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Forums - Politics Discussion - St. Louis will drop minimum wage from $10 to $7.70.

American wages baffle me. For 10$ and hour I wouldn't even get out of bed.



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Bring in the Unions and protest over losing 23% of your pay rate!



OTBWY said:
American wages baffle me. For 10$ and hour I wouldn't even get out of bed.

Try Eastern Europe, most people get 4$ an hour here.



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Wow, people here are actually against minimum wages. You guys must either be business owners who suck at making money or employees who don't like getting paid for working.



About 2.6% work at min wage or below (there are exceptions for jobs with tipping like bar-keeping)

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, last year ... total of 3.3 million hourly workers at or below the federal minimum. That group represents ... 2.6% of all wage and salary workers. In 1979 the represented 7.9% of all wage and salary workers.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/08/who-makes-minimum-wage/



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m0ney said:
OTBWY said:
American wages baffle me. For 10$ and hour I wouldn't even get out of bed.

Try Eastern Europe, most people get 4$ an hour here.

Relative to cost of living 

https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/index/europe 



Naum said:
Thank God I live in Europe.

so true.... especially since it looks like some americans themselfs defend this kind of behaiviour from businesses...



TallSilhouette said:
Jon-Erich said:

So by your logic, poor people should never start a business. Unless you're someone who already has large sums of money, chances are, you'll need a loan from a bank to start your business and since you're nobody, the bank will only be willing to loan you so much money. As a result, you would have to start off small and you would be unable to pay your employees a lot of money until the business took off. 

Going by your logic, the only people who deserve to be in business are rich people who can easily afford these wages. Going by your logic, the economy should be set up in a way where the rich people run all the businesses while all the poor people should only work to make the rich people even richer. 

I'm not sure if this is what you intended to say, but it sure sounds like it.

Poor people should never run a business larger than they can afford to properly support. You can be a business of one. If you're starting out and can't afford full time employees with livable wages, do the work yourself and don't hire others until you can. If you can't get the proper loan yet but really need the extra hands, hire part timers and odd jobs to supplement, but not replace. If you really expect others to fully committ to getting your business off the ground without proper compensation, they deserve a percentage of the company. If you're unwilling to do any of those things, you don't deserve to be in business.

Unless your business involves running a youtube channel of being a web designer or something you could actually do on your own, that's impossible. You can't run a restaurant on your own. You simply cannot. In fact, with the restaurant business, you're probably going to lose money for the first two or three years before it takes off, if it takes off. In a small retail establishment, it may not be impossible to run it on your own, but still very difficult. 

What you're proposing just isn't economucally feesable, especially since some of the business owners can't even pay themselves a living wage. Also, under a business plan such as yours, all of your entrepreneurs would end up moving to the south since living expenses are far cheaper than the north or west coast. 



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nomad said:
Wow, people here are actually against minimum wages. You guys must either be business owners who suck at making money or employees who don't like getting paid for working.

Switzerland doesn't have a minimum wage and they seem to be doing great. In fact a few years ago, they had a national referendum to have a $25 minimum wage and the voters voted it down because most people there apparently make more than that. Having that artificial standard would have given some business owners the insentive to pay pay people less. That's what a minimum wage does. It creates an artificial standard that is not reflective of the state of the economy or the marketplace. Depending on the wages, having a minimum wage could either cause someone to get paid far less than what they should be getting paid or far more than what is economically viable, much like what we're seeing in Washington state. If the wages were more reflective of what the marketplace demanded, most people probably would be making a decent wage, just like in Switzerland.

Then again, Switzerland hasn't been involved in a war in over 200 years and is far more fiscally responsible than the United States, which is largely why that country so well off economically.



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Ultr said:
Naum said:
Thank God I live in Europe.

so true.... especially since it looks like some americans themselfs defend this kind of behaiviour from businesses...

The US has higher wages than nearly all or most of europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita