Shocker: After Massive Hike In Minimum Wage, Young And Low-Wage Workers Having Trouble Finding Jobs

• January 27, 2010

I often describe the minimum wage as a tax on low-wage labor. And when you tax something, you get less of it. Back in 2006 when then-minority Democrats were trying to push a minimum wage hike through Congress (something the finally did in 2007 when they took the majority), I had this to say:

…raising the minimum wage doesn’t help low-wage workers at all. It just ensures that fewer of them get jobs.

Now three and a half years later, and $2.00/hour more in minimum wage, low-wage workers (read: young and low-skill workers) are unemployed at record levels:

Teenagers have found it significantly harder to get a job since the recession began in late 2007, with black youths and young people from low-income families faring the worst, wrote Andrew Sum of Northeastern University in Boston, a employment researcher commissioned by the Chicago Urban League and the Alternative Schools Network. …
Overall, 26 percent of American teenagers aged 16 to 19 had jobs in late 2009, said the report, which was based on U.S. Census Bureau data. That figure is a record low since statistics began to be kept in 1948, the researchers said.
Employment counts the number of people with a job as a percentage of the entire work force. By contrast, the unemployment rate — which stood at 10 percent in December in the United States — does not include people who have grown discouraged and stopped looking for work.
Joblessness was particularly rife among high school dropouts aged 16 to 24 who were neither in school nor holding a job, the report said. Family income also had a influence on joblessness.

The pathetic part? These are the very demographics the minimum wage is supposed to help.
Liberals gnash their teeth and shake their fists and the air and demand that these workers get a “living wage.” So they mandate a higher wage, only to find out that in the real world you can’t just dictate prices without dire results.
And in this case, the result isn’t higher wages for poor people but rather more unemployment for poor people.
The best thing we could do for these people right now is abolish the minimum wage. Stop inflating labor prices and more people will go back to work. Because better a job at a lower wage than no job at all.

Tags: Asshats, Domestic Issues, Politics

http://Array sayanything-203

Brent,

Good point! It’s not the low skilled or inexperience workers we can’t afford. It’s the liberal Democrats that the nation’s economy can’t sustain.
sayanything-203

Shocker??? Rob, you call this a shocker?

Perhaps we should go back to when the minimum wage hike was passed and see which side of the partisan aisle had sense enough to see this coming?

Recession or no recession, no businessman is going to be more willing to hire an inexperienced kid for $7 per hour than he was at $5.
Brent

Eh. It isn’t the $7 and change federal minimum wage that is causing the problem, dumb as it is. It is these big city “living wages” that are causing the problems. For instance, Chicago has a minimum wage of $11.03 per hour, Baltimore and urban counties in Maryland have a minimum wage of $11.30 per hour (rural counties have to pay $8.50 per hour), the whole state of Washington has a minimum of $8.55 per hour, San Francisco is at $11.54 per hour, Los Angeles is at $11.55 per hour, D.C. is at $12.10 per hour, Boston is at $12.79 per hour, San Diego’s at $13.20 per hour, San Jose is at $14.08 per hour, St. Louis is at $14.57 per hour, and on and on.
AKA WOOF

Tautology,
You betcha
“Joblessness was particularly rife among high school dropouts aged 16 to 24
who were neither in school nor holding a job, the report said “
sayanything-2

Every time the “minimum” wage is raised this happens. You can not pay $5 an hour labor $7 an hour and stay in business. And many businesses are going out of business. Exactly as Democrats have been working towards since the 1930s.
sayanything-7775

from 2008

75.3 million American workers age 16 and over were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.2 percent of all wage and salary workers.
[â€¦]
Together, these 2.2 million workers with wages at or below the minimum made up 3.0 percent of all hourly-paid workers.

So yea, artificially raising the minimum wage for 2.2million of the least-skilled workers, out of 129.4million total workers, is definitely going to boost the economyâ€¦ /sarc
http://www.fairytalebaby.com/category_70/PettiskirtsTutus.htm jason kuiper

Well, unfortunately we need to get used to it. Obama looks as though he is heading the wrong direction with this economy!
farm4money

even paying above min. wage doesn’t find good quality farm labor. Last year i started totally unskilled labor at $8.00 plus meals. he was 15 so I didn’t put him on any machinery, just lawn mowers and other odd jobs. Tractor, combine, sprayer, and truck drivers all start at $10.00 plus meals and housing if needed. Once they prove they know what they are doing they get raised to $12.00 and now I am looking at trying to get someone from South Africa because Americans don’t want to work. That is small grain farming, No livestock.
sayanything-2

Wow, a big bucket of lying a$$ed bullsh*t from cuntnundrum. Who woulda thunk it!
sayanything-15427

Not only that, but those that have been working there longer and got a Nickel raise here and a Quarter raise there, don’t normally get a raise when MW goes up. Suddenly those with seniority are making the same or close to the same amount as the guy who is training.

Now they plan to force business to pay people more per hour, force them to carry an insurance plan for those workers, AND tax that business to hell if they make over 250k per year? It is a recipe for death and it is going EXACTLY according to plan, there is no longer any other explanation.
sayanything-1317

It’s needed to keep the business afloat. If you have to take a 3 dollar an hour pay cut, or an everything pay cut…which do you choose? Wages have to fall during a recession.
sayanything-32073

Obumer isn’t interested in creating jobs. All he cares about is punishing America for its past and redistributing what little wealth we will have left when he gets done with us.
sayanything-7134

wages do fall but if prices don’t fall nothing is gained.
sayanything-7702

I guess my white son who is working 3 hours every other week at McDonalds should feel grateful…. he has almost all the stickers filled up on his badge so he should be getting another raise…. Lucky him ( I told him I would not take a shower for 3 hours every 2 weeks)…. visit him at Nascar McDonald’s he will be the handsome one with the clean shiny new uniform, barely worn.
sayanything-4808

The minimum wage in CT is over $8. Wheras that was once an income that in a two-earner household was enough to live a decent middle class existence, no longer. As the minimum income wage rises, the amount of money coming in to a business does not. They have to give more money out which they cannot afford. People lose jobs. The labor needed to be done doesn’t lessen. The remaining people have to undertake a bigger workload. Those remaining must be more responsible and mature so that they will be able to handle that workload. When the economy dips, the company must shed workers and divvy up the work amongst remaining people.

Now, we’re doing both at the same time and everyone at large acts surprised that this is the case.

Oh, but it gets better. Whereas you used to take $4/hour at a previous workload, workers now do twice the work for $8/hour. Nothing has changed. X amount of work for Y dollars maintains. Instead of a reasonably laid back schedule of trash bag collection, carriage collection, shelf stocking, aisle cleanups, sales helping, etc. for one wage, you now get twice that wage to do twice that work. Is the extra emotional and psychological stress worth it? Not after a couple weeks. You get paid the wages of three people from twenty years ago, but do three times the work of twenty years ago. Nope, not a bit of extra compensation for the stress.

And government caused this because people only thought superficially like little kids, “oh, goody, more money.”

They didn’t think of the rest of the things that would be sure to happen based on common knowledge of human behavior and our media cheerleaded for that ignorance the whole f’n way.
sayanything-4808

In addition, JustRuss pointed out, the bottom get ever closer to the senior higher up.

Will people put up with their wage being in essence lowered towards that of the bottom? Nope. They demand more to differentiate themselves from the bottom and businesses don’t have a choice, because those people will shop around for a place that will recognize their seniority in the industry and field and the greater responsibilities and visibility of their positions.

Everyone across the board heads up a little. Good thinks the liberals. WRONG.

As I said before, the business cannot pull money out of thin air. Consolidation begins and fewer people are now doing the work of more people.

When the economy gets better, do they rehire them? NOPE.

They hire new people in various places, give them a little of the work, and pay them less because they can and because it won’t tick off the long suffering people.

BUT… the long suffering people are now set up for a smackdown as when the economy goes down, AND IT WILL SOMEDAY, the people who make the most are first in line for layoff.

Now the business has gotten to resorting itself financially with respect to wages, BUT, you also now have FEWER people, with LESS experience than before, doing EVEN MORE work per person.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

This is why the tech field is dominated right now by people in their early 20s making almost half of what was being made for those positions a scant ten years ago. Whether it is economic upset, or economic stress introduced by government finagling with wages or both, it inevitably ends up being that the better paid are ever more in danger of doing way more work than people at their wage ever did before, and more in danger of being laid off in favor of someone who makes one half to three quarters what they did.

The result is that we are right back to where we started and the government just keeps at it. Lowering the ocean instead of raising the boat.
sayanything-1317

Yes, Woof, that’s the people the increase was supposed to help.

Good boy. Way to red. Here’s a biscuit.
sayanything-7134

yet if wages stayed low and prices rise say due to costs of raw materials, the lower wage can’t buy as much, which means you don’t produce as much which means you cut jobs because you are producing less. A bit of a vicious circle. The most basic cost increase would be raw materials because of scarcity…or perhaps wages go up because of shortage of labor. We saw that happen in ND. Unemployment was so low you had to bump wages to hire even unskilled labor. Then when the economy cycles you usually don’t see decrease in wage except in catastrophic recessions. Today Ford announced that they would rehire 1000 people but at $14 an hour vs the $20/hour. Now the question will be whether retail prices will go down as they did because of the glut in the housing market. If not then buying power will be decreased and we will be stuck.

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Shocker: After Massive Hike In Minimum Wage, Young And Low-Wage Workers Having Trouble Finding Jobs

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