Gbaji wrote:
Honestly? People continue to be waiters/waitresses because it's arguably the best paying job someone with little to no job skills or experience can get. There's a reason why waitstaff is overwhelmingly made up of college age kids. It's the kind of job you get while looking/waiting for that "real job" to come along.
That's what I said.
Gbaji wrote:
Yup. In a McDonalds where there are limited amounts of money customers are willing to pay for a Big Mac.
First of all, the set prices at your nearest McDonalds isn't the highest price that customers are willing to pay for a Big Mac. I've gone to McDonalds and Burger Kings where #1 meals were above $10. Second of all, how does that conceptually contradict my point? The actual amount is irrelevant. The focus is on raises based on percentages.
Your claim is that employers will increase their employee's wages at any chance they can get (i.e. 100k a year). However, you already agreed that employers, employees and customers all want the most while doing/paying the least. So, which one is it? The real truth is that the employers will only increase wages just enough to keep their employees working. They aren't going to dive deeply into their profit just because they can.
Gbaji wrote:
I'm asking you to stretch your mind a bit and imagine if there wasn't any limit. The company could make as much money as they wanted to, while still paying as much as their employees wanted as well. It's not intended to be a real world example, but to illustrate the point that it's cost constraints that affect labor costs. I know it's popular to blame greed for these sorts of things, but here's the secret: Everyone is Greedy. That's what I was trying to get across earlier.
Read above
Gbaji wrote:
They do so because they can make more money by doing that business overseas than domestically. There are a host of factors that might come into that. Simply blaming it on "greed" is silly. Greed is a constant. Businesses were just as greedy in a year when less offshoreing happened than in a year when more did. What changed was the conditions that impacted their business decisions. Sitting around crying about it and decrying "corporate greed" is completely counterproductive. The correct answer is to find ways so that businesses can make more money while hiring folks in the US than otherwise.
CREAM..... that's it. There's nothing else to it. There exist people who care about things other than money. I would argue that I fit somewhere in that category, but to pretend that it isn't all about money at the end of the day is asinine.
Gbaji wrote:
Sigh. As I said earlier, this applies to everyone in the market though. If you could earn twice your current salary by changing jobs to another employer, with everything else staying the same, would you? Of course you would. Because you are greedy. If you could buy something from store A for half the price as the same thing from store B, would you? Of course you would. Because you are greedy. To insist that employers must make less money than they could while you insist on making as much money for yourself as possible, and buying things for as little as you possibly can, is completely hypocritical. You're blaming them for doing the same things you do yourself.
Not at all. I said that CREAM is ALWAYS in effect. You're the one denying that isn't happening, that the employers would want to
maximize their employee's wages. My point is very simple. No one should be paid
UNDER the national minimum wage; however, agreements are made because at the end of the day, it's about how much money is earned. People would work for $0.50 an hour if they ended up making 200k a year with a normal work schedule.
Gbaji wrote:
And it's doubly silly because all of these things interact in the market. As long as you want to buy things for as little as possible, you help drive the need for producers of those goods to find the cheapest way to do so possible. As I said earlier, the correct answer isn't to "blame greed", but to find ways to make greed work. Make it attractive to businesses to do business in the US, and they will. And btw, this is a bit off topic because I can tell you that the idea that businesses do this for labor reasons alone is a fallacy. There are a host of reasons for businesses to move their operations. Cost is a factor, but labor costs are rarely the biggest ones. It's usually regulations and/or taxes (or other costs/benefits) on the businesses that drive this, not labor costs.
Simply false. This isn't restricted to the U.S. When I was in Korea, people would hire illegal immigrants to do the crappiest of jobs or ridiculous hours for the least amount of pay. It was a win/win situation The immigrants were making more money there than they would in their home country and the employers saved a lot of money because they didn't have to follow the national guidelines with employees.
Sounds familiar? You can live in la-la land if you want, but that's the reality of it all.. It's all about money.