@frauenfelder didn’t say, nor even imply that the CEO’s 10 million in one year (10.2 actually) alone is all that would be needed to pay workers a more humane living wage.
Never mind that it was a slow year for the CEO (he’s been known to grab 21 million in stock options alone).
Never mind all the other combined executive pay, franchise owners (many are owned by small groups) that rake in many millions and all the executive stock options combined that puts everything at many tens of millions of dollars overall that could help pay for better wages.
Oh, and let’s not forget the Institutional Ownership of Dunkin’ Brands Group that includes banksters such as Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase & Co, etc. who are raking it in on the backs (and taxes) of low-wage earners nationwide.
Also, never you mind there aren’t 270k employees in the United States. We’re talking about the minimum wage in the USA here, not worldwide.
Look, the point is these moneybags should collectively take a cut along with small price increases to get a lot of workers in the United States closer to a living wage. Why should the American public subsidize these massive hauls for executives and various wealthy owners? We shouldn’t.
It’s sick that these executives, etc. are taking in tens of millions of dollars while asking the working poor to make do with less.
I’m tired of my taxes subsidizing externalities for the obscenely wealthy… aren’t you?
I realize 2013 was a more dire time than today, but here is the crazy bit: Speaking English Natively is a Hugely Marketable Skill.
You read about companies building call centers in India, or in Eastern Europe (mostly India, though). No offense to India and the like, but I have long thought that we could do better to pay a little more money and get much better results from native speakers in poorer communities that could use the money.
Not only that, but you put people from those communities on the corporate ladder, and teach them marketable skills. It all starts with speaking English natively and a little initiative. From there you can easily move overseas to further your teaching career, or go the technical route, or whatever.
You make some good points, but things such as rent control and public transportation only apply to urban areas…many of the working poor are in rural areas and small towns where these things are not as much of a factor. Single payer healthcare is where we really part ways. I worked in healthcare for many years and saw for myself what programs like medicare, medicaid, and later obamacare did. They were a disaster. The answer lies in tort reform and insurance reform. Legal and malpractice costs are outrageous, and these costs are passed on to patients. Medicaid is a joke…it more often than not reimburses medical facilities at less than the cost of the procedure, effectively forcing them to operate at a loss when serving medicaid patients. Bottom line is you have to compensate doctors and nurses well or nobody will take all the time, or pay all the money to get the education to do so. I don’t see a single payer government system doing any better than existing programs, government just isn’t that clever. So the costs must be cut somewhere, and that is in legal costs. Open up more insurance options to patients and that helps as well. Right now you and I pay the exorbitant amount we pay for a checkup because for one, we are covering the losses from treating those on government programs, and secondly, most of us are paying through insurance, not out of pocket, and just like when you get your car repaired on insurance, they sock it to the insurance companies… And they don’t care, they just raise our rates…and so the vicious cycle continues.
Maybe these people need to get an education, or train for something better then. That is if your post is even accurate, which I doubt considering it comes from think progress.org. Get real. Try maybe taking a course in economics, rather than reposting talking points from a biased source and acting as if they are fact.
The tax rate for lower income folks is much lower in the US, but more importantly, a US$15.00 wage is equivalent to CAD$19.54 at today’s exchange rate.
Blaming the franchisees is often a dodge, depending on the contract details. If corporate controls all of the cost inputs except for wages it effectively controls wages. “You can pay your six employees whatever you like! We calculate that to earn a profit your compensation budget works out to $45 an hour…”
Why are CEO’s and other corporate big wigs so rich? Look in the mirror. We buy products. That’s like complaining about professional athlete’s incomes, or movie stars, or famous musicians. We buy the tickets, the merchandise, the albums, and we enjoy those things. That’s how a capitalist society works. Don’t like it? Then go get you masters or doctorate in business and work 80-100 hour weeks for the next 20-30 years, and please a lot of the right people, come up with the best ideas, and always go that extra mile on your way up the corporate ladder, and you can do it too. It’s easy to hate those who have more, and that’s what it boils down to…envy. Very few are handed these jobs, it is hard work beyond what most average people could even fathom. They can have their millions, and with it their countless hours away from family and friends, and all the stress that comes with being the one who makes all the big decisions. Be happy with what you have, and if you find it to be unfair, then aspire to do more. You can’t just wait for big daddy government to swoop in and save the day. If you want to talk about fair, then how about how fair it is for an unskilled worker serving donuts to earn more than starting teachers and sheriffs deputies make where I live. That is more of a concern to a logical minded person, than the unfairness of Mr. Pennybags with his top hat and monocle kicking back in his CEO chair lighting cigars with $100 bills. Why should we have to pay $20 for a donut and cup of coffee to subsidise the clerk at dunkin donuts when there are public school teachers making about $20k a year and police officers making $12/hr? I think if anyone is underpaid it is them…and those are public jobs. Government is barking up the wrong tree with this one.
The real problem here is a lack of diversity in the economy – just like the middle class is getting squeezed out, there is becoming a bigger gap between small businesses and mega conglomerates, with few companies in-between.
Some jobs create more value for their employers than others, and the minimum wage distorts the hell out of that. The problem is that in a more diverse economy, these jobs were held mostly by teens and people who needed temporary or supplementary work. The disappearance of small manufacturing companies and other higher-value jobs that people would ‘trade-up’ to has many overqualified workers competing for those entry-level jobs.
Compensating people more for work literally anyone could do is not the solution; the long term solution is to bring back the middle tier of jobs. With new technology, new transportation options, and the ability to match buyers and sellers evolving in new business models on the Internet, you could bring back a lot of the businesses that have gone overseas and create a much more robust economy. We’re leaving entry-level workers in the cold otherwise, because no employer is going to take a chance on paying a kid $15 an hour when they can easily find more mature workers displaced from better jobs. Rather than pay Wal-Mart workers more, let’s pay them better wages working in companies that can produce better goods than Wal-Mart currently imports.
But, government is not going to drive this, even though many would argue it is their place to do so. They are beholden to too many competing interests to take action, and in fact are actively in the way due to laws that mostly serve to protect the status quo.
There are some good examples of companies that are innovating around the status quo and creating good jobs in the process (think of how the craft brewery industry has managed to take a foothold, despite a lot of obstructive red tape around alcohol distribution); then, there are also bad examples of companies like Uber who break one outdated exploitative monopoly to create a new exploitative monopoly. If we let our principles pick the winners and losers among these companies, we stand to create a new economy that can employ and compensate people fairly according to their skills.
Donut shops in California are a prime example – when Dunkin left in the first place, a lot of entrepreneurs bought the old locations and prospered, often mentoring employees who opened up their own shops. One of the reasons this CEO is getting the big bucks is that he’s so far proving successful at bringing the brand back to a market that had gotten along just fine without it.
What I will say about that is that I think that is great for theindividual who could find gainful emlpoymejt abroad simply by knowing the English lajguage. The downside is as a whole, the country then loses labor to other countries. Ah, but we are only losing unskilled labor, one might say. Yes, but we need unskilled labor too, we need labor of all levels because the streets won’t sweep themselves.
To be fair, as much of a cold hearted right wing crank as I may seem, believe it or not I do believe that the minimum wage is too low…and unlike some of my pals on the right I do believe in a minimum wage…just not $15/hr. Right now $10-12 would probably be okay to adjust for inflation and rising food and transportation costs if nothing else. I just have a problem with overpaying for a job most anyone can walk in and do, when there are teachers, cops, EMTs, and other professionals barely making $15/hr, often times less for new hires.
Social Security’s admin costs are less than 1% of expenditures. I’m grudgingly told by my retired Republican father that dealing with SSA is fast and painless. Of course, as a directly administered program states can’t divert money to paper over their budget shortfalls. It also has the advantage of being a program that benefits a demographic that is politically influential; if the program wasn’t well run seniors would scream bloody murder and vote the bastards out of office. Poor mothers and the unemployed, though? If their programs don’t deliver no one cares because they have no clout.
Hey! Me too! Also malt liquor on the weekends. I’m pretty sure I’m inedible…
Although that reminds me, a friend of the family did a round of chemo a few months ago. She went out to our lake house to relax while she puked her guts out.
I watched, over and over again, as a mosquito would land on her, punch into her skin, and die from the chemo…
It was… Surreal. Just watching the skeeters land, prep for dinner, and then just die.
I’ll give you that some cops do very well. My buddy is a state trooper and makes over $80k/yr. But that is not easy to get into, and is not the norm. I am giving extreme examples, but I am 100% truthful in telling you that county sheriffs deputies start at $12/hr, part time, in my county. Yes, it is a relatively poor county, but that’s the thing. Here in upstate NY incomes are much lower than in the city. I just find it absurd to make it statewide to require $15/hr for fast food workers when some counties can’t even afford to pay deputies and teachers that much.
Trade schools are underutilized here, and the few that are left struggle for continued funding. However, many of these jobs cannot be offshored, and can pay very well or form the basis of a small business. I would rather see money spent on better vocational education that may well launch a group of entrepreneurs than young people taking out loans for degrees that will have them serving coffee. It also doesn’t help that California’s community colleges are basically finishing the work undone by substandard high schools. All of these things are contributing to lack of economic mobility for people of all ages.
We are shipping out our english language speaking jobs to countries whose standard of living is way lower. I’ve been there. Somebody told me, totally straight faced, that their silicon valley was growing at a rate that one could expect to pay $1000 a month for a one bedroom in Bangalore. I mean, that’s nuts for there, but… Needless to say, I failed to be really horribly shocked.
You could do better if you built a call center in a lot of parts of the US, at least in terms of cost of living. I recall some years back some dudes I knew renting a whole 3 bedroom house in a college town for 600 a month.
Agreed on the call center thing. They are actually putting them up in towns around where I live. It has actually been a good thing for the depressed rust belt economy here…well, at least up until now it has been a good thing as an option other than flipping burgers for those who have no formal Training or skills…but time will tell how those call centers fair if fast food is paying so much better in the future.
Education can actually be a great route to penury these days. If you earn a doctorate and get a job as adjunct faculty you can expect an average annual salary of $20,000-25,000. Good luck paying off your student loans on that. Worse, these days adjuncts make up half of college faculty and 90% of instructors.
This is awesome to hear. May I ask what region you’re in (without being too specific), and what companies were doing so?
I was aware that WiPro was testing out call centers in Eastern Europe and the various lower income spots of the Americas. No offense to India at all, but I was hoping American companies would follow suit similarly.
Planet Money had an episode a few days ago titled “Why do we Work so Much”
In the end, they offensively surmise that the reason is that “people love to work. They need to do it for internal psychological reasons.”
The fact is, most people don’t like to work, or rather, don’t like to do their jobs, and would work less if they could.
I think the glaringly obvious explanation for why people work, is that real wages haven’t budged since the 1970s, yet the cost of living keeps increasing.
People have to work, because they’re essentially being paid less this year than they were last year.
Minimum wage factors into this. If minimum wage was directly linked to track the cost of living in terms of real dollars, then it’d still be a living wage, generally around $15/hr or more.
Basically, the rich have figured out a way to make people more productive while paying them less (hooray for technology, boo for using it to devalue people’s work). Our productivity per-individual has never been higher. And the reason people still work is because that productivity keeps the prices of stuff high, while they aren’t getting any adjustments to maintain standard of living if they maintained their level of production.
In any case, the problem as I see it, is that corporations are just taking more and more of the pie for themselves, and if unions were still a popular way to collectively bargain, then the lower and middle class would wrestle their fair share of the profits of their work back from the plutocrats at the top.
