The same can be said for a lot of companies including the one I work for.

[munkeyinorbit]

I mean that's not bad for starting out but I sure as fuck wouldn't work at a place that paid me the same as the peasants there. No fucking chance. Would I do peasant work there? Yeah, I'd sit around and fuck about, absolutely. Would I lower myself to the level of others? Nope. You pay peanuts and you get monkeys.

You wouldn't get a job there in the first place. You have terrible reading comprehension and the wrong attitude. In that company there is a pay scale, just maybe not as prenounced as others. What does it matter anyway. There is a limit to how much pay a person needs before adding another $ to it gives no satisfaction. Alternate rewards such as satisfaction in the work you do, team spirit and how the output of the company makes you feel are far larger incentives. Granted, it isn't 70000, but a company that actually values their employees sounds like a great place to work.

[Vash The Stampede]

As great as this is, I think we'll never see this sorta thing outside of some rare companies. Pretty clear the wealthy are getting wealthier while the wages stay the same. Exactly how much money do you need? Best thing to do at this point is Universal Basic Income, because at some point the robots will take away your job. Lots of other reasons to have it as well, like how Americans are basically bat shit crazy right now and take a lot of opioids, probably stressed out due to their financial situation. Shitty jobs with shit pay are awful, but you can use UBI as negotiation power to get a pay raise. A lot of people work for scammers so this might incentivize them to quit working for scammers.

Getting paid at least $70k worth a year would create a new booming era for Americans. UBI would also do the same thing but put more of that burden on wealthier companies by taxing them. Like we actually tax big companies to begin with.

[Zeek Daniels]

They had salary jobs so its not minimum wage. What even is your title. You mean to say 70k Minimum Salary.

[avx81]

Also for reference back in the 70's the ratio of CEO to employee pay was something closer to like 20:1. Fast forward to today CEO pay is closer to 300:1 ratio. CEO pay ratio to employee needs to be capped at closer to where it was in the 70's and the rest of that money should be distributed to growing the company, pay employees better wages and provided better services.