Posted on 04/13/2010 5:17:42 PM PDT by Kaslin
Which allows an American Samoan worker to have a higher standard of living: being employed at $3.26 per hour or unemployed at a wage scheduled to annually increase by 50 cents until it reaches federally mandated wages at $7.25?
You say, "Williams, that's a stupid question. Who would support people being unemployed at $7.25 an hour over being employed at $3.26 an hour?" That's precisely the outcome of Congress' 2007 increases in the minimum wage.
Chicken of the Sea International moved its operation from Samoa to a highly automated cannery plant in Lyon, Ga. That resulted in roughly 2,000 jobs lost in Samoa and a gain of 200 jobs in Georgia.
Given Samoa's low cost of living, $3.26 provided Samoan workers a higher standard of living than some of their neighbors on other islands. Now these workers are unemployed.
What's worse is that Starkist, Chicken of the Sea's competitor, might leave the island as well. If that happens, increases in the minimum wage will have cost more than 8,000 jobs in Samoa's canneries and related industries; that's nearly half of its labor force.
Samoan standard of living will be further reduced by the increased cost of goods it imports. Ships delivering goods from the U.S. and elsewhere to Samoa will not have as much cargo on their return trips, making shipping a costlier proposition.
Cannery jobs flourished in Samoa because of its location, and it was one of the few American territories exempted from the minimum wage. Even the proposed 2007 increases in the minimum wage exempted Samoa.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
what’s worse than this is Nazi Pelousy and her husband have a big stake in COTSea
I love Walter Williams, but this article sounds as if it was written by a high school sophomore.
Nazi Pelosi is an owner of Chicken of the Sea: a vicious, evil hypocrite if ever there was one.
Walter’s column is a ‘must read’ at Drudge Report. Always brilliant-!!
i will make note of that ty!
To me it sounds as if it was written by someone who is able to discuss complex economics in laymen's terms so it's easy to understand.
The minimum wage is a horrible thing on so many levels. It contributes to the illegal alien problem. It contributes to teen unemployment, and there's no telling how much it has done to weaken strong commerce and American ingenuity. A bright young teen or a person not suited for college but pretty smart who gets paid a fair market wage rather than having no job at all, discovers that as he works harder, he becomes more valuable to his employer, who is willing to pay him more for his value.
It's WORK ETHIC and self-determination in action. Minimum wage stifles it in its infancy. If entrepreneurs were able to pay their employees a market value instead of a false floor "minimum," they'd be a gazillion times more productive. If kids or unskilled folks who were driven, smart, and productive could find jobs worthy of their skills and learning curve where their employers would benefit as well as themselves, we would all thrive and prosper. The minimum wage stifles it harshly by stealing the reward.
The minimum wage is a stellar example of a road to hell paved with good intentions.
Exactly. That's why I laugh when I hear left-wingers make fun of Sarah Palin and the simplistic way she talks. She talks at a level Democrats can understand her. Which is why she is so hated. What's funny is that she talks at a higher level then do documents written for public consumption by the government who assumes everyone is a moron.
I’m bored by many of Williams’ articles because I know this stuff. An unspeakable percentage of the voting population doesn’t know, and has to be told it in words of one syllable, with plenty of repeats and “Did you understand that, honeys.”
I think there were 7 people in the family, all from Vietnam
Added up together it was 60 dollars an hour.
They now have about 100 apartment units in this city.
It was a wake up session for some students.
and then, the min wage workers get to pay the increased prices too on every hamburger they eat, thereby giving it back again...
of course haaaaavad lawyers are too enlightened to comprehend this ...
Just the end results of liberals meddling with economies while entirely ignorant and arrogant.
Yeah, if only we could all know the deep, abiding joy of working for $0.41/hour.
You first.
It has nothing to do with the equities of minimum wages.
I understand this, that moguls like J.P. Morgan, half owner of The White Star Line (as in, RMS Titanic), packed ships and trains with immigrants for generations, filling up the lands Congress had given them via their railroad land-grants. They became fabulously wealthy while holding down wages by dumping immigrants on the manufacturing and agricultural labor pools.
"Beggar thy neighbor" works great.
And there is no mathematically-provable market-clearing wage. Theoretically, if Morgan et al. were diligent enough in dumping new jobseekers on the market, wages could actually go negative. Think about that one for a while.
There is no bottom.
I never worked for $0.41 an hour, but I worked (heavy construction) for $2.25, which was well above minimum wage. Of course, in those days, a family of four could do okay on $100.00/week.
Oh, and back on topic: Walter Williams has a knack for putting economic lessons in layman's language that almost anyone (other than hardhat unionists) can understand. If only there were about two dozen Walter Williamses in Congress, we'd be in much better shape as a nation.
It's a moral principle. It's immoral to force a business owner to pay an employee more than he's worth in production. I imagine lots of times there's a perfect part-time job for a 14-year-old kid in a neighborhood machine shop somewhere, and the guy would love to hire him at a pay commensurate with the returns, and bring him up in the business, but the government makes it a losing proposition, money-wise. So both the kid and the guy's business suffer. That's the real-world loss of being guaranteed to never have to work for 41 cents an hour.
If things were such that employers could pay a market wage instead of an arbitrarily established government minimum, jobs would flourish and so would American productivity and righteous work ethic.
And the business owner's liability insurer won't let him employ the boy even as a volunteer, and the compulsory attendance laws won't let the boy work during "school hours" even if he's homeschooled and his finished his lessons for the day, and ... and ...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.