I have tried to remain a "lurker" on Elitetrader. Sometimes I get lured in. Mav: the average Hispanic minimal wage worker today is far better than what was available in the 50's. Throw in recent Asian immigrants into the soup as well. Have you seen these folks in action? Thanks, and commence debate.....
WASHINGTON -- Most people know Labor Day as an extra day off of work. Fewer know the holiday comes from a time when the government was offing workers. It all started with a bad recession in the early 1890s that reduced demand for railway cars, prompting Chicago railway magnate George Pullman to lay off workers and reduce wages. Many of his workers went on strike. The sympathetic American Railway Union refused to handle Pullman cars, hampering commerce in many parts of the country. "The boycott tapped the deep and pervasive alienation of labor in general," historian David Ray Papke wrote in his 1999 book The Pullman Case: The Clash of Labor and Capital in Industrial America. "Workers were mad about their situation," Papke wrote. "They were angry about their limited opportunities and about what they took to be the mean and arbitrary treatment they received from the distant owners of the industries in which they worked." Pullman workers started their strike in May 1894. The following month, Congress passed legislation making the first Monday of September a day to recognize workers. (Such a holiday had already been a demand of the labor movement, thoughcommentators have described the Labor Day legislation as an attempt to "appease" angry workers.) In July, President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to crush the strike. Illinois Gov. John Altgeld (D) resented the president's decision, as there had not yet been any large-scale rioting. "I protest against this uncalled for reflection upon our people, and again ask the immediate withdrawal of these troops," Altgeld wrote to the president. Within a day of the troops' arrival, mobs started tipping railroad cars and setting them on fire. Troops cracked down with bayonets and bullets; the rioting and property destruction worsened. Dozens of people ultimately died in Chicago and elsewhere. The government restored order by the fall, and American Railway Union leader Eugene Debs was eventually convicted of defying a court order and sent to prison. The U.S. Department of Labor's page on the history of Labor Day notes the holiday "is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers." It doesn't mention the Pullman strike or labor strife in general. Throughout American history, workers had to fight to get better pay and shorter hours -- evenings and weekends weren't just handed over by lawmakers and benevolent managers. "I think most people consider Labor Day an end-of-summer three-day weekend," Papke, a law professor at Marquette University, said in an interview. "Very few Americans stop to reflect on the working man, on labor, on the union movement or any of those things." Arthur Delaney
When someone can publish that 1% of $10 is 1-cent, I not only question his maths abilities, but the quality & professionalism of all those involved in getting it published.
. . . as Seattle gets acclimated to its $10.10 wage and mulls over the possibility of a $15 threshold (with a likely exemption for small businesses), the sky isn’t entirely caving in. Craig Jelinek, CEO of Costco, told Seattle Weekly that “$15 seems not even a living wage” and that “We at Costco could manage it.” That’s a far cry from the apocalyptic drumbeat emanating from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, for whom the prospect of a minimum wage increase sounds like a gamma-ray burst shearing through the solar system to extinguish life on this planet. They’d prefer literally any other policy, even an expansion of the dreaded welfare state. But the arguments don’t hold up. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), that intellectual fountainhead for a great deal of conservative public policy, has a white paper on raising the minimum wage that takes a peculiar tone. Instead of hectoring those meddlesome socialists who can’t see the consequences of interfering with the free market, ALEC sheds a few crocodile tears for low-wage earners, who will still be caught in a cycle of dependency and mass unemployment. Remarkably, however, the same paper concedes that a $9 wage would lead to “increased spending by minimum-wage earners … [and for] GDP to remain constant in the long run.” Imagine, the architects of wage suppression themselves, basically conceding the point toPaul Krugman. Yet the rhetoric surrounding the minimum wage still borders on the hysterical, from the WSJ to the Chamber of Commerce to Forbes — a hysteria that happens to rest on complete ignorance about how poverty is lived in America. In a brilliant segment, Samantha Bee of “The Daily Show” skewered supply-side economist Peter Schiff, capturing his insistence that only teenagers earn such low wages because no one with a bachelor’s degree is actually an employee at Burger King, before cutting to college-graduate fast-food workers on the picket line. Yet to Schiff, adults earning the minimum wage is “a hypothetical situation that’s not going to exist.” What will certainly exist in an America of higher wages is more consumer spending. According to Bloomberg News, a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago estimated that a $1.75 raise boost would increase consumer spending by some $48 billion, largely because low-income people would no longer have to pick and choose among necessities. Perhaps fears of mass unemployment ought to be tempered with, if not altogether replaced by, relief over hordes of new customers. more . . . Peter Lawrence Kane
dbphoenix you really need to think this through. Instead of arguing from the perspective of a low wage worker, think about the problem from the perspective of a business owner. You own a restaurant..... dbphoenix burgers. As an owner you work long hours and barely make enough to survive (true for almost all individually owned restaurants). Government says you have to raise wages for your workers. Can you absorb the cost and still survive without raising prices? Probably not, certainly not for forever. Now here is the rub.... the same law that applies to you applies to all your suppliers... and their suppliers..... and their suppliers........ and their suppliers. This means you are almost certainly going to see increased costs for: water, soap, mops and brooms, paper goods, plastic cups, electricity, gas, towels, aprons, delivery costs, the food you resell, yada, yada, ad infinitum. Can you still absorb the cost? As a business owner what do you do?? What is the result of your action? Explain it in a post here please. The bottom bottom bottom bottom bottom line in this argument is that in every society there will be a poor- "EST" class. Yes, a class that is poorer than all others. The poor-est. You can not make this go away. I explained it to you here: http://www.elitetrader.com/et/index.php?threads/sky-high-inflation-coming.284557/page-6