Pretty soon fast food outlets will have self serve checkout.
Bingo -- and that's why they are hiring government subsidized labor.
Re: “Five years of 2% average yearly GDP growth simply doesn’t produce enough jobs to absorb the natural increase in the labor force.”
The increase in the American labor force is NOT natural.
Legally, we issue 1 million new Green Cards each year, and most of them go to low skill workers.
Legally, we issue or renew about 1 million work visas each year, and most of them go to foreign workers who directly compete against American born workers.
Finally, today, both Republicans and Democrats make almost no attempt to enforce the laws against nearly 10 million illegal workers, most of whom have limited skills.
America has flooded - deliberately flooded - its own labor market with cheap foreign labor.
That deranged policy has crushed the wages for millions of American born workers.
There are only two solutions:
(1) Stop importing foreign labor.
(2) Or, dramatically increase the minimum wage.
don’t worry you poor, stressed out ceo’s, the GOPe has cheap, invisible, illegal labor in the pipeline for you to make up for the “expensive” US youth that the gov’t has hamstrung with obamacare. and as a bonus for you, it’ll keep legal wages for hardworking US families low, and it’ll take care of the last part of the working US economy—the ruling political and crony capitalist elites must destroy: the part of the economy that can still give local jobs to US citizens.
isn’t that great news chamber of comerce? since china and india are already welcoming the gov’t sanctioned transfer of US technology and skilled jobs from well-paid, experienced, quality workers here in the US, to cheap, semi-skilled, quantity-over-quality workers overseas, and now with the gov’t subsidy of illegal aliens lowering wages here, the jobs you can’t move overseas can be converted to lower wages!
salad days for you, you crony capitalists; all you have to is keep those contributions coming to the dems and GOPe, so they can crush those “knuckle dragging” tea partiers.
I read the whole article. What nonsense — “if there was no minimum wage, I’d hire more young people!”
I worked at Carl’s Jr. in high school. The entire staff, except the managers, was high school students. And we worked for minimum wage.
So what’s changed? There are no teens working at Carl’s Jr. anymore because there’s a new, better source of labor that wasn’t around when I was in high school: middle-aged Mexican and Central American immigrant mothers.
You don’t have to schedule them around school hours. They will go the extra mile because they’re supporting children. They don’t call in sick to go to a concert.
Carl’s Jr. gets a better return on their labor dollar with middle-aged immigrants than American teens. It’s disingenuous to suggest that little Madison and Dylan would be slinging fries if only there were no minimum wage.
He’s perfectly fine with his labor force; he just wants to pay them less.
Once upon a time, I believed Obama, like many politicians, was just ignorant when it came to economics. But I’m now of the opinion that you don’t push the stuff he’s pushing out of ignorance.
Leni