Individually - a lot. As a group - not that much?Cal_79 said:Wonder how much of an impact being unskilled has to do with the wages one earns...Unit2Sucks said:Facts without context can be misleading. You know this. I posted context which showed your facts were misleading, whether accidentally or otherwise.DiabloWags said:Unit2Sucks said:This is a bit misleading since there are ~15 states that set their minimum wage to the federal level. So roughly half the states have minimum wage at $7.25 per hour. They aren't all tiny states either - we're talking Texas, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Indiana, etc. There are a handful of other states with minimum wage slightly higher than federal level but still sub $10.DiabloWags said:
Last year, only 5 States had no minimum wage law while 2 states had minimum wage below federal levels (GA and WY).
You're being quite dismissive of g4r.
As you know, I posted a FACT.
It's not misleading to post a FACT.
And the reason I didnt go one step further and explain what you just posted above is because the federal minimum wage level has essentially been rendered meaningless by the same people that Going for Roses hates..... Corporate America.
I can assure you that no one in Georgia is driving a Fed-Ex truck for only $7.25 an hour.
And Fed-Ex is one of the most soulless companies you could ever care to work for.
Ask me how I know.
Referencing those 7 states in this conversation could cause people to believe that the other 43 states have higher minimum wages which is obviously not true. You are correct that employers can pay whatever wage they want so long as it is at least minimum wage, but that doesn't mean that the level is meaningless. It's certainly not meaningless to the unskilled wage earners (with no bargaining power) who are still stuck earning $7.25 an hour.
Interesting article from the Economist from October showing how income growth (on a percentage basis) was higher for lower quartiles. Of course it's not true that they are playing "catch up" on an absolute basis, but it's nice to see increasing wages for the people who need it most.
One thing to note is that the article explicitly credits rages in minimum wage for some of the growth.
Quote:
The pandemic has served up a reminder, as if any were needed, of how deeply unequal America is. Billionaires have seen their wealth explode over the past year and a half thanks to a huge stockmarket rally, especially in the tech sector. At the opposite end of the spectrum, millions of mostly low-wage workers have lost their jobs, while also facing a higher risk of death from covid-19. But against this gloomy backdrop, there is some good news: the incomes of poor Americans have grown more quickly than those of richer ones.
The earnings out-performance for poorer Americans started in 2018. JPMorgan Chase Institute, a think-tank within the bank, parsed data on more than 7m households. Early in the 2010s, as the American economy recovered from the global financial crisis, the top quartile of income earners reaped the fastest income gains and the bottom quartile brought up the rear. However, a few years ago, their positions flipped. And over the course of the pandemic the gap has widened, such that, by May, incomes for the lowest earners were growing by about 7% annually, compared with 4.5% for the highest earners (see chart).
What explains the shift in fortunes? Some of the credit goes to policymakers' willingness to run a hot economy in the years prior to the pandemic. Traditionally, economists have worried that if growth booms, unemployment may dip too low, pushing up wages and, by extension, inflation. But the pre-pandemic evidence is that the "too low" level of unemployment may be considerably lower than previously assumed. Even with jobless rates below 4%, inflation remained subdued. At the same time, wage growth was most pronounced at the lowest rungs of the income ladder (given an additional boost in some states by higher minimum wages). This relationship was first observed by Arthur Okun, an American economist, in a paper in 1973 about how "high-pressure" economies tend to promote upward labour mobility as companies pay more for workers.