Deregulation in job hiring requirements could spark job growth?

Businesses will always hire the number of people it takes to do the job and pay them as little as they can get away with, and treat them as poorly as they can get away with and still get the job done.

The old chestnut that there would be a surge in hiring without minimum wage laws is just corporate fellatio. Ooooh we must do whatever it takes to make our corporate overlords happy so they will deign to grace us with their presence.

In the current political climate I think even the corporations realize they have gone too far. They will tentatively whisper something they might want in a dream world, but know that it would gut the middle class....and some politician picks up on it and goes "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Corp Cash, Corp Cash, Corp Cash, America, America, America!"

The corprocracy winces a little and waits for a backlash...but everyone is too busy watching American Idol or Football in HD to care.

 

Why would they hire more than is necessary to do the job? Why would they pay more than is necessary to get the job done? That's a disservice to shareholders and not a prudent use of limited resources.

 

Right, but the context of his post was that this was a negative.

 

It means that removing a minimum wage law will not cause them to employ more people, it will just allow them to pay them less.

Nothing wrong with business owners looking out for their business, but government's job (ostensibly) is to look out for "the people"...thus the minimum wage law.

(Though of course, in Right-to-Starve Texas...we push the boundaries as far as we can.)

 

I'm not completely clear on what you're asking but I do see a gap in reliable skilled manual labor. If the position you seek to fill is mostly manual labor you should seek to fill it with QUALIFIED workers. If a college degree does not actually make the worker more valuable then don't hire someone with one. Many college grads have gone to school to avoid that and are only taking the position as a last resort. They'll probably always resent it unless it is a particularly high paying manual labor job. The best thing to do would be to hire someone with useful experience. If there is no applicable experience look for a person who has done things in the past (even hobbies) that shows that they might be more useful than the other candidates.

 

Reregulation in job hiring could spark job growth

Conversely we could also regulate to promote job growth by imposing more stringent restrictions against overtime. Then we could hire 5 workers to work 40 hours a week instead of 4 workers to work 50 hours a week.

 

In Germany, they have several different kinds of public high schools (which can differ from state to state within the country), and I know at least one type is devoted to producing skilled labor. Not prep for college, but preparing them for a skilled job in industry. Someone like Commodore would decry that effort, saying that industries should simply hire who they can get for the least amount of money. That if they aren't as good as a trained and skilled man or woman, so what? If the quarterly profits are OK, who cares?

Interestingly enough, Germany has one of the most advanced economies on the planet.

 

Not sure which one you are referring to, I guess "Hauptschule" (which is the one the people with worst grades in elementary school go to)? We are just about to get rid of that one. Not sure where these people will go then.

 

Businesses will always hire enough people to do the job and pay them as much as they must to keep them and get the job done.

 

Even more important, Germany is one of the few developed countries that is also an export based economy. We hear the constant message that manufacturing can't exist in developed countries because of labor costs. Yet Germany proves that a well trained and educated labor force can produce goods so efficiently that the unit labor costs of manufacturing exceed that of any other country. We used to have a similar competitive advantage but today we have let the basic education and training required to produce such an economy fall apart.

 

I believe that if we got rid of the minimum wage right now, prices would stay the same and entry level salaries would decrease. There would be more profits and more bonuses for execs.

Minimum wage laws in the beginning were well intentioned, but inflationary. To get rid of them now, however, is a bad idea.

 

There are some unfortunate realities that we have to face as a rich nation.

Cheap skilled (and unskilled labor) is becoming increasingly prevalent around the world.

We just need to be mindful that minimum laws don't have the unintended effect of pricing out some industries. Ideally we could have different minimum wages for different industries - but I guess we achieve that effect via subsidies.

 

or just stop meddling

 

Cheap labor means very little. I pointed it out earlier. Germany is still a manufacturing/export based economy. Cheap labor in many cases doesn't necessarily equate to cost savings. German manufacturing might be more expensive but it is also many times more efficient and productive and that drives unit labor costs down below that of third world countries. There's a reason why BMW still builds almost all of its cars in Germany. For that matter, there's a reason why car companies don't build in Mexico anymore either.

The minimum wage has little to do with any of this. Skilled manufacturing labor will always get paid above the minimum wage. Far from decrying that we need to lower our standards, the Germans have made it abundantly clear that America's manufacturing expertise is awful and there's a massive skill gap that prevents them from moving jobs to the US. Hell high wage manufacturing jobs are not getting filled in the US thanks to a lack of training. it's actually pretty hard to find qualified machinists, electricians, welders, etc.. Germany's educational system places a priority on creating well trained workers in trade skills. The US meanwhile convinced itself that all of that will get exported to China so the US doesn't bother with that. Also as bad as the old unions were, they placed a large premium on in house training (which management also supported). Those programs no longer exist either.

The bottom line is that the minimum wage has little to do with unemployment in labor, especially in today's economy. I'm actually in the process of hiring people for minimum wage part time jobs and I guarantee if the minimum wage didn't exist I could get away with hiring the same people for even less. And while that's nice for me, that won't make me hire an additional worker that I dont need.

People like Commodore are so deluded by their 11th grade macroeconomics regurgitation that they forget that hiring decisions are not purely a function of wages. Median wages have collapsed since the 70s and wages as a whole have been stagnant for 20 years after adjusting for inflation. Inflation is non-existant today as well. We're not killing off jobs with our minimum wage.

 

The automation you refer to means that unskilled labor is worth less (not worthless), which means the minimum wage is preventing them from getting work. If some kid offered to walk my dog every day for a dollar, I would take that deal. For minimum wage, not a chance.

If the marginal revenue generated by that additional worker was higher than his wage, you would hire them. A minimum wage prevents this, in the aggregate. Basic math.

 

thats the point he cannot think out of his very small box

 

abolishing the minimum wage is way outside most people's boxes

Let's hear your ideas.