Mommy, why are poor people poor?Follow

Remind me not to open a business with gbaji. I'd like to walk away not losing money each day.

That's a strange response to my post. Was there something I said about the relative value of labor that you disagree with?

That you can't pay fast food workers more than the total sales during their shift minus the total cost of all materials involved in those sales (so electricity, equipment, food, etc), on average? That's not like a shocking thing to say, is it? All I'm doing is calculating net profit (absent labor cost) over a period of time and saying that this is the upper bounds you can pay for labor.

Is there someone who thinks that's wrong? I mean, if it costs you $5 for materials to run your lemonaid stand for 5 hours, and you sell $15 of lemonaid during that time period, then your profit rate is $2/hour. If you were to hire someone to sell lemonaid for you, that would be the maximum rate you could pay them (or yourself in this case). This should not be an alien concept, but it's shocking how many people will argue that it's unfair that the lemonaid stand worker doesn't get paid as much as the guy who repairs your car. Well, if people were willing to pay 5 times as much for a glass of lemonaid at a stand on the side of the road, then you could pay your workers more. But that's the point I'm making. The value of labor is a function of the value of the product of that labor to consumers.

We can complain that this is unfair, but it's really not. As long as consumers are free to choose whether a given good or service is worth the cost being asked, then the labor to produce those goods/services will be tied to that factor. Put another way, in order to make labor not valued that way would require removing the freedom of purchasers to choose whether to buy things at a given price (ie: no free market). You can't change one without changing the other, but some continue to think that they can. I'm just trying to point out the uselessness of trying to do that unless one is really arguing against a free market entirely.

Edited, Oct 23rd 2013 3:41pm by gbaji

That's what was missing first time around. Your previous wording made it seem like you were only considering product cost and labour.

Unions. And when there is no union, fear of a union.

Edited, Oct 23rd 2013 10:03pm by Uglysasquatch

The question I was answering was why a button pusher on a factory floor gets paid more than a button pusher at a fast food restaurant (service industry in general). It's a given in the question that the factory worker *is* paid more, even if he's not considered more skilled, or the work considered any more difficult. So your question is tangential at best.

My question wasn't about pay though (and that's what you quoted when you posted), it was about how society views the importance of the job and how skilled the person is viewed. Pay may be a factor there, but my comment wasn't about pay. Someone looks at a burger flipper working 40 hours a week and thinks "loser". Someone looks at a button pusher on a factory floor working 40 hours a week and thinks"productive member of society".

And as far as pay... the difference isn't there if you are a non union shop. Our button pushers make between 9 and 13 dollars an hour based on whether or not they are temps and their seniority .

As long as society doesn't view these services and the people providing them as important, they won't be willing to pay more for them, and the people providing these services won't be able to earn more for their work.

A world in which the percentage of our population required to grow sufficient food to feed our population is 1/20th of what it was a century ago, and yet we don't have 95% unemployment. Clearly the market actually does find new things for labor freed up via automation to do. Is that really a question?



Both forces are in play. If you increase the cost of labor, you must increase the cost of the goods produced by that labor. That is because the total cost to produce a good cannot be greater than the price you sell the good for. You're saying the same thing I am.



False. I said that the upper bounds of labor value is a function of the market value of the goods and services generated by that labor. I said nothing at all about how that value differential is divided between profit and labor costs.



Which has nothing at all to do with what I was talking about.




That's a lot of complaining about stuff I wasn't talking about. I was answering the question of why a button pusher in a service job (like fast food) gets paid less than a button pusher on a factory floor, even if both jobs are similarly demanding in terms of skill/difficulty.

That's it. You're trying to fly before you've learned to crawl. Start by understanding the basic concepts first, then we can move on to more complex ideas.



I have never argued this. Ever. You're creating false conditions and getting way ahead of the issue at hand.

Let me ask you a question: Have you ever walked into a store, looked at an item on the shelf and then decided that you can afford to pay twice as much as the asking price, so you just give that money to the store? No? That's what's wrong with your question. No one does that. It's not about setting arbitrary "fair" prices for things. It's always about competing forces.

What force prevents the store from charging you $1000 for a loaf of bread? If you can answer that question, then you can answer the one you asked (or the one you should have asked).



Missing the forest for the trees.

You guys are arguing pay rates with a guy who fought tooth and nail to say waitresses made as much as Brigadier Generals.

There are no numbers that support your claim though. Average income has not risen in proportion to perceived "Higher Value" jobs. Do I make more than a guy pushing a button, In fact I do. I make 10$ more an hour because I went to school and got a piece of paper that says I know what I am I doing. But I know half a dozen guys who now make 15 dollars less than they used to because their jobs were replaced by Robots. So lets see I make 80$ more in a day, and one of those guys now makes 120$ less. Over the 6 of my friends thats a cool $720 or about a difference of 540 bucks. Now I know this affected 6 people because I installed the Robot that replaced them on the line. A line of 9 is down to 3 because we only need 1 person to load parts and push a button instead of 2 guys welding and 1 guy handling parts.

So yes higher value jobs are being added, but this in no way supports a "non-deterioration" of the Average wealth. In fact it hurts the whole town. Those 6 guys are joined by about 34 others, some who went to school, some are unemployed, most took part time jobs at minimum wage because hey, they had to put food on the table for their kids when the EI ran out. So now there are ~30 People who used to make Over 50K a year (~48K is the average in Canada) and now making under 30K/yr. 7 have lost their houses, had to sell them cause they couldn't handle the mortgage, ever rising bills, and of course feed their families. I can only imagine how Bowling Green was impacted when GM started laying people off. I can only imagine how it fell when entire truck lines were moved out of the country for cheaper labor and operation cost, especially since they had to add in the cost of health care into that ball of necessities we consider mandatory for basic life.

Of course its cool because I am making 80$ more than everyone else because I monitor the Robots. So why does it matter than hundreds of thousands of dollars has left my city. Well we lost 3 resturants, my home value has decline by 12%, we have lost 1 movie plaza, we have lost an ice cream shop, a Blockbuster...then again they went out of business (something about being able to rent thousands of movies from your couch or something...) Lots of other stuff has closed, we have seen many mom and pop shops shut down because they don't have the loyal customer base they once did. Unemployment here is just about 11%, but that doesn't include the thousands who probably don't bother saying anything, then again I am sure many work under the table too. The income of the town has declined, this year it couldn't pay its police service and a needed hospital extension...thankfully the Government of Ontario helped a bit, but then again Ontario as a whole has seen hundreds of billions sapped from its economy over 9% unemployment and for the first time in the History of Canada is now a have not province.

I mean its not like its a big deal or anything I mean those things are probably all unrelated right, I am sure the 80Dollars more a day I make is actually covering the losses oh hundreds of Billions in consumer incomes. After all companies are still making record profits so my $80 must be doing just fine. I mean I could be over thinking it and am sure that once the US economy comes roaring back to life all these jobs that robots now hold will be replaced some where in the economy, because hey I got 80 bucks and that can totally pay for one hour work for the staff who made my Quarter Pounder meal tonight.

Fantasy land economics were proven wrong in the 80's they were shown to be wrong again in the 00's and now no one has any money left to do anything to rectify the situation, except for those record setting profiteers in corporations who somehow have swallowed up several trillion in profits and put it somewhere..

I'm also reminded on how he argued the impossibility of paying waiters more money without the collapse of your business. You know, as opposed to cutting money in other places.

I'm sure on average, cocktail waitresses make more money than day care providers.

When dissing occupations that you deem lowly, your superior facade is dulled by bad facts.

She would be looking for Gibberish Boy.

It is somewhere. Maybe we should all pretend we live in New Zealand for a while, at least until Sunday?