Emac - do you know MeepMeep, you've got me thinking. What is your view of dogs?

No, Emac, a lay off is not a firing. At least not according to my HR bokk (I'm taking an HR class this quarter too). In fact, one big difference is that an employer who has a layoff can call people back to work at which point, the employee can choose to go back to work or cease to receive layoff benefits.

Ohio is an employment at will state as well, but fire someone without cause and they still get unemployment. That "at will" just means the employer can fire you without cause and you receive unemployment but you can't sue them for wrongful discharge unless you had a written contract, then it's a breach of contract suit. That is all "at will" means from the employer's side. Same applies to employee in that they can be sued for breach of contract if they had one, but under general employment they can quit without notice and the employer can't stop them.

As far as your response way back... Privately owned companies have no requirement of public disclosure or transparency, so you may not know just how shitty their books look. On the outside they may be looking pretty but a year in, they suddenly shutter their doors. I worked for a company who hadn't been paying their taxes. the principles absconded to a non-extradition islind with millions and bounced the meployees last pay checks. We never did get that money we were owed or any of their creditors get anything back. Those guys now live in the lap of luxury because they took the money and ran. Was that my fault? I was only out of work for less than a month, but I was still out of work through no fault of my own.

I really don't think young Emac here has had something bad happen to him yet. I've lived the rural life... I know what its like growing up in a bubble where it just seems "natural" to be living the good life (relatively speaking), and be able to get up on your high horse and look down on anybody not able to do the same.

Eventually, you're going to wake the fuck up, and realize that all you've been is lucky. A series of shitty things will happen (sooner or later), and then you may have a little more understanding of how bad things can happen to good people.

I've fired and laid off, and been fired and been laid off. I can tell you that as the one its happening to, it feels the same. But as the one one having to do it, firing feels much better than laying off, because there is a justification for it.

When one done the firing, the companies that I've worked for have always had a policy of paying 2 weeks. But that was just policy, not law. And to be fair, I've only fired people because of performance. I think if there was someone who threatened another employee, or watched porn at work or something that was an immediate firing offence, then the policy would just be to walk them out without any severence.

So Starbucks might have a policy that says they WON'T fire someone without cause, but there certainly is no law that says they CAN'T fire someone without cause. They'd just call it a layoff, if there was no cause.

Actually unless a store its closing then people don't get laid off. I have seen stores closed so I know how that works. It could be a company policy about firing. I was told it was also state law. We had a problem employee but it its really hard to fire someone within company.

I've fired and been fired. I can't say I've laid off and the only lay off I ever got was when the company folded and the owners absconded with our last pay check money to the Cayman's or someplace (fucking bastards). But a lay off is legally different from a firing.

The bottom line is why would you even bother working? You just go on government aid and get paid more than you do to work. Anyone that gives you a hard time you just serve up excuses to. Did I miss anything?

You still end up with more money if you work, because you are still entitled to welfare even if you're working a minimum wage job.

Which backs up my point... if the minimum wage was set at a proper level, we wouldn't have to pay social benefits to somebody working full time.

Again, we're choosing to subsidize companies that won't pay a living wage, instead of trying to reward individuals who are at least willing to pay into the system by working full time.

Mendax, the study factored in benefits with a minimum wage job if I'm not mistaken.

As usual Jack, you simply can't post a logical argument for minimum wage increases.

As usual Emac, you simply can't post a logical retort for your side, you just say the other person is wrong and assume we'll all believe you without question.

I've posted from leading economics textooks, articles, and offered detailed explicit arguments Bo Sox. These facts make you a liar and a troll in this thread, but this was already evident so I apologize for making a redundant statement.

If you've got all this awesome info, how about you make a counterargument like everyone else...

I did. So I'll copy and past the voluminous arguments of my own I've made in the thread to continue exposing you as the thread troll and liar that you are. (again apologies for pointing out the obvious about you in this thread.)

There is a direct correlation between increases in the minimum wage and increased teenage unemployment. The logical reason for this is obvious. When the minimum wage is $8.00 an hour no one with skills not worth $8.00 will get hired thus teenagers without skills don't get hired. A generation ago when the minimum wage was lower the teenage employment rate was much greater in direct correlation.

The demand for labor is not inelastic while the funding for labor costs is largely inelastic without prospects for market share growth. So raising per unit labor costs (raising the minimum wage) does not increase the funding for labor. So workers will either get laid off or get their hours cut. To claim this premise isn't valid one must argue that employers ignore labor costs and either raise prices to cope with increased labor costs or accept decreases in profit margin or operate at a loss when encountering increased labor costs.
Your article argues that increased labor costs have no effect, laughable as that is.
These leads to the statement made in all three of my articles that if this premise is true then why don't we just raise the minimum wage to make everyone rich, at $1,000 an hour. You claim this isn't a valid point, but of course it is because your position preposterously claims that labor costs do not effect employment in any way.

Of course your problem is that if you finally admit the truth. that labor costs do affect employment then you have to begin judging at what level this effect takes place. Which of course you won't do.
Greg Mankiw, chairman of the economics department at Harvard writes in his Mankiw's "Essentials of Economics" 3rd edition, Part 2, Chapter 6. He has a case study of "How the Minimum Wage Affects the Labor Market." He states verbatim, if the minimum wage is above the equilibrium (wage) level the quantity of labor supplied exceeds the quantity demanded. The result is unemployment.
Lyndon Johnson established the modern welfare program administered by the federal government. Yet there are more people living before the poverty line today than when the program began in 1965.
As a matter of fact welfare progarms in the United States have led to higher levels of poverty. There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that poverty climbs with a complete removal of welfare because it never occurred, yet we have concrete evidence that increased welfare spending does not reduce poverty. In fact we have almost 50 years of evidence of that effect.

Emac Online (55 )
New Mon 2 Sep
(+1)


The study doesn't even account for the opportunity costs of being at work compared to being at home. You collect welfare and have all day to do whatever you want while the person working has less money than you and spends all day at work to boot. The person on welfare can't do anything productive with their day and get paid for it because making any money would endanger their eligibility. The welfare state in the West is simply fiscally unsustainable and also socially bankrupting and destructive because it traps people on government aid in unproductive lives.
Raising the minimum wage increases unemployment, and the adding people to the unproductive welfare rolls increases the unsustainable obligations already on the books. A proposal that leads to insolvency isn't valid
http://goo.gl/OGCEUS
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/01/14/opinion/the-right-minimum-wage-0.00.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-04/can-we-pay-a-minimum-wage-that-makes-everyone-rich-.html

@JACK - " if the minimum wage was set at a proper level, we wouldn't have to pay social benefits to somebody working full time."

NO you fucking moron. If some incompetent jackass working for minimum wage didn't think they need a cell phone with a data plan, didn't think they need to live on their own (instead of splitting housing costs with others), didn't need cable TV, etc....if the morons learned to be RESPONSIBILE and learn to share costs and go without UNTIL THEY EARN MORE --- then we wouldn't have to subsidize.

You...AGAIN....take on the fucktard liberal ideology that EVERYONE deserves to have everything handed to them because they breath.

Fuck that...hey Jackie poo....next time so slog off to the bar at midnight to find a hooker...why don't you instead take some of your free cash and go find someone in need and help them out.

Oh? What? You are a selfish hypocritical asshole?

I thought so...

Jack Klein, I guess you've completely lost track of my counter argument to your article. You articles study looks at a correlation between minimum wage and unemployment across the entire wage sector. It shows that when the minimum wage goes up there is not corresponding increase in overall unemployment. The reason this study is completely invalid is because it includes employed workers completely unaffected by changes in the minimum wage because they work in jobs that pay well above he minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage does not increase unemployment of computer engineers working at Microsoft and Google. Teenagers work minimum wage jogs and one of the three articles I provided you showed a direct correlation between increasing the minimum wage and teenage unemployment.Only 6% of the entire American work force is in the category of minimum wage workers paid an hourly wage. The only valid studies on minimum wage correlation to unemployment would use this 6% as a study group, not 100% of workers in the economy. 94% of American workers paid an hourly wage are unaffected by changes in the minimum wage because they already receive a wage above the minimum wage price floor. This information is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics-4.4 million workers with wages at or below the Federal minimum made up 6.0 percent of all hourly-paid workers. The BOL describes minimum wage workers in this way

So the only valid studies of the minimum wage focus on the 6% of hourly wage workers in the minimum wage category. Including any workers getting paid above the minimum wage would skew the results and make them invalid.

except that a huge number of workers currently above the minimum wage would both get a pay rise and end up on the minimum wage should it increase by any meaningful amount, so for this incredibly obvious reason at least the studies are not as invalid as you'd like to claim. There are also other reasons, of course, but those will take more time to explain than I care to give you.

Why would someone get a pay raise if the minimum wage went up? There is a study that shows that people making $10 an hour got a pay raise the last time the minimum wage went up to $7.25 an hour? How high up the wage scale did pay raises occur as a result of the minimum wage going up to $7.25 an hour? This sounds like a conjecture based on facts not in evidence.

Mendax your post also ignores the evidence supplied in this thread with links to studies that show a direct correlation between people working for the minimum wage and increases in their employment rate the last time that the wage went up to $7.25 an hour. So raises the minimum wage increases unemployment among those working for the minimum wage. The vast majority of those working for the minimum wage are between the ages of 16-25 according to the bureau of labor statistics, and their unemployment rate is the highest in history exactly at the time the minimum wage rate is highest.

Here is another study done by the Federal Reserve on the minimum wage and unemployment in the United States and 17 other industrialized nations.
The studies conclusion- "in the least regulated labor markets in the sample—namely the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Japan—minimum wages reduce employment."
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2003/200323/200323pap.pdf

Actually, about half of those earning minimum wage are 25 or younger. Last time I checked, half was not a vast majority. See: http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2012.htm

Also, to blame rising youth unemployment on minimum wage is quite frankly laughable. Youth unemployment started rising massively from 2007 onwards, where as the latest round of minimum wage legislation didn't take effect until July 2009.

Emac, it also includes as a comparison the market of young people as well. So please, if you had read the article, then you'd have read that.

Krellin: Until you learn to have an adult conversation without foaming at the mouth, I'm not going to even bother to respond.

At least the minimum wage attempts to address a problem, Emac. Your counter-proposal is what.... fuck you, you were born poor, and should have thought of that before you were born poor?

"It is also worth noting that due to the politics of the minimum wage, and the resistance of conservatives and businessmen to higher rates, increases in the minimum wage have been generally infrequent and then relatively large in percentage terms. This thus provides good material for a test of whether increases in the minimum wage lead quickly to jumps in the unemployment rate (particularly of the young). Yet one does not see it."

So whatever theory you want to dig out, its not supported by the actual real-world data.

You still haven't been able to address this, despite your attempts to ignore and/or handwave it away.

No one is hiring teenagers right now because there are plenty of people with skills to get. Interns are asking to get paid nowadays and are getting turned down as a result for people that don't need training. It took me 13 interviews to even get a second one and 23 total applications before into a restaurant whose average employee age is 17 (my age - meaning we hire kids in high school and keep them through college). Even that took quite a bit of persistence, more than normal at least. I was on the cusp of asking my dad to hire me until I found something. And all of this is in one of the few parts of Indiana that was mostly unaffected by the housing bubble burst years back and the stock collapse in '08. Correlation is not necessarily causation as they like to say. Once the trained workforce has been hired again (i.e unemployment down to 4-6%), teenagers will start getting hired more often because the demand for teenage workers will be back up as trained workers ask for more money again. That's the cycle.

Raising the minimum wage to meet inflation only means that prices will increase. That doesn't automatically mean that people will get laid off en masse. When Clinton hiked the minimum wage in 1996, unemployment was falling and it kept falling until it hit 4% in 2000, which is unbelievably low as you know. It then came back to 5-6% under Bush. Not blaming his programs for that because it stabilized again in 2003.

Emac, every economics textbook will tell you that increasing minimum wage will increase unemployment, but every economics teacher (including mine) will tell you that that model only works in a perfect world with a perfectly rounded competitive market (which we haven't ever had and never will have anywhere). Feel free to check out this poll conducted in February, and notice that the participants are extremely diversified: http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-results?SurveyID=SV_br0IEq5a9E77NMV

And if you think all industry disagrees just by magic, well, just ask Costco (http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/06/business/la-fi-mo-costco-wages-20130306). And please don't tell me this a political issue because it isn't at all; it's a widespread desire (http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/kuziemko-norton-saez-stantchevaNBER13.pdf).

Mendax, I'll accept your correction on "vast majority."
Here is a graph that shows the direct correlation between http://www.aei-ideas.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/minwage3.jpg
Be sure and tell the Federal Reserve their study found "minimum wages reduce employment." You should also write Greg Mankiw at Harvard's economics department and tell him that his textbook used throughout the nation in economics courses is laughable because it states that " if the minimum wage is above the equilibrium (wage) level the quantity of labor supplied exceeds the quantity demanded. The result is unemployment."
I appreciate the fact that you abandoned your argument that raising the minimum wage caused other workers to receive pay raises.

Jack, your article included comparisons of people not being paid the minimum wage and this is what made it invalid to a discussion of the correlation between raising the minimum wage and increased unemployment.
Be sure and tell the Federal Reserve and the Chair of Harvard's economic department that their conclusions are "not supported by real world data."

Literally, the only time a hike in minimum wage had a corresponding increase in unemployment was the 2008 financial collapse.

And considering how much of a shitshow that was (thanks, deregulation), I don't think you can lay that at the door of a minimum wage hike (considering its literally the only one), and there are 19 hikes, and three of them are falling under the general increase in unemployment during the 2008 recession and the aftermath.

If it was minimum wage causing unemployment, you'd expect to see the 16-24 line have a uptick, and the rest of the market either a tiny one, or none at all. Its weird... it seems that the 16-24 unemployment rate is basically the same as the general pool.

http://aneconomicsense.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/minimum-wage-vs-unemployment-rates-1950-jan-2013.png?w=584&h=401

Emac, you can go on about this all you want, but the simple fact is that your position is not backed up by real world data. Cherry picking, appeals to authority, etc don't disguise the basic bankruptcy of your position.

Bo Sox, people who do not possess the skills to earn $725 an hour will not get hired, and thus increasing the minimum wage guarantees rising unemployment for unskilled workers, i.e.
Quit making illogical claims- every econ book blah blah blah and every econ professor blah blah blah. You said this and then linked to a study that showed everyone econ professor didn't say the same thing. The study you linked to showed that only 58% of economists did not disagree that raising the minimum wage did unemployment. Claiming that economics in academia isn't colored by politics is ludicrous. Among ordinary Americans the dispersion between registered Republicans and Democrats is roughly 1 to 1, while in tenured academia at American universities the ration is 5 Democrats to 1 Republican.
I just posted a link directly to a graph that shows direct correlation between youth unemployment and minimum wage increase so touché.
Your point about Clintom makes the same mistake that Jack made. Looking at the overall unemployment rate which includes 94% of workers who do not make minimum wage does not show the effect of minimum wage increases.
You also ignore the simple fact hat 16-25 year old unemployment is the highest in history at the same time the minimum wage is the highest in history, and that 16-25 year old unemployment is double that of the regular unemployment rate. This demonstrates both the correlation between minimum wage and 16-25 year old unemployment and the invalidity of comparing minimum wage increases to overall unemployment.
Costco is a warehouse store that has few minimum wage workers at all. Google and Microsoft also support raising the minimum wage since they don't employ minimum wage workers either. You should read this article comparing Costco to Wal-Mart (who does employ large numbers of minimum wage workers to stock shelves where Costco leaves stuff on pallets.)http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-27/why-walmart-will-never-pay-like-costco.html