From an MPBN article, reposted to the Green Independent Party website:
The current minimum wage in Portland, and across Maine, is $7.50 an hour. But the Portland City Council’s Finance Committee is expected to vote early next year on a proposal that would increase it to $9.50 an hour, beginning next July.
It would increase again – to $10.10 an hour – in January 2016, and go up to $10.68 an hour the following year. Thereafter, the rate would increase annually, following the rate of inflation.
…
For some, the ordinance does not go far enough. Tom MacMillan is chair of the Portland Green Independent Committee, which is calling on the council to adopt a minimum wage of $15 an hour.
“What I support, and what the Green Party supports, is a universal, enforceable living wage,” MacMillan said, “and what the mayor’s proposed is a universal enforceable higher poverty wage.”
MacMillan and others cited studies carried out in the handful of cities that have introduced their own minimum wage ordinance, suggesting that the economy has benefited and employers were not driven away. But several business owners said adopting the measure will drive up wages across the board.
Great points, Starchild!
I always try to refer to “wage control laws” rather than “minimum wage laws”.
“Wage control” is about exerting government control over wages, just as “gun control” is about asserting government control over guns.
Although the main focus of economic statists in recent years has been to criminalize paying people less than a set amount, there have also been calls to criminalize paying people *more* than a set amount.
This has actually been government policy before, including in the United States. Brian Doherty’s book “Radicals For Capitalism” recounts, for instance, how R.C. Hoiles, the libertarian owner of the Orange County Register and other papers in the Freedom Newspaper chain, was penalized for illegally giving his workers a *raise*.
In extreme cases, governments have attempted to do this to entire countries. The “Iron Curtain” dividing Europe during the Cold War was to a large extent a manifestation of wage control laws. The Soviet Politburo and its satellite regimes in Eastern Europe did not want companies paying employees more than their state-owned enterprises were paying, because it might lead their best employees to go somewhere else where they could make more money.
Since they couldn’t stop employers in the rest of the world outside their control from offering higher wages, what they did instead was simply make it illegal for the people under their control to leave.
The free market may not be a perfectly fair way of setting wages, but a system that allows wages to rise and fall naturally in response to dynamic and ever-changing price signals is a lot more fair, a lot less biased, than arbitrarily establishing some fixed number by an act of legislation, bureaucratic fiat, or majority vote, with which non-exempted employers are then forced to comply.
The voluntary interactions of a market constitute a kind of ecosystem. Just as interfering in biological ecosystems often creates unintended negative consequences, so does interfering in economic ecosystems.
Statists rarely acknowledge this in so many words, but they often acknowledge it in a de facto sense, by exempting or excluding various entities or individuals from their economically coercive policies. They seem to realize that if they implemented these policies fully and consistently, it would be a massive disaster and completely unworkable. These exemptions and exclusions are rarely talked about, however. They like to maintain as much as possible the fiction that their controls are fair for everyone, and treat everyone equally.
That’s why, for instance, we so often hear about a “universal” living wage, “universal” health care, and so on. Despite regularly using the term however, the people championing government controls are almost *never* talking about a universal system. In this country, they are usually talking about programs limited to covering people in the United States, i.e. roughly 5% of the world’s population. They have enough understanding to realize paying everyone in the world at least $15 an hour starting in January 2016 would be an economic and political impossibility, but, sadly, not enough to realize that even less ambitious schemes of this sort are harmful and go against economic reality, and so for the purposes of their proposed policies they tend to simply ignore those who are excluded from their “universal” plans, despite the fact that many of those folks are poorer and more deserving on a “needs” basis than most of the designated beneficiaries of the government interference.
I’ve posted this vid before, and his political speculations at the end have not , yet (?), turned out to be true. But her Wolff does a better job than me at explaining a Marxist view on how capitalism works
This url doesn’t read right, maybe it’s a mobile device url? The vid is titled How Class Works, it’ on youtube.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=eGOA2WedIQo
I think “surplus value” is a more accurate description of what I mean. Capitalist applies capital to buy resources, tools etc, working person provides the physical or mental effort that turns saud resources, tools, capital into something of value to others. Subtract worker’s wage. What remains is what I’m refering to as surplus value, or profit in the capitalist view.
I would have to see some hard data showing child labor laws have negative consequences. I’ll look into that. But it does not seem realistic — that children are better iff working.
I know Wolff supported The Green for Governor in NYS this last election. And I think he participated in that Green Shadow Cabinet thing. But the Greens are a capitalist party, albiet neo-Keynesian. I’m sure there are crossover issues, like worker coops, but the Green Party in the US in not socialist.
I’m familiar with what “surplus profits” is supposed to mean. I don’t agree with the theory. It’s based on the idea that work by itself produces value, and capital adds nothing to the equation. But if that were true, people digging the earth with their hands would be better than if they use farm animals which in turn is better than using machinery, since more work = more value. And it would be best of all to dig holes and fill them up – lots of work! Capital adds to the productivity of workers and is motivated by profit. Workers are motivated by wages. It is a mutually beneficial exchange, which Marxists try to paint one side of as completely unnecessary and parasitic.
Unlike many libertarians I actually do agree with that, but I see it as a result of government-business collusion in many ways both big and small, and impossible without that. Government imposing and raising the minimum wage only aids and abets this process, it does not curb it.
“There is no such thing as “surplus” profits, and labor by itself does not generate any profits or much of anything whatsoever without the other factors of production.”
By surplus profits he is talking about the profits the owner gets for owning the means of production that could have gone to the workers in terms of profit sharing.
The owner should be compensated for her productive labor. But she shouldn’t be compensated for merely owning the enterprise. The immoderate amount of profits people accumulate through capital/stock/land/patent ownership according to contemporary norms seems to be a big cause of statism and crisis in the world.
Deran, from what I can tell the Green Party would welcome qualified candidates who advocate for Wolff’s variety of economic democracy. I don’t know how you’d translate Wolff’s view into a reform program, but I imagine it would have incremental steps. Greens would probably support start up loans for cooperative businesses (like in Venezuela and Italy) as well as state/local banks to administer them.
You left out part of your sentence, but assuming I guessed correctly, yes, all of these things contribute to unemployment. Child labor laws are a big pain in the ass to a lot of teens who actually want to work. Instead they are forced to sit endlessly and be bored, learning crap they will not retain and have no interest in just to regurgitate it on tests with various degrees of success and forget it. Then they have copious amounts of time left over to surf porn, play video games, get drunk and high, have (often surreptitious) sex without commitment, get into petty theft and vandalism, hang around malls being bored, and so on. They end up knowing less book-learning wise after high school, and often after college, then people did a century ago after finishing middle school or even elementary school and dropping out. Biologically they are adults, but are treated as children. It’s a big part of what is wrong with our society.
With minimum wage laws, the forced idleness often lasts well past the teen years, and for more than a few people leads them to dependency on bad relationships, turning to crime, and/or lifetimes of poverty because they can’t get the jobs, skills and experience that form the bottom rungs of a career ladder.
Many measures of worker and consumer empowerment – wages, work hours, work conditions, environmental conditions, food and other consumer safety, etc. – were actually getting better on their own before the laws that supposedly provide for these things were enacted, and the pace of progress in all these areas that naturally happens as a society gets wealthier actually slowed after the laws were enacted.
There is no such thing as “surplus” profits, and labor by itself does not generate any profits or much of anything whatsoever without the other factors of production.
When I hear people say raising the minimum wage I remember reading about how similar things were claimed when child labor laws were enacted. And food safety laws. And when the Rural Electrical Admin brought electricity to farms. Businesses always complain when their ability to maximize short term profits are restricted.
The problem with the Greens is that they are focused on reforms. And if the last 30+ years have taught us nothing, we have learned that reforms can and are retracted and abolished to give businesses the upper hand as far as control over the surplus profits working people generate. imo.
And here is a good essay by economist Richard Wolff on the minimum wage. It’s a few years old, but the analysis holds up.
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2006/wolff220906.html
Ross makes things too bureaucratic. All good little socialists know there should be no wages at all – everyone takes what they need and everyone provides to their own ability. Or else.
Ross, are you being facetious?
Who is going to pay for all that you mentioned?
In addition to a minimum wage increase, we really need universal healthcare, free education, improved welfare and unemployment, and maybe some form of a guaranteed minimum income. Then inflation wouldn’t be such an issue for people’s basic survival….basic needs could be met without people needing to worry about paying the bills.
$20 per hour? I think socialists true objective is what Pol Pot did in Cambodia. How can they actually believe in such economy crippling nonsense.
When $41.6k becomes the new $24k due to inflation what will be your next measure for a living wage? You’re promoting an endless cycle of poverty despite your claiming to want to eliminate it.
Who can live on $15.00 an hour? Get serious! Living wage is at least $20.00 per hour ($41,600 per year). Eliminate poverty now!
I thought $15 was the goal? Or, is that just the Socialist Alternative Party’s goal/platform?