Re: Oh my Gawd! Carly!

Hi James,

"James Arthur" <bogusabdsqy@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:XEoQj.42$TS5.4@xxxxxxxxxxx
When he did get a minimum wage job, local "living wage" rules meant the kid
earned enough to raise a small family, for bagging groceries. No wonder
they can't afford to hire many workers!

Rather than eliminating minimum wage laws, a better approach might be to
expand the "farm worker" laws to encompass more people? It's a hard
question -- while obviously most teens are living with their parents who are
supported by them, there certainly are older teens out there supporting
themselves largely or completely independently from their parents and as just
as "deserving" of the minimum wage as, e.g., some 40-year-old is.

Or maybe we just need to make it easier for teens to declare themselves as
independents: In college a few kids did that because they didn't qualify for
student loans or grants based on the buckets of money their parents had, yet
said parents weren't volunteering any of it to help the kid put himself
through school either.

At least locally, if you go to somewhere like McDonalds it's probably about a
50/50 split of teens and those who are, say, over 25 and likely completely
self-supported. At Wal*Mart the split is more like 25/50/25 of teens/"regular
working Joes"/"seniors who may not actually need the money but wanted
something to do."

My grandparents lived in Naples, Florida and it was rather odd to find that
nearly all of the fast food workers were either seniors or immigrants -- it's
an affluent area, so apparently a lot of the local teens could readily do
without the wages offered. (And when it came to lawn care or pool care
services, I'd say that less than 5% were not immigrants! Many were Cubans and
Hispanics, and had good work ethics.)

And of course we can argue all day about how much the minimum wage should
actually *be*, but most people do support the concept.

I worked at McDonalds as a teen, but if I had to be 16 again I think I would
try to get a job in a regular restaurant with tips: The idea that there's a
pretty direct connection between the level of service you provide and your
income is pretty appealing when you're confident that you provide
above-average service.

-- even if all the othe rrules were equal, companies are always going to
be attracted to workers at $0.25/hour compared to $8/hour.
Not so, otherwise there wouldn't be any engineering jobs, for example,

I just said they'd be attracted, not that they'd all actually decide that
going overseas is a clear win. :-)

Right, and that's super healthy. It's great to see other countries
prospering, their people enjoying those fruits of technological and social
progress which have been too exclusively ours for too long.

Yes, agreed.

From my scant knowledge, India is on paper a pretty decent government but in
practice is a bit corrupt, but over time that probably will fix itself. On
the other hand, even on paper China is not a very citizen-friendly place, and
while it saddens me to think about it, I imagine there will be plenty of
bloodshed before their government becomes markedly democratic.

---Joel


.

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