But every company has a minimum wage - that is the lowest wage paid to an employee of the company. Or it can be more broadly used to describe the minimum hourly wage paid to anyone who does work for the company (temp worker, contractor, etc.).
It seems you're really missing the point of the article. Some political forces have been pushing the argument that raising the minimum wage will have many negative side effects, especially for the businesses themselves. This one example seems to show the opposite. But it's not a market force; it's a (contrarian) business decision which was made with a long term goal in mind. It seems the company decided that retaining skilled talent was worth paying more for and would result in better long term profits.
You're just playing with words. The point of a government mandated minimum wage is that work that pays less than this wage is banned. A company can decide to set the lowest wage to $15/h and when economic conditions worsen it can set them even lower to $10/h. With a minimum wage of $15 the company would just fire the employees. Right now businesses are doing well so raising wages won't hurt the economy.
Minimum wage increase do not increase unemployment. We have almost a century of data. It's always trumpeted by the wealthy, but never happens.
Small changes in the minimum wage will have minimal changes in short term total unemployment - less productive workers will have a harder time competing as more desirable workers will now compete with them and longer term there will be a bigger incentive to switch to automation to remove workers.
Larger increases in the minimum wage though will obviously effect total unemployment as the law of supply of demand still holds. As one example, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated a national $15 minimum would cause employment to be reduced by 1.4 million workers.
https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2021-02/56975-Minimum-Wage....
If any given minimum wage rate would have no effect on employment levels, than we would simply increase the minimum wage to 100 dollars an hour and end all poverty.
You simply wrote "Minimum wage increase do not increase unemployment."
I pointed out "Small changes in the minimum wage will have minimal changes in short term total unemployment - less productive workers will have a harder time competing as more desirable workers will now compete with them and longer term there will be a bigger incentive to switch to automation to remove workers.
Economists think larger increases in the minimum wage though will effect total unemployment as the law of supply of demand still holds. As one example, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated a national $15 minimum would cause employment to be reduced by 1.4 million workers."
You then respond with an insult and a link to the Nobel prize about the research showing that small increases in the minimum wage don't have an effect on employment levels and that sometimes higher pay would also attract more applicants, boosting labor supply. I pointed our that this was exactly what I said. Those 'more applicants' they refer to are why I said in the longer term less productive workers will have a harder time competing as more desirable workers will now compete with them - that won't be reflected in overall employment but it will hurt the most vulnerable workers. I also pointed out that "the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated a national $15 minimum would cause employment to be reduced by 1.4 million workers." While small increases of the minimum age won't have a major effect on employment you are acting as if you think that it would not be possible that increasing the minimum wage by over 100% could have no effect on employment. If everyone is already earning over $15 an hour it wouldn't have an effect, but for example, the wage rates in San Francisco are much higher than rural Mississippi. If you don't think a >100% increase could have an effect, please explain why you are right and economists at the CBO are wrong.
You then falsely claim I am making a straw man argument. No, I am not - I pointed out that while small increases won't have a noticeable effect on employment level, economists think a large increase can have a direct effect on employment or otherwise economists would simply propose making a $100 minimum wage. If you don't think that a minimum wage can ever affect employment levels then say so, if you think there is some level where it would affect employment levels, then what is that level and how did you decide what that level is?
Let's further break down your post.
economists think... (conjecture) ...a large increase can have a direct effect on employment... - ( 72% used to, now only 46% do. per my link)
...or otherwise economists would simply propose making a $100 minimum wage... (the most classic case of Straw Man ever. Who is proposing this huge increase?)
They are referring to the typical small increase in minimum wage that has been done for the last few decades. You seem to hold very very strong views for someone who found a press release.
>......or otherwise economists would simply propose making a $100 minimum wage... (the most classic case of Straw Man ever. Who is proposing this huge increase?)
This is exactly my point. If economists believed that a large increase could have no effect on employment levels, they would propose raising the minimum wage to say $100 an hour. Since they haven't proposed that, that means that they do believe that a large increase would directly impact employment levels. This really shouldn't be that hard for you to understand. If you don't think that a minimum wage can ever affect employment levels then say so, if you think there is some level where it would affect employment levels, then what is that level and how did you decide what that level is?
Economists are not proposing massive changes, because economics is mostly about justifying current systems and getting paid by the wealthy.
My advice would be to take an economics class.
"What Winston Plywood is doing defies almost everything we have been told about wages in Mississippi — that raising the minimum wage would cripple profits, throw company pay structures into chaos, create inflation and ultimately wreck the economy. Besides, we are told, Mississippi’s low cost of living makes a raise in the minimum wage unnecessary.
Yet a recent study provided to Congress on hearing about raising the federal minimum wage showed half of Mississippians are ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) and that a minimum wage that would cover essential costs of living would need to be $10.94 per hour for a single person and $14 per hour for two-income families with two children.
That a sawmill in a rural Mississippi town would go far beyond that is startling — and definitely something to keep an eye on."
The key factor of the minimum wage is that, if they wanted the employer could reduce their wages back down to the actual minimum wage.
It seems obvious to me that it is referring it the minimum wage within the company's wage structure, and not a national minimum wage. I don't understand your point, "the company announced the rollout of a new wage structure, including a minimum wage of $15.25 per hour", means exactly that.
> What Winston Plywood is doing defies almost everything we have been told about wages in Mississippi — that raising the minimum wage would cripple profits, throw company pay structures into chaos, create inflation and ultimately wreck the economy.
The minimum wage of that debate is a government legislated minimum wage, obviously.
They took a story of interest and lied about it to mislead people to put a favorable spin on a political issue. I.e., modern journalism.
If you accept the premise that some work is more valuable than others, then you must also accept that having a minimum wage will rule out certain types of work as being not sufficiently valuable to actually be worth paying for. Thus, having a minimum wage law means that some jobs will disappear (or become much more expensive). Whether this trade-off is worth it or not is a political choice with arguments to be made on both sides.
Unless there happens to be a major group I've never heard of in that state which opposes legal minimum wages and also wants legislation to outlaw companies giving pay rises to their lowest paid workers.
Case studies? Economists?
Or
Vested interests? Politicians? Talk radio hosts?
Journalism should be calling out the specifics here and the ?lack? of grounding it has had, and how such ?misinformation? Is spread.
These days, paying more than required is contrarian unless you’re a big tech company.
That's also exactly what's written in the article, what are you complaining against?
> “The one thing that doesn’t change is that they want to make profits,” Hill noted. “Not to get too far into theory, but what’s happening here, I think, is basic economics. For a lot of years, there were more workers than jobs. Now, I think that’s changed. These are smart people. They realize there’s a competitive market for workers. They want to hire and retain the best workers they can find. I think that’s what they’re doing here. I think what we’re seeing is that it’s the workers who have the leverage now. It’s been the other way for a long time, and now we’re seeing a shift. Everything is cyclical, so I don’t know how long it will last. But I think what (Winston Plywood) is doing is significant.”
In the small Arkansas town I grew up in, when the Tyson plant changed what we called the “starting wage” it was a big deal. Back in 97-98 it went up to $6.05, which got me to apply there and get a job. That was almost a dollar more than the US minimum wage.
I didn’t last very long. That wasn’t for me. I instead went to a mcse boot camp and got a job offered to me by the place that ran the camp. They had a service side that hired me at $11.25/hr. I was billed out to clients at $125/hr. The rest is history.
When I returned to see some high school friends around 2000, the starting rate at the Tyson plant was up to $7/hr.
> What Winston Plywood is doing defies almost everything we have been told about wages in Mississippi — that raising the minimum wage would cripple profits, throw company pay structures into chaos, create inflation and ultimately wreck the economy.
Uh, no ... they didn't raise the minimum wage, they raised the wage that they pay. That's not the same thing at all. That's a market force, not a government intervention, in this particular case.