minimum wage

[recovering conservative]

FourPart;1458228 wrote: I am a direct descendant of James Brine, one of the Tolpuddle Martyrs (the first ever Trade Union) who was deported to Australia for his part in inciting other workers to stand up for their rights instead of simply allowing themselves to be exploited by their Lords & Masters of the upper echelon.

Nothing much has changed since those days. The rich continue to get richer by way of the exploitation of the poor, and just as it has always been, the Tories, who are primarily members of this echelon, are bound to support their own kind, scratching each others' backs.

If they could get away with it, the wage offered would be as low as they could possibly get it, so long as there was always someone desperate enough to do it.

Even now, there are thousands of immigrants, both legal & illegal who work at far less than Minimum Wage, but because it's all paid cash in hand (as illegal payment rates could not be put on the books), they don't pay Tax or National Insurance, meaning that their Gross income is also their Net income, which often means that they're on a higher income than legitimate workers who pay their way.
And don't forget, that the underlying motive behind the exploitation....the driving wages down by: tacit approval of undocumented workers, union-busting laws, outsourcing production etc., is to wipe out the large middle class that developed after WWII.

The immediate benefit of hiring undocumented workers and outsourcing manufacturing may be on the bottom line for each individual company; but let's not forget that the Neoliberal economists and political theorists hired by the big oligarchs in the 60's were telling their employers that the underlying reasons behind the strikes, the antiwar demonstrations, the environmental movement, the feminists, and the more militant racial equality movement of the 60's, all directly stemmed from the outgrowth of a large middle class that included most working people. This was unprecedented in history, as tradition held that only landowners, bankers and major business owners were the only segment of society that was freed from grinding poverty!

The social theorists noted that the children who became the idle rich of the 19th century - the bohemians, marxists and anarchists, were mostly from well to do families. If they were from working class or peasant stock, they would have been too busy toiling away to be out there protesting, threatening to overthrow the government, or writing controversial books or creating art that upset the nobility. So, the advisers who set up the process of creating increasingly intrusive trading and globalization regimes that drive wages and working conditions to the bottom lowest common denominator, have not been advising this course to maximize individual company profits!

Overall, the net effect of low wages and shrinking middle classes is stagnation and profit declines for the oligarchs. So, at some point it needs to be recognized that these are people who are more concerned with the power that their money can grant them, than they are with the amount of money itself. And that's why the average, typical liberal columnists and talkers can put up one set of statistics after another showing the benefits of raising the minimum wage and improving wage and working conditions overall, and it will fall on deaf ears for the most part. Because the money players who own most of the politicians are in the business of controlling people...and keeping people poor, indebted and working longer and longer hours, maximizes their control. The only point where instability becomes a factor in an impoverished society is when living conditions are reduced to famine and food shortages....that's the only point where the oligarchs might hit the panic button! Until then, any increases in minimum wages will be slim to none.

The point is that while there is someone who is willing to be exploited, there will always be someone who's greedy enough to exploit them - and what's worse is that with the unemployment situation as it is, supply (of workers) surpasses the demand by far, meaning that the employers can cherry pick to get the most for the least.
It's a shame that all of the economists and political theorists decided that Marx was no longer relevant after the fall of the Soviet Union! Because one thing that Marx had, that none of the capitalist economists (right to left) have, is a theory that explains adequately how capitalism works...and how it fails! Think of the BS "invisible hand of the market," and how that convenient notion of supply and demand has collapsed since the banking meltdown. According to Marx, every wage earner (which is the majority of people still) has to provide a surplus value of work to maintain their job in the workplace. And, under a capitalist system, all or virtually all of that surplus value of labour (profit) goes to the owner of the business. What Marx himself advocated as a replacement of capitalism, was worker cooperative enterprises (not state ownership). But, that goes offtrack again, because the relevant point here is that over the last 40 years we have seen increases in productivity, which should have led to increases in wages...but have not, except in a few isolated lucrative fields that remain in high demand. For most people - wages have either stagnated compared to inflation, or have fallen behind. In the minimum wage debate, the relevant point here is that even the modest-to-meaningless minimum wage increases offered up by Obama in the U.S. fall far behind what the minimum wage was compared to inflation 40 years ago, and far, far behind what it should be when compared with growth in overall productivity.

I would argue that most of the productivity growth in the economy has been consumer capitalist economies taking us down a road we should never have been on (resource scarcities/global warming etc.), but FWIW the point here is that not only has modern capitalism failed to distribute the economic gains equitably, it has actually steered a deliberate course to impoverish the vast majority of people in the world.

Of course there is also the down side to the Minimum Wage, inasmuch as in order to cover their costs, businesses raise their prices, thus increasing the cost of living, thus requiring a higher Minimum Wage - and so the spiral of constant inflation continues.


Don't fall for that red herring that raising minimum wage...or raising wages in general for that matter, will cause inflation or increase the costs of living! There are loads of examples such as New Hampshire's, where raising the minimum wage improved local economies...even for low wage service sector workers. Any costs associated with giving decent pay to McDonalds workers for example, are more than balanced by the gross harvesting of profits by the CEO's and major shareholders of the Company. And, I would rather pay that extra 20c for a burger (if I actually ate burgers....or ate at McDonalds) if the workers received a decent share of those profits!