Posted on 05/12/2016 4:35:21 AM PDT by expat_panama
One of the rallying cries of the Fight for $15 movement is that employers like McDonald’s (MCD) make billions in profits on the backs of taxpayers.
In the view of the political left, companies shouldn’t be credited for employing large numbers of workers with modest skills, but rather vilified for paying so little that workers need to rely on food stamps, Medicaid and earned income tax credits.
Now that same low-wage argument used against the fast-food industry and Wal-Mart (WMT) is being brought to bear against a surprising target: manufacturers. It seems that even as Donald Trump has vowed to bring factory jobs back to the U.S. — and get Apple (AAPL) to start making its Apple iPhone at home — by threatening to impose tariffs on imports, the reality of manufacturing employment is no longer quite what it used to be.
The Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the federal government and states spent $10.2 billion per year on safety net programs for factory production workers and their families from 2009 though 2013.
The families of 34% of production workers were enrolled in at least one public safety net program...
...factories are an unlikely target for nationwide minimum-wage protests, the Berkeley researchers suggest another course of action. Noting that many manufacturers receive significant tax subsidies as states and localities try to attract and retain them, they advise “conditioning subsidies on strong wage requirements across the workforce.”
That would provide further incentive for manufacturers to shift work out of state or out of the country.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
Related thread: Small Businesses Have Big Job Openings, But Can’t Fill Them.
Try to fight a war with lawyer and not a factory worker.
We have 330+ million people in this country.
Questions for our government:
1) What are they supposed to DO? Burger flipping is out. Manufacturing is out. Is collecting welfare a primary career option?
2) Should we be bringing in millions of low skill workers to add to the mix?
God we need Trump. In a bad way.
Honestly ? Semi-skilled assembly-line workers are going away.
Skilled trades ? Not so much, although the skill and training levels required are trending upwards (i.e. mechanics on assembly lines need to upgrade to robot maintenance technicians. . .)
As long as trained skills are required, those factory workers will have stable employment, but are under notice that they have to constantly up their game as well . . .
What an employer pays an employee is no business of the federal government.
Face it.
The $15 per hr minimum wage push is just another tax increase.
Someone good with numbers see what the take would be for the parasites in government if it gets passed.
Easy - put the lawyers in the front line like Soviet penal battalions and let them soak up the enemy’s fire.
The art of warfare has become so complex these days that conscription is basically just creating cannon fodder. Modern warfare of the kind practiced by the West requires trained professionals. Even the basic rudiments these days requires at least 14 weeks of instruction and it’s another several months before recruits start really getting proficiency.
Another factor is automation. We simply need less people to turn out a good these days with automation.
No it is not a tax. It is inflationary. Big difference.
Automation is separate issue. Automation affects all countries equally. The point is to keep the factories here in the good old USA.
Try to fight a war with lawyer and not a factory worker.
Plus, too many idiots would happily outsource our Defense work...to China! After all, many Defense workers are conservative, so by all means, put them out of work.
The funny thing is that an awful lot of automation suddenly becomes a much better option starting around the $10-12 level in many parts of the US. The last I checked, a burger bot becomes the superior choice to a dude flipping burgers at around $10 per hour.
The obvious question is what is the burger flipper who pushed for $15 per hour going to be doing when he gets no money for no hours as he’s been displaced by a bot? The Dems bet the answer is ‘go on welfare’ at which point they will become captive Dem voters.
Who’s going to build the equipment for the lawyer soldier?
Automation will actually help bring more factories back to the US. The problem is they will only employ a few people.
If we get onto a big Asian war do you think the ChiComms will give us our factories back?
Actually, it doesn’t. Because of US and Canadian unions, many factories in the US are not automated to the same degree as they are overseas. The first car fully assembled by robots with no human hands touching it in the assembly process was the 1990 Nissan 300ZX, which was assembled in Japan.
Number of US branded cars fully or even *majority* assembled by robots even today? Zero. Number of US marque plants capable of doing so? Zero.
They’re lawyers. Why would you issue them equipment?
Yup. I know that and you know that, buuuuut....
Au contraire. Free Traitors™ will tell you there to many "regs and taxes" for that to happen.. There's always an excuse with these people. According to them for manufacturing to come back to the USA there needs to be no minimum wage, no taxes, no regulations and the moon needs to be in the 7th house.
Correct. The economic arguments against a minimum wage are correct, but they are also irrelevant.
The Congress, or any agency it may create, has NO Constitutional authority to impose a minimum or maximum wage.
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