Derideo_Te
Je Suis Charlie
- Mar 2, 2013
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How can it be fixed, what needs to change so that 93% of us are not behind the 8 ball on salaries and the other 7% reaping the benefits of the economy leaps and bounds?
If everyone was to be given a $10 an hour increase across the board the economy would boom and the problem would resolve itself.
The Wall Street Casino Bosses are demanding that pay raises be held down to the bare minimum in order to maximize shareholder profits at the expense of hardworking Americans. They punish any corporation that fails to meet their expectations. Since the corporate executives make the bulk of their income from share price increases in their stock grants they have no incentive to tell the Wall Street Casino Bosses where to shove it.
Where do you think that extra money comes from, in order for workers to get a 10.00 increase and hour?
How about out of the bonuses of the 1%?
They will make it all back as soon as the economy booms and way more besides.
It worked for Henry Ford and it still works today.
It doesn't work that way.
The Story of Henry Ford s 5 a Day Wages It s Not What You Think - Forbes
There’s an argument you see around sometimes about Henry Ford’s decision to pay his workers those famed $5 a day wages. It was that he realised that he should pay his workers sufficiently large sums to that they could afford the products they were making. In this manner he could expand the market for his products.
It should be obvious that this story doesn’t work: Boeing would most certainly be in trouble if they had to pay their workers sufficient to afford a new jetliner. It’s also obviously true that you want every other employer to be paying their workers sufficient that they can afford your products: but that’s very much not the same as claiming that Ford should pay his workers so that they can afford Fords.
So, if creating that blue collar middle class that could afford the cars wasn’t why Ford brought in his $5 a day wages, what was the reason?
Actually, it was the turnover of his staff.
At the time, workers could count on about $2.25 per day, for which they worked nine-hour shifts. It was pretty good money in those days, but the toll was too much for many to bear. Ford’s turnover rate was very high. In 1913, Ford hired more than 52,000 men to keep a workforce of only 14,000. New workers required a costly break-in period, making matters worse for the company. Also, some men simply walked away from the line to quit and look for a job elsewhere. Then the line stopped and production of cars halted. The increased cost and delayed production kept Ford from selling his cars at the low price he wanted. Drastic measures were necessary if he was to keep up this production.
That level of turnover is hugely expensive: not just the downtime of the production line but obviously also the training costs: even the search costs to find them. It can indeed be cheaper to pay workers more but to reduce the turnover of them and those associated training costs.
The reason for the pay rise was not as some of our contemporaries seem to think it was. It was nothing at all to do with creating a workforce that could afford to buy the products. It was to cut the turnover and training time of the labour force: for, yes, in certain circumstances, raising wages can reduce total labour costs.
The reason why Ford did it is utterly irrelevant to the outcome.
It worked for unions and it is working now too.
States That Raised Their Minimum Wages Are Experiencing Faster Job Growth ThinkProgress
States That Raised Their Minimum Wages Are Experiencing Faster Job Growth
BY BRYCE COVERT POSTED ON JULY 3, 2014 AT 11:53 AM
The minimum wage went up in 13 states — Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington — either thanks to automatic increases in line with inflation or new legislation, as Ben Wolcott reports in his analysis at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The average change in employment for those states over the first five months of the year as compared with the last five of 2013 is .99 percent, while the average for all remaining states is .68 percent.
Digging deeper, all but one of those states are experiencing increases in employment, and nine of them have seen growth above the median rate.
Wolcott’s analysis builds on a previous one from Goldman Sachs, which did the same evaluation for just January and compares it to December of last year. It found that the states that had minimum wage increases experienced faster job growth than those without a raise.