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crissindahouse on 05 June 2020
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sundin13 said:
Ka-pi96 said:

The problem with that is those jobs are usually the most commonly held and easily replaceable (nobody has told politicians yet that they are literally the easiest to replace and the most dispensible people on the planet yet though). And largely due to that they're also the hardest jobs to give meaningful pay increases too. Pay them more, and things cost more for everybody (including them) then everybody else charges more since they're paying more too and you just get a load of inflation and no real increase in relative income for those people.

The working conditions however would be easy to improve. They may be a shadow of what they once were, but unions can still effect meaningful change in that area.

This is going a bit off topic, but I've always felt like this argument didn't make much sense. When you look at all of the things which contribute to the cost of an item, labor costs make up a small portion of it. There is also ingredient/goods costs and overheads to consider. There is also the consideration that minimum wage increases do not apply to every worker, so you are not seeing a 10% increase in overall wage costs when you increase the minimum wage 10%.

As such, the data that I've found indicated that a 10% increase of minimum wage tends to increase cost of goods by about 0.4% (some studies find it to be higher for food service/fast food, but still not anywhere close to 10%). That means the people who see their wages increased 10% get a significant increase in buying power while everyone else gets a very minor decrease in buying power.

https://www.upjohn.org/research-highlights/does-increasing-minimum-wage-lead-higher-prices

"By looking at changes in restaurant food pricing during the period of 1978–2015, MacDonald and Nilsson find that prices rose by just 0.36 percent for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, which is only about half the size reported in previous studies. They also observe that small minimum wage increases do not lead to higher prices and may actually reduce prices. Furthermore, it is also possible that small minimum wage increases could lead to increased employment in low-wage labor markets."

In my company the worst paid jobs (order pickers) get around 2,5k a month. 

What do they have to do as minimum per month? 

Pick minimum 30k packages with around 15 sales units per package. Average sales price of one unit is like 5€

So, they pick goods worth over 2 million each. 

I'm sure a little pay raise for these guys wouldn't be the reason to go broke. But they already earn more than in many other companies which should definitely pay more.