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Originally Posted by socal
Uhmm.... Are you sure it has anything to do with the governments intentions.
At the end of the day, non-union wages are based on nothing other than supply and demand. Period, end of story.
The answer is not to have the govt "do something about it" I assume you are referring to the federal govt since you were comparing to other states in the union. I suspect that the answer lies in what the state and local elected officials are doing to attract new business as the economc climate has changed. The elected officials, the ones you elected, have the responsibility to adapt as things change. We are a services based economy and as the manufacturing jobs have gone by way of the union, they local emphasis needs to change, unless of course they were in the back pockets of those unions....
just my two cents....
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Do you have any suggstions for what could be done?
The state has two service oriented businesses: Kroger and Wal-Mart.
Fred Meyer's (owned by Kroger) is unionized in certain sections (like the cashiers).
Otherwise they would get minimum wage indefinately. Even the unioniized workers get fucked oftentimes. My wife's store would constantly violate policies and her contract (as in, work her less than 20 hours per week so she wouldn't get benefits).
For anyone who thinks she should have gone somewhere else, that's the outlook in so many sectors it isn't even fathomable if you haven't been on the job market within the past decade or so. And it wasn't a personal thing, the store would hire multiple workers and rotate them around so everyone got equal hours. In fact, I got the impression that the manager was actually trying to do something positive by spreading the hours out--so more people could work, even though it was without benefits or a steady or enough paycheck. It was the corporation that capped the total amount of hours she could use per store sales and floorspace in a given week.
Before we left, she made ~$8 an hour. 8*16 (average weekly hours) = $128 * 4 = $512 per month. If we weren't married, she would have been in hardship. She wanted to work more and her schedule was available to work, but the company did not give out more hours; people in her situation are referred to as "involuntary part-time workers" in the literature and employment figures and we have more than 3 million of them in our workforce.
I just lectured this the other day, so I'm trying to recall the exact figure, but there are about 3.5 million full time workers in our workforce that make under the poverty level.
None of these numbers include illegal workers--they either don't have phones, don't want to talk to a government surveyer, and/or live multiple families to a single home. So the estimate is that we can likely double both of those and still not quite tap the extent of the working poor in our economy.
The simplest thing is to raise the minimum wage to a standard appropriate to the buying power it had when it was instituted decades ago. Studies the professor cited to the class indicated that the notion that jobs suffer from increases in minimum wages is a myth, but I haven't read them myself.
Also, the way we measure poverty is outmoded. It is figured by this weird notion of the average price of a food basket (an abstract basket that contains the proper nutrients for a family of 4) and multiplying it by 3. That is because it was assumed that the average family spends 1/3 of its income on food.
The woman who created that food basket forumla has since written a book about how it was misused. She states that her version was for basic life requirements to keep someone alive. Not like someone should live on it. You can figure it backwords and decide for yourself:
Just think for a second whether $18,000 per year for a family of 4 is enough to live on.
But using the $18K (which at least 7 million working people live under per year), we find that the government expects people to feed two children and two adults with $6,000 per year. And pay rent with the other $12,000 (we don't get to figure vehicle, clothes, medical care, or entertainment).
Researchers have come up with an alternate measure that does take into consideration those other items people need -- a self-sufficiency standard. I don't remember if it varies by region, but the number cited was, I think, $38,000.
In orange county, even shady parts of town that I guarantee most posters on this board would not live in, average rent is ~$1,600. That would be about a 2 bedroom apartment, so I don't know how long a family of 4 could live there.
So we need to do a couple of things:
1. Raise the minimum wage commensurate with inflation
2. Raise the poverty threshhold
3. Develop a plan to get these workers some preventive health care.