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In Most Countries, 40 Hours + Minimum Wage = Poverty
Last week, we noted that Democratic lawmakers in the US are pushing for what they call "$12 by '20" which, as the name implies, is an effort to raise the minimum wage to $12/hour over the course of the next five years. Republicans argue that if Democrats got their wish and the pay floor were increased by nearly 70%, it would do more harm than good for low-income Americans as the number of jobs that would be lost as a result of employers cutting back in the face of dramatically higher labor costs would offset the benefit that accrues to the workers who are lucky enough to keep their jobs.
Regardless of who is right or wrong when it comes to projecting what would happen to low-wage jobs in the face of a steep hike in the minimum wage, one thing is certain: many working families depend on government assistance to make ends meet, suggesting it's tough to persist on minimum wage in today's economy and indeed, a new study by the OECD shows that in 21 out of the 26 member countries that have a minimum wage, working 40 hours per week at the pay floor would not be sufficient to keep one's family out of poverty.
Here's more from Bloomberg:
A global ranking out Wednesday by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development painted a grim picture of the situation in member countries straddling continents. The 34-member organization found that a legal minimum wage existed in 26 countries and crunched the numbers to see how they compared.
Forget taking a siesta in Spain. There, you'd have to work more than 72 hours a week to escape the trappings of poverty. Turns out that is the norm, not the exception. In the 21 countries highlighted with blue bars in the chart below, a full 40-hour work week still won't lift families out of relative poverty. This list includes France, home to the 35-hour work week, which almost met the threshold. Minimum wage workers there who are supporting a spouse and two children need to work 40.2 hours to get their families out of poverty. (The poverty line is defined as 50 percent of the median wage in any nation.)
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If you earn minimum wage, don't start a family.
Sounds like they all just need to get a second job.
Take away the cost of government and a 40 hour minimum wage would be a comfortable life.
Cost of govt should be zero since it can just print whatever it wants.
"Sounds like they all just need to get a second job."
Unless, you live in Czech Republic. Over there, you need a third job. Perhaps thats why most of the girls there are hookers :)
quarter acre and a farmbot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty_acres_and_a_mule
bs graph :
uk job with zero hours... mean anything to you ? uk outside of london is as poor as any other east european country.
this is only taken from white collars part of the population, definitivly.
Western girls aren't hookers by necessity but by slutiness and choice...
If you want to start a family, don't start a family.
Step 1: Raise Minimum Wage
Step 2: Increase Unemployment
Step 3: More People on Government "Assistance"
Step 4: Profit
What's the difference? Govt is already providing assistance to full-time workers because they don't get paid enough.
they don't get paid enough
"Enough" for what and by what standard? If it's enough to cause someone to accept the job and show up for work than that is "enough" by any reasonable definition isn't it?
No, because there are no alternatives to taking a place in the money economy. People are forced into a position where they have no choice but to accept whatever is available. Give me a system in which non-participation is a reasonable option for EVERYBODY and then you can tell me that "enough to cause them to accept the gig" is enough $$$.
"People are forced"
No they aren't.
force fôrs
noun - coercion or compulsion, especially with the use or threat of violence.
verb - make (someone) do something against their will.
Please provide documentation of widespread kidnapping and enslavement by US employers. You can't, you say? Then why did you use the word "forced?"
Because by saying that people are "forced' to do something you have a villain in mind. You intend to use the power of government guns and prisons to make these villains stop "forcing" people to work. So the guillotines are rolled out and sooner or later your head is on the block, Robespierre. We've seen this movie before and I for one have no intention of sitting through it again. Don't call us, we'll call you.
Which of course you interpret as me "forcing" you to do something that's not to your liking.
For what it's worth, I'm currently living on about 45 dollars a day, all my bills are paid and I've never been more content in my life. No force involved.
Uh-huh. The day that good land is reasonably affordable for the masses and not taxed, we'll talk. The day people can create a communal environment in which they live outside of the system without the corporate controlled .gov setting fire to their buildings and shooting them as they run out of the flames, we'll talk. We live in a planet-sized forced labor camp.
Asking for a free market paradise to be handed to you on a golden platter is a contradiction in terms. Only the government which you rightly condemn for its theft through taxes can create the kind of hippy-dippy society you envision.
"Baby I'll be there to take your hand,
Baby I'll be there to share the land,
That they'll be giving away when we all live together."
-- The Guess Who
Funniest song ever. "They" are just going to be giving land away! Good thing those guys wised up, formed BTO and started "Taking Care of Business," and "Looking Out for Number One."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-05-07/growing-signs-of-froth-i...
Nailed it.
Ironically, Krugman's theory of macro-trade predicted the mean reversion to the global wage about 30 years ago. In a world where anyone can replicate, or pirate an iPhone or DuPont plastic batch, its kind of hard to keep productivity gains and the wealth effect inside a country's finished goods sector. However to return to the pre-Bretton Woods trade wars and Smoot tariffs would pose equally destructive since the US lacks any real necessary organic demand for North American heavy industrialization like it did in the 1850-1928 period. So if we were to prescribe a public fiscal policy format of throwing fixed metal (heavy metal if you will) would generate a small stimulus effect, much like when the USA ordered utilities to switch from DC to AC current, but could lead to further imbalances in investment led productivity gains.
The maliase would need a new form of infrastructure which can generate a new 'moat' for NAFTA labor. And then a government program that can tool and train these people as a durable workforce. the Software "corps" and very diffuse wage gains generated by the Software sector has not been the solution since 98.
Supply and demand bitchez, oh do you really think that a garbage collector should be paid the same as an engineer ?
What about full open immigration to oversupply the labor market ?
Leftist like you never understood that in the first place...
By the way you have choice of your job.
a society have a problem when every one is paid 1000 but a firm is making a product for 700 and the same society force the hype to possess the product because the firm keep the society up financially.
no need to say the firm rebrand each year the same stuff with couple of liftings here and there.
sadest part is, finally, population is composed of idiots, they deserve what happen to them.
that give credit to elite to not give a fuck to people of the bottom...
it is a circular scheme without a single exit.
very long way to the bottom of the hole where all government will have to make some very specific decree just to prevent famine and keep EVERY one eating.
a population is calm even poor, as long they are fed. remove the food, then you should consider to open you gun cabinet.
Minimum wage increase = Tax increase
Wage Compression, come on people Think, Think, Think
It is not today, but there will be a day when we have had enough. And with little or nothing to lose, we will rise up and reclaim what is ours from the sociopaths.
"If you earn minimum wage, don't start a family."
Have as many kids as possible if you're on welfare and/or need an anchor baby.
Yeah, I have 3 words for you, Earned Income Credit...
Birth rates in Japan and Spain are low; and in both cases it's job insecurity which is the main cause. Children have become an opportunity cost.
When robots take our jobs, humans will be the new 1%. Here's how to fight back
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/22/robot-jobs-humans-used-to-do-fight-back
The "robots take over" scenario is impossible unless it's enabled by a welfare state.
If the robots take all the paying jobs no one will have money to buy stuff and the robots would have to be shut down. Meanwhile people who need to eat will transact outside the employment and government systems with others who also need to eat. There's no way the elite class would simply abdicate control like that.
The welfare state is necessary for any Logan's Run type scenario. Eliminate the welfare state and you'll avoid that problem along with a host of others.
You aren't meant to support a family on minimum wage... who the fuck is surprised by this?! Why are these articles always so god damned revolutionary?
of course, you are absolutely right. i have always measured the cost of an area by measuring what 2 minimum wage incomes can buy, a couple just starting out pre kids. a one bedroom apartment, 2 used cars, phones, internet, utilities and food. so 290/wk twice pre tax = 580, about 500 net/wk or 2166/month. using a local example, apartment=700 cars=200 phones=80 utilities=200 or around 1200/mo leaving 8-900 dollars to eat and pay for the stuff that always comes up and a coupla six packs. you are not living good but it is doable up to about $1000 rent. with kids it is impossible.
the caveat to all this is there are very few people working for minimum wage so it is just bs.
the thing i don't understand is why these kids aren't working 60hrs/week if the work is there? if they can't work 60 hours when they are young what will they be able to do when they are 50?
You know what the problem is with working 60 hours a week? You will not know your children. Someone else will raise them. I swear to christ, damn near everyone in america is a fucking calvinist.
+100 ---- Nailed it! My first job wasn't meant to support a family - any bonehead that aspires to bag groceries as their plan for finacial security deserves what they get
My first real job paid $0.75 an hour as an assistant cook for a dude ranch. I was eleven. Eleven years old getting a paycheck, with taxes and social security deductions. Luckily, I wasn't supporting any kids at the time.
Biff's World. Potterville. Banker's Paradise.
You're better off being on the dole than busting your ass, which is how TPTB want it.
Sell drugs, rob the .01%, become a gangster weather on Wall St or on the street. But DO NOT work for the man.
What minimum wage does is prevent uncredentialled workers from ever getting into the work force. They are too expensive to hire. so, on the dole they go.....to stay.
A brilliant scheme really.
Squid
Squid,
I wouldn't worry too much about the minimum wage. Here in the USA, the purchasing power of it peaked in about 1968.
I used to be pissed off about stuff like this, but then I realized anybody with half a brain can start out making $30 per hour at a real job straight out of college, which they finished in 2 years because they tested out of general ed and took extra classes each semester. Minimum wage hurts the dumb and the hopeless; i feel no worse for them than i feel for cattle.
The minimum wage kills jobs for low skilled people. It makes people legally unemployable. Young people used to take these jobs in order to get some experience so they could find a better job. When you increase the wage above what the market will pay, you saw the bottom rung out of the advancement latter.
Trade Unions love the minimum wage because their wages are pegged to it. That is why they promote increasing the minimum wage even though they know that this harms poor people.
Imagine how terrible are our public schools that kids go out and protest or do sit-ins protesting the [low] minimum wage. Those jobs are only the beginning of a career, but they imagine themselves working them for the rest of their lives. How disgusting.
Sigghhh... you clearly have no clue. There IS no advancement ladder for unskilled labor anymore, and anyone who thinks there will ever be enough skilled jobs to go around is living in a dream world.
Hard cold fact: the vast majority of jobs in an industrialized economy will ALWAYS be unskilled. And the people doing them have to eat.
But if you're poor, you can't have cool toy like this mini-Jeep Willys:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46BrUn0tfEE#t=57
I'm so getting one of these. I figure the kids don't need to go to college. It's just high-priced indocrination anyway.
Look into the REEPER...way better...and street legal.
https://oreionmotors.com/
People who think there is such a thing as "the dole" in the United States should do a little research on the subject. It's not something people can just go out and get, you have to be found disabled in some way. And when they do there is almost no money involved, about $300 for a single adult. There is no public housing to speak of, and there is no money for rent. Those people with children can get more, but its never enough to make ends meet.
The last thing that happened in this area was to cut the monthly food stamp amount from $200 to $150 per person, and the total budget for over 50 million people to eat for a year was $70 billion. $70 billion is not even a rounding error to the Social Security program or DoD.
Anyone with knowledge of the facts has to shake their head at some of the things said on this site about "The Poor". It's hard to believe that there's this many ignorant douchebags on ZeroHedge. Mostly it is the poorly paid shills trying to stoke hatred and distract from the true source of the problem. The people who own all the assets do not desire job creation, or freedom of the peasantry in any way. Minimum wage is a red herring, because it will never address the root of the problem whether or not it theoretically results in job loss in economic models.
There are not 100 million lazy out of work people. There are 100 million victims of the punitive oligarch policy of destroying the economy in the US to create scarcity and chaos.
It's not something people can just go out and get
you're obviously an astute observer of things in which you are interested. tell me, have you ever considered owning a bridge?
All most folks want to do is earn their little living, support their families, maybe sock a little away for luxuries or retirement. But TPTB have created this monstrous construct of debt. The result is we can't possibly work our way out of poverty once we're there, and it's getting easier and easier to GET there.
As soon as we manage to claw out some meager victory, like a 12 dollar minimum wage, the rest of the economy gets inflated beyond any progress we've made. We cannot win under this system. The endgame to all this is a nation of permanently or cyclically unemployed, all dependent on the govt. dole. Which will be barely enough to support survival, but many will opt for this instead of engaging in the pointless scramble to survive outside the system. We'll all be herded onto the welfare rolls as we once were herded into the stock market. There will be nowhere else to go...
People who think there is such a thing as "the dole" in the United States should do a little research on the subject.
So the guys who live in County housing next door who walk around chatting with friends all day, who don't do a lick of work and who are well fed to the point of obesity are figments of my imagination? Maybe I can get disability for that.
The one dude who really irks me is a petty thief. The cops busted in his door and nailed him for heroin a few years back. I figured, "Good, the thief is gone," but he was back in two weeks walking around chatting with his friends and not doing a lick of work.
The problem is that if we mobilize against it we fall into a certain ideological trap, and we all know where ends, It’s terrifying to read right-wing Republican attacks, they were watered down through clear material force of ideology. I think if Democrats pick carefully the issues for which they fight, and then try to organize a popular movement, I think on the end the 1% may concede without a fight, because if i can't tell, they will be scared as hell of loosing their welth.
I get 30 to 36 hours per week at KROGER. I am available 24/7. My schedule is not set; it changes week to week, therefore making it hard to have a 2nd job. I make 7.30 per hour; my resume was not looked at. I have a colege education; I have worked at major corps, and I have started my own business in the past.
My situation really sucks to be sure! I struggle to get to work, but wen I'm there I take pride in my work! I work with some young people in their 20's, they work hard when management is around, but shirk their responsibilities when they are gone. I would shay that most of our young people are lazy and functionally illeterate. No one cares.
SH
I figure most people who don't take pride in their work know the score. You've spelled it out in the first paragraph - they want to control you.
I've worked in one of those shitbag operations and it was the owner's directive not to have anyone fulltime or even on a permenant schedule they could rely on. He wanted an army of plebs with barely enough hours so they'd be ultra hungry to take any extra hours if they ever came up.
The disruption was intentional. Never knew your schedule so you could never fit in another job and never say no to what they were offering.
I figure most people who don't take pride in their work know the score.
Do your doctor, mechanic and accountant know the score? How does that make you feel?
You put people in a shitty position like that, utterly controlled and making 7.30 doing work that in 1970 paid $25 adjusted for inflation... and you expect them to actually give a fuck?
You put people in a shitty position like that
Yeah, he's making people go get jobs. It's his fault!
and you expect them to actually give a fuck?
Did they say that they would give a fuck when they interviewed for the job?
2handband... I dig your style, man. ;) Keep flowin'.
Yeah, he hates his job, lies to his employer and tries to undermine the business at every turn. He's a hero. The world would be a better place if we all just lied and cheated a little bit more.
The capital vs. labor "battle" has been an utterly lop-sided rout.
It's not even close since most humans and their needs are now thought of as obsolete by TPTB; whoever the fuck they are.
These are fun exercises but the robots will come for your job too and they have no family. When they break, they just get thrown away and replaced.
http://studimonetari.org/articoli/lifewithoutusury.html
Usury on money, especially bank credit as money, is about 42% of prices. The obvious next question, what economies practiced non-usurious methods in history?
Quote:
“In the middle of the 19th Century, Oxford Professor of Political History, Thorold Rogers wrote of that era: "At that time a labourer could provide all the necessities for his family for a year by working fourteen weeks." The other thirty-eight weeks were his to do as he pleased. Would you like to earn all of the money required to feed, shelter, clothe and recreate your family for a year by working fourteen weeks? What would you do with thirty-eight weeks of vacation per year?
Many parts of Europe were so prosperous during the Middle Ages that hundreds of communities averaged 160 to 180 holidays a year. None were bank holidays. The people worked for themselves, learned new skills, studied, went hunting or fishing, and many volunteered their skills and trades for building those magnificent cathedrals. Lord Liverhume, writing the century before Thorold Rogers said : "The men of the 15th Century were very well paid."
Today we can still visit the remaining cathedrals if we can afford to leave our contemporary responsibilities. Cabot in his book 'The History of the Reformation' stated that our forbearers possessed the wealth and leisure for one hundred thousand pilgrims at a time to visit Canterbury and other cathedrals. This was in a land with one tenth today's population. Cabot in his book 'Rural Rides' stated that concerning Winchester Cathedral: "That building was made when there were no poor rates, when every labouring man in England was clothed in good will and cloth and when all had plenty of meat and bread and beer.”
Talmudic Jew practices usury, and is foremost proponent of the methods, despite Mosaic law forbidding the practice. Therefore, this element will always be against moral money and attempts at Logos type societies. Usury and magick swapping mechanics of banking and finance, funds and empowers illuminist Cabala.
If Jews actually practiced Israel and Mosaic law, they would not be predatory:
From the Dearborn letters:
http://www.jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij01.htm
Begin at the beginning. During the formative period of their national character the Jews lived under a law which made plutocracy and pauperism equally impossible among them. Modern reformers who are constructing model social systems on paper would do well to look into the social system under which the early Jews were organized. The Law of Moses made a “money aristocracy,” such as Jewish financiers form today, impossible because it forbade the taking of interest. It made impossible also the continuous enjoyment of profit wrung out of another’s distress. Profiteering and sheer speculation were not favored under the Jewish system. There could be no land-hogging; the land was apportioned among the people, and though it might be lost by debt or sold under stress, it was returned every 50 years to its original family ownership, at which time, called “The Year of Jubilee,” there was practically a new social beginning. The rise of great landlords and a moneyed class was impossible under such a system, although the interim of 50 years gave ample scope for individual initiative to assert itself under fair competitive conditions.
If, therefore, the Jews had retained their status as a nation, and had remained in Palestine under the Law of Moses, they would hardly have achieved the financial distinction which they have since won. Jews never got rich out of one another. Even in modern times they have not become rich out of each other but out of the nations among whom they dwelt. Jewish law permitted the Jew to do business with a Gentile on a different basis than that on which he did business with a brother Jew. What is called “the Law of the Stranger” was defined thus: “unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury.”
Being dispersed among the nations, but never merging themselves with the nations and never losing a very distinctive identity, the Jew has had the opportunity to practice “the ethics of the stranger” for many centuries. Being strangers among strangers, and often among cruelly hostile strangers, they have found this law a compensating advantage
Compound interest between consenting adults is no vice.
The SA is the talmudic caliphate.
Not techno-feudalism. Straight to slavery and genocide.
"We need to turn our backs on this materialistic society and get back to the basics i.e. hunting, fishing, Hot Rods, motorbikes, surfing, BBQ's, smoking weed and screwing chicks. Fuck the mortgages, marriage and all the other shit we are expected to do as a good citizen/debt slave."
Philosophy of a 17 year old high school kid.
Or simply going Galt.
I have to re-read the Magna Carta; where does the "right" to only work a third of the time come from?
If you're an adult making minimum wage, the problem is you.
If you cannot figure out anything at all that could pull more than the minimum compensation demanded by law, you suck at serving your fellow man and don't deserve more.
An adult that can't produce more than minimum wage value is either mentally defective or cares so little about doing anything productive/helpful to anyone else that they have no fair claim to anything better.
The Australian one is a bit disingenuous. While Australia has a "minimum wage" almost no business actually has to pay it.
I know of several people who have been offered 'full time' employment by fast food corporations offering less than half the 'minimum wage'
it really depends how you define "poverty"
"Relative" according to the article. Whatever that means. If these "poor" people stopped using credit to drive the cost of everthing up and people stopped fucking using it then the cost of shit would be RELATIVE.
If this is relative to others in the country, than obviously this will be thurougly pointless. For example in Australia it may be a measure of where's the line on "poverty" and not PPP of minimum wage. It does seem like an emotional grab. This really amounts to nothing. PPP on a minimum wage hour would be much better, PPP on median wage hour would be even better than that.
Thats odd, I'm working on "0 by 3", an initiative for all willing to stop paying the IRS anything in 3 years, whatever it takes.
Australia rocks, don't know about the UK though, when I was there I thought it was fantastically expensive.
I heard one handburger flipper in California insist that he needed wages that would support him, wife, two kids and a nice car and apartment. I flipped burgers in 1966 for 85 cents/hour ((equivalent to $6.50 today) and we were not crazy enough to think that that could ever provide what the CA flipper demands. Yeah times are different but people can overcome with a mustard seed of faith - unless you keep insisting they can't.
You earned the wage back then. Explain to them how you had to calculate math at the till. These fucker's can't compute a fucking till without the computer telling them. Why do you see self checkout lines?
Ask for $25/hr you dumb fucks who cannot make change without a manager. Then we stop shopping at your retail outlet.
Practically everybody knows that if you want to get ahead in this life you have to quit your job and go to college until you are retirement age. Then you supplement your retirement income by working. Its bas ackwards from the way my parents did it but hey it works if you work it.
Maybe work less hours, move somewhere with a cheaper living standard.
Simplify your life, you dont need all the bells and whistles they advertise on TV.
My definition of poor, is someone who has to work a lot of hours in general.
If you spend 95% of your time working and sleeping, you might as well not even be alive.
The problem is that everyone is in debt and everyone is working for the bank... hyperfinancialization has made it impossible for avg. working class people to keep up.... everything is loaded with interest fees, late fees, and expensive as fuck.
My electric bill (with all the govt shit and shit and delivery shit is like 60cents/kw/h) its a bit crazy.
The idiotic premise of this populist "living wage" argument is that Walmart door greeting, burger flipping and other unskilled menial jobs are value-add enough to command a "living wage". These are entry-level jobs; one is supposed to climb the ladder.
"Poverty" is such subjective term.
Minimum wage in NZ is $14.75 = USD11 per hour. Unemployment rate 5.7%. You guys should be able to match us without the sky falling in!
More Americans living outside the U.S. gave up their citizenship in the first quarter of 2015 than ever before, according to data released Thursday by the IRS.
The 1,335 expatriations topped the previous record by 18 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Those Americans are driven to turn in their passports in part because of laws that have expanded bank reporting and tax compliance requirements for expatriates.
The increase in early 2015 follows an annual record in 2014, when 3,415 Americans gave up their citizenship.
An estimated 6 million U.S. citizens are living abroad, and the U.S. is the only country within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that taxes citizens wherever they reside.
I am shocked to see Czech so in the lead as an almost outlier. I have been researching the relocation to Prague and that city is strong economically. The rural areas will play a role but this graph is suspect. And why are the measuring all of these by a 40 hour work week? Not all countries are 40 per week.
Most are 38 hour week like here in NL.
No sight of CHE or any Scandinavian Countries...
Here's more, including Chart Pr0n, if anyone's interested:
https://www.oecd.org/social/Focus-on-Minimum-Wages-after-the-crisis-2015...