Posted on 08/25/2007 5:30:31 AM PDT by Hydroshock
who in places are being forced to boost wages or be creative to fill their jobs.
Sounds like a good thing to me.
I went to a subway this week, ordered a BMT. 2 weeks ago a BMT was $6.50, last week the price went up to $9.50. Complained to owner. He said he had to raise wages to $10/hour
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Did you call bull? If he raised his wages from $8 to $10 an hour, does it take an employee more than an hour to make your sandwich?
Mrs VS
The unemployment rate for blacks is 8.5%. The US population will increase by 62 million in the next 23 years. This is more propaganda aimed at importing more high school dropouts from Mexico and Latin America.
Of course I had to pay his price, you state the obvious.
My point was to show that the problem is surfacing as a price increase here in the west.
....Bob
We have plenty of workers...If anything, we have too many small businesses...
If you go into business counting on cheap foreign labor to fill your pockets for you, you have no business being in business in the U.S....
There is more than wages involved in a price increase eg:
materials (bread, meat, plastic wrappings, napkins
he has to pay a % of his profit to Wal Mart
Gasoline
and the beat goes on and on...
....Bob
Just so. The market still works, if it is allowed to. And those who are complaining need to recall that just because they want to open a restaurant is no reason to expect they will be a guaranteed success at it. Half of all small business launches fail in the first year, so there is nothing new going on here.
This doesn’t surprise me a bit. The problem started thirty some years ago when we started aborting (murdering) potential workers — about 50 MILLIOM (so far).
Such employers and managers are too economically illiterate to be employers and managers. The country needs them to go out of business and be unemployed, so that they can be available to work those jobs for less than market wages.
Jobs that require government intervention to be filled don't contribute to economic growth; they contribute to the growth of nanny government and corrupt business.
There is no shortage of labor in this country, and no need to import workers of any kind. Let the market determine the value of the services required. Those who refuse to pay market rates can do without, do it themselves, or go out of business.
It's pathetic that half the posters here are suggesting government intervention (increasing immigration) as a solution.
I also read a few months ago about a Montana fishing equipment manufacturing firm that could not get employees to work their assembly line. The owner searched 100 miles in every direction.
The owner was between the rock and the hard place. If he raised wages and prices to make a profit, he lost sales because his prices were too high.
His choice go out of business (and let China sell it all) or outsource to a 3rd world country (he was very anti China, BTW) He opened a factory in India.
It ain’t easy....
....Bob
Montana has a total population under 950,000 while Wyoming hovers right around 500,000. And those are big states. You have a very small labor pool and not much prospect for anyone unemployed to survive one of their typical winters, so those not already employed tend to leave, rather quickly, when it starts to turn cold, say around NOW (not quite, but it has seemed that way to some of my family up there).
The economics of these states is not amenable to analysis the way the economy of New York or Atlanta is. When there’s a boom in employment the workers need to come in from elsewhere in the country. With all of the benefits still available in the urbanized areas, even after all of the much vaunted reforms in welfare, it’s a big deal to get minimum wage workers to move to that kind of isolated country.
I love Wyoming, particularly the Wind River area where my Relatives are. I’ve always said I’d love to live there... so long as I knew I didn’t HAVE to live there. The thought of being “down and out” and trapped there is truly frightening.
By the same token my cousin runs a fabulously successful exotic car certified maintenance facility in Southern Montana (at one time he was the only certified Lamborghini mechanic in three states) and all of the Hollywood types with their pocket ranches have provided him an excellent living over the last 40 years or so.
Nobody talks about ‘cost push inflation’ because it’s scary, nasty stuff which can’t be addressed by minor manipulation of interest rates....
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In my humble opinion there is no such thing as “cost-push” inflation, one economist in the sixties read a newspaper column describing how the government was worried that recent increases in the price of steel would cause inflation. He commented that that was equivalent to saying that the recent rise in the river level would cause heavy rains.
I have a novel idea. Keep the wages the same for years and let another 20 million slaves illegal aliens undocumented workers pour in from turd world countries to keep the wages down, fill the jobs on the cheap, and undercut Americans, especially on the low end of the wage scale (but that "trickles up" to most levels, so it's a twofer)! Oh, wait a minute. We're already doing that. Never mind...
Which is a good thing. Because when supply gets on their side, employees make more money. With more money they can buy more things. Including American made products that cost a little more but are better quality.
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A world of wisdom in one paragraph and it seems to be understood by few! I have seen complaints on this board recently about how long it takes to check out at Wal-Mart and I made one such comment myself. But I also commented that I remember when a checkout operator actually made a living and the line moved much faster than it does now even with “automated” scanning. I knew an A&P checker in 1971 and she earned in nominal terms probably sixty percent of what checkers are paid now and in inflation adjusted terms probably three to four times as much as checkers are paid now. She knew she was well-paid and took pride in being the fastest and most accurate and the regular customers would actually change lanes just to get to see her smiling face. The ones I see now are so bummed out it is a wonder they don’t spit in the customer’s face sometimes.
Have you read about housing costs in Montana? It’s not pretty......except MAYBE in Sidney, which is just a big farm town on the edge of N. Dakota, and the Canadian border. Brutal winters, too. (My great grandparents homesteaded there.)
It’s not that, John. It’s, like Bush says— We Americans just don’t want to do any work that’s...well...icky.
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Baloney, I am sixty three and I work part time because I want to make a little extra, I could live without the part-time job but pay me one hundred dollars an hour and I will shovel horse manure for eight hours a day. And yeah, I can still do it, I have done it before, I grew up on the farm.
BINGO! I’d like to ask the “jobs Americans won’t do” crowd if they would be willing to do their job for half as much. And if they say “no”, then point out that they must give up their job to an illegal, as its a job that Americans won’t do.
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Excellent!!!
I hear what you are saying...BUT... I went to a subway this week, ordered a BMT. 2 weeks ago a BMT was $6.50, last week the price went up to $9.50. Complained to owner. He said he had to raise wages to $10/hour, and pointed out that he wasn’t in business to lose money. BTW, this was a Subway in a Wal Mart. (in Utah)
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The same is happening here but perhaps not that fast! I remember when paople didn’t eat away from home much and if they did they often carried something with them from home. We may wind up doing the same thing again. I admit that I got used to relatively low-priced eating places and I miss being able to eat out any time I felt like it but I realized that there had to come a time when the prices went back in line with other things. I ofter hear others say that they have almost stopped eating out because it costs so much more than a couple of years ago. Eating out was once a rare treat, it may be again.
Gotcha! And a big Amen, brother!
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