The charity organization that my church is involved in faces this problem all the time. Trying to get people who don't speak the language or who have real mental problems from things like drugs is a hard sell for what minimum wage rates are. Things like going around town and cleaning restrooms for some nominal fee isn't legal with our current system. It really makes the problem of poverty a problem for direct charity instead of self enabling, it is really tragic . We have a class of people who fall below the min wage rate who are forced by law to be perpetually unemployed. Even if you see unemployment as a good thing, there HAVE to be some exceptions so that we can get some low skill jobs for the people that need it.

This also encourages cash, under the table transactions for cheap jobs. Causing people who try to find work to be criminals as well as the people providing for it, not something any charity wants to get involved in. Min wage laws at worst need to be repealed and at best need some fine tuning, especially during hard times.

(technically speaking, if I stared a lemonade stand and payed people to go fetch things for me, poor people, and I didn't pay them min-wage (something not likely to be generated off lemonade stand) then I would be in breach of the law...now if I just gave them money...that's cool...wth)

The other side is that if you set the minimum wage lower, then that's how much the entire low-end of the market would make. Fast food workers, student jobs and so on, make minimum + something, if they're lucky.

Most states have a separate number for tip-based jobs, but we already covered tipping in a different video.

A college student making a bit less, IMO, can't excuse damning a person to eternal poverty, or at best, criminal employment. And as a former cook in a sonic, a fast food chain in the south, I started at above min wage. I guess depending on where you go that would very, but here in Texas, that was the state of things. If the statement the broadcast brought up is true (about a very marginal amount of jobs being min wage), then the amount of people that benefit from it being so high is small compared to the amount of people it hurts.

Regardless, even if we disagree on the particulars of the necessity of min wage, I think we could agree that if 2 parties agree that they wave that protection, it should be allowed. Right now, we violate the law if we go around and get payed to clean rest room stalls. What we have to do is clean it, accept it as charity, then give it away. And even then we are in the gray area and depending on the DA at the time could be brought up on charges.

How about we lower maximum executive compensation? That would free up millions to billions of dollars to hire minimum wage workers!

You can't add a 2 party consent loophole, because then every job interview would simply include a form saying you consent, and if you don't you're no longer a candidate for the job. There's no way to enforce any sanctions against employers who don't hire people who insist on the minimum wage, because the jobs don't exactly have high requirements from candidates.

I worked in a few jobs above minimum wage, but they were always "min + X". If the minimum wage was less, I would have been paid less. I've also worked a job where I was paid cash under the table, but that was for different reasons.

From my experience, the minimum wage creates a starting position for the value of human labor. An employer can't take advantage of high unemployment times and say "I'm gonna fire my $7.50 an hour employees and hire $3 an hour ones, since right now people will work for that". The same is not true for higher paying jobs, where an employee has value due to his experience, training and education, but can still be replaced by a college graduate earning half what his predecessor used to make.

^Right, I already think the system is horrible, and I wouldn't want to add silly rules to make it work for some people at the expense of others. That is already how the system is setup, it protects skilled laborers from unskilled for ever rivaling their position in the market place. It keeps the poor, under skilled person from ever threatening his position. I was lucky enough that I could read, write, and do arithmetic as I am unimpaired and took my education seriously growing up, some either weren't that lucky or missed the opportunity all together.

However, as a result of that, the majority of people make more than min was in the US, but you still have a substantial portion of people who can't read, write or do all that other basic stuff you take for granted. There is something very important to remember about min wage, it isn't the starting point of what labor is worth, it is just what some person considers a min standard of living should be in the US, and as a result, the default wage one has to charge. What it doesn't represent is what actual value of skills certain under privileged people (sometimes through no natural fault of their own) have. A person who can't read, write, or do simple math, or speak the language could only very rarely find a job that would demand them to be compensated in a level on par or surpassing min wage.

When you set a min price for labor rate you ensure that when markets fluctuate, that the people on the bottom suffer most. Instead of trying to find a low paying job, they just get none. You also ensure that the price of goods, specifically goods that would be inexpensive through cheap labor are more expensive and cause those with all ready low wages or no wages to pay more for them.

I sympathize with the goals of min wage, truly, but in my experience with the destitute, they do more harm than good.

(edit grammar...gosh I sux at writing)

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
^When you set a min price for labor rate you ensure that when markets fluctuate, that the people on the bottom suffer most.

Yes, eliminating the minimum wage sure would stick it to the rich. I can just see all the lobbyists going to Capitol hill to fight such a measure...

And one should stick it to the rich because? Doesn't matter cause min wage sticks it to the poor as it currently is configured. Mandatory charity would be "better" for their situation than mucking with wage prices.

I just don't buy the argument that lowering the minimum wage helps the people on the lowest economic tier.

First of all, my experience working with homeless people appears to be different from yours GFreek. What I find is a mix of 3 categories of individuals.
1. People who are disabled to the point that they cannot care for themselves. These people should really be supported by society but are on the streets for lack of any kind of social programs that would help them.
2. Individuals who choose to live on the streets and have learned to work the system. It's an unavoidable group that will exist no matter what you do.
3. A very, very few people who have been knocked off their feet and will get back up in a short time.

Minimum wage doesn't really affect any but the third group and there really aren't many of them from my experience. Lowering the minnimum wage would just make that group larger.

No. It's hard enough to survive and provide for a family if you have to make do with 7.25 an hour. The idea of employing MORE people with LESS ability to survive on the wages they're being payed is absurd. If you want to help people then fight the top heavy pay structure that's developed in the US over the past 4 decades. Salaries at the top levels of our companies have been hyper-inflated at the expense of everyone else.

^ I was being a bit facetious. People like me tend to think that things like "economic recessions" aren't caused by forces of nature, but by the big boys in our economy making big mistakes. From a goals point of view, my aim is to make sure that the people at the top making the decisions are the ones who feel the pain of their mistakes instead of the poor.

Eliminating the minimum wage won't make things better for people at the bottom of our society as long as the chief result of some big banker at Goldman Sachs or the Fed making a mistake means that everyone who makes less than $40,000/yr has to take a haircut, while they take home millions in bonuses.

Conservative/libertarian right-wing ideologues seem to think that giving these robber barons and banksters (rhymes with gangsters) a freer hand to fuck over their underlings will make things better for we peasant folk.

I honestly can't fathom why people's basic faculties of reason can be so broken as to think that's really what would happen.

Put another way, is there any historical precedent where cutting or eliminating minimum wage actually improved the lives of the poor? I don't doubt eliminating the minimum wage would reduce unemployment, but so would a ban on powered earth moving equipment for road construction. It doesn't mean it's actually improving the situation at all.

Authored by David Neumark, (professor at UC Irvine, a college located in the hardcore conservative Orange County, CA), and William Wascher who sits on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. So no surprises here.

We have recently been reminded that if the market is left to its own devices (without regulation), our ecomomy will collapse.

The same is true here.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/would-cutting-the-minimum-wage-raise-employment/