Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

There must be some unstated assumption here; A lower rate for teens isn’t a good in and of itself. Nobody goes around saying, “If only we had a lower minimum wage for teens… It would be worth raising the regular minimum wage to acheive it!”

It seems you’re assuming the minimum wage is going up, even if Republicans don’t cooperate. Plausible. But what do Democrats get out of offering Republicans a teen wage, if they can get their minimum wage increase without Republican votes?

So, I guess the deal is indexing in return for the teen minimum. But that conceeds that Democrats don’t have the votes to get an indexed minimum wage, which means that even if they do pass an increase, in a few years the damage will be eliminated by inflation.

So, we should trade making the loss on the minimum wage permanent, in return for reducing the damage…

I don’t think so. Seems a poor bargain to me, turning a temporary setback into a permanent defeat, just to make the defeat a bit smaller.

I negotiate union contracts at a major company (hence anonymity).

THE reason the Democrats want indexing is because many unions get automatic raises tied to the minimum wage.  This would artificially inflate costs in almost every sector, including government.

We could make it illegal to tie other wages to the minimum wage or to any changes in it (perhaps including indexing) during the life of the contract.

There should be regional cost-of-living adjustments.  If the minimum wage in rural Oklahoma should be $7.25, then it should be something like twice that in NY.

If we accept the premise that individuals in government should set a price for labor, how do we make the philospohical case that individuals in government should not set all other prices?

Travis

Thomas, interesting point.  The “G” already give variable housing allowances for geography (at least in the DoD) - could use the same factor/multipliers that they use.

However, are there many places in New York that can actually get by paying the minimum....heh.

I thought the point for liberals was to PREVENT teenagers from competing with union labor.

You mean it is “NOT” going away, right, beginning of line 4?

Travis,
Government allows the formation of corporations whose primary purpose is to shield their share holders from responsibility, both legal and economic for what the company does. It is therefor, quite proper for the government to regulate those entities relationships with real, living US citizens. Not nearly enough of that has been going on for the last 12 years.

DK,
Minimum wage is not a “liberal” issue. It is not a conservative issue. It is a working class American issue. Stop being an elitist. Unions aren’t “liberal” either. They are a product of the American working class trying to protect itself from corporate tyranny. They used to be the basis for a healthy, prosperous middle class. Perhaps you’d perfer to live in China where they don’t have unions that aren’t government controlled. This country needs to get back to where we’re making our own durable goods and growing our own food, and allowing our people to feed their famlies while doing so. If that means you have to pay a little more for things, tuff.

> If that means you have to pay a little more for things, tuff.

Protectionist measures transfer money up the food chain and to govt.  Why is either one a good thing?

> This country needs to get back to where we’re making our own durable goods and growing our own food, and allowing our people to feed their famlies while doing so.

Why is it that there are plenty of examples of non-union US industries that can compete on the world stage but damned-few examples of unionized US industries that can?

Indexing is a terrible idea and subminimum wages don’t work.  A better bargain would be to raise the minimum wage but allow the value of benefits to count against it.  Right now, only cash wages count.  The result is that low-wage workers get no benefits and increases in the minimum wage cause employers to reduce benefits.

> This country needs to get back to where we’re making our own durable goods and growing our own food, and allowing our people to feed their famlies while doing so.

Why don’t you grow all your own food and make all your own goods, and provide all your own services for yourself? Because you benefit from specialization: you produce goods/services for other people, and have others provide you with goods and services and in the end you are wealthier for it. The same applies at larger scales, including the international level. Why should we grow all our own food when we can trade high tech products to other nations for food and raw materials and end up with both the food we could have made and high tech products of our own instead?

> If that means you have to pay a little more for things, tuff.

It would also mean that human resources would have to be pulled away from other pursuits to fill the requirements to make all your food and your durable goods. Where would they be pulled from? Beauracracy? That might be nice, but seems doubtful. Research and development? That would be selling out our own future and our decendents’ futures for the ability to smuggly declare are nation economically independant.

As for indexing: increases in the minimum wage will also tend to push up higher wages. If a worker is worth twice as much as a minimum wage worker, but then minimum wage doubles, certainly the aforementioned worker’s wages will also increase. Even if the wages don’t all stay in proportion, one would expect that all wages in the economy will be raised due to the increase in minimum wage, which will in turn raise the price of all goods and services, which will in turn raise the minimum wage due to inflation indexing. At least it would not spiral out of control too quickly, as the minimum wage bumps would occur only after inflation data could be calculated, perhaps annually.

>A better bargain would be to raise the minimum wage but allow the value of benefits to count against it.

That makes sense to me.