Another Day, Another Neolib Sellout

So much for Howard Dean being the "voice of the people." Another neolib I saw through years ago.

By the way, that "raising the minimum wage costs jobs" is a bunch of horseshit. If you raise the minimum wage, people have more money to spend, which means more demand, which means more jobs, and certainly more jobs are created than are those eliminated due to job loss, a myth anyway. It's the same principle that applies to any safety net programs--they, too, create jobs.

Rich people do NOT "create jobs." Job creation is purely a result of demand. Supply can only be created after there is sufficient demand for goods and services. You don't need a Ph.D. in economics from the Ivy League to know this simple truth.

The right wing has done a hell of a job persuading people the minimum wage is evil.

It Makes Sense to Raise the Minimum Wage

since it would spur demand, thus creating more jobs in the long run. The only drawback I see from this proposal, provided it actually becomes law, is that more businesses will employ part-time workers instead of full-time ones in order to save money on pay and benefits.

After weeks of careful ballot counting, officials in Washington state on Tuesday certified the results in a potentially historic vote that will create far and away the highest minimum wage in America.

Squeaking by with a mere 77-vote margin, the ballot measure known as Proposition 1 will set a $15 wage floor for an estimated 6,000 airport and hotel workers in SeaTac, Wash., a suburb of 27,000 residents south of Seattle.

While the vote count had been too close to call in the days following the Nov. 5 election, the King County Elections commission posted the official results on its website late Tuesday: 3,040 in favor of the measure, 2,963 against. There were 12,108 registered voters eligible to cast ballots.

Businesses can't be trusted, especially in this current economic climate, to do the right thing.

Etc. for the Day

Coming to a country near you: Abolition of the minimum wage:

The Bank of Spain has called for the elimination of the minimum wage, more flexibility in the labour market and other attacks on the working class.

Its annual report states, “The seriousness of the labour market advises maintaining and intensifying reform momentum through the adoption of additional measures to promote job creation in the short term and facilitate wage flexibility.”

It continues, “It would be worth exploring the possibility of establishing new formulas that would allow, in special cases, temporary departures from the conditions laid down in collective bargaining agreements, or exceptional mechanisms to prevent the minimum wage from acting as a constraint on specific groups of workers with most difficulties in terms of employability.”

These idiots don't understand or care that if you cut wages, nobody will buy anything, and that will cut into profits.

It's not "sustainable," to use a hackneyed phrase that I hate.
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What does it mean to have a "good job" anyway?

For a long time now, we have heard talk about creating “good” jobs, with manufacturing being at the top of the good jobs list. It almost implies that service- sector jobs — the primary replacement for disappearing manufacturing jobs in a post-industrial economy — are really bad jobs. Well, if the definition of a good job is one that pays a solid middle-class wage that allows one to live in dignity, this is probably true. - See more at: http://www.employmentpolicy.org/topic/blog/meaning-good-job?utm_content=bufferf4a8c&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer#sthash.1ODmGSIk.dpuf

Some Reads for Today

These, too, piss me off.
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"Austerity" isn't a policy mistake as far as I am concerned, but instead it is a policy on purpose.

The elites want everybody else to be poor so they can have more.
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This is what happens when you are tossed out in your fifties and try to get back in the labor force to be gainfully employed:

At age 53 I expected to be quizzed about why I was looking for minimum wage work in a big box retail store. No one cared; instead, the application process included a background and credit check, along with a drug test. Any of those anonymous agencies could have vetoed my employment and I’d never even know about it. Most places that don’t pay much seem really concerned that their workers are drug-free. I’m not sure why this is, because you can be a banker or lawyer and get through the day higher than angels on a cloud. Regardless, I did what I had to in front of another person, handing him the cup. He gave me one of those universal signs of the underemployed I now recognize, a “we’re all in it, what’re ya gonna do” look, just a little upward flick of his eyes.

After hiring I watched a video on theft. The interesting thing was that in addition to warning us about stealing candy for breaks, we were not to steal time. The store paid us for our time and so even if we snuck out for a breath of air or flipped through a magazine, we were stealing time. Would we have liked someone from the store to come to our home (or, I guess, day-rate motel room, car back seat, shelter bunk or cardboard box under a bridge) and have them do whatever the heck the store would want from us there?

New break policy: zero to five and a half hour shift, no break. New schedule policy: all shifts reduced to five and a half hours or less. Somebody said it was illegal not to give us breaks, but what can you do, call the cops like it was a real crime? It turns out in fact that in my state employers are not required to grant breaks to anyone over age 16; in some places minimum wage workers do eight and nine hours shifts without a meal or a chance to get off their feet for a few minutes. No one gets sick leave, holidays or accrues vacation time. No health benefits.

It's gonna get worse because our politicians don't give a shit.

Minimum Wage Lies

One of the most persistent lies peddled by right-wingers and neoliberals alike is that any raise in the minimum wage, much less the very existence of the minimum wage, costs jobs.

It flies in the fact of common sense. The more money people have to spend, the more money that is pumped into the economy, which in turn creates jobs, which in turn creates more demand, which creates more jobs.

Our problem in the economy is because nobody has any money to spend, there is no demand, and because there is no demand, few or no jobs are being created. This is a result of deliberate policies designed to force wages downward to third world levels.

Etc.

At least some states are doing what Congress refuses to do and that is raise the minimum wage.

Oregon's is going up to I think $8.80 an hour.

link
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This Christmas will be far from merry for many, many people in this country because Washington wants people to suffer.

According to a study by the McKinsey consulting firm, it took six months for the US economy to return to pre-recession job levels after the 1982 recession. After the 1991 recession, the recovery in jobs required 15 months. After the 2001 recession, it took 39 months.

Some 48 months have already passed since the current slump in the labor market began, and there are six million fewer people employed than in December 2007. McKinsey initially forecast that it would take 60 months before jobs regained the level of 2007, but at the current level of job creation, it would take 78 months to reach the level of 146 million workers employed before the onset of the recession—assuming that there is no further deepening of the economic slump.

Bad tidings, indeed.

The Economy

The federal minimum wage will go up for the third time in three years, to $7.25 an hour.

Of course to really keep up with the rising cost of living, it should be indexed to inflation.

And contrary to GOP lies about raising the wage costs jobs, previous experience shows it isn't true.