Got into it with my arrogant brother Re: Minimum Wage

[Dirty Socialist]

Long and rambling. Sorry about it.

My older brother owns a microbrewery. He is really upset about the proposed minimum wage hike. He posted (on Facebook) that paying 30 percent to do more with less people to do more work is bad. I responded (with my moderate view that the wage should go up to $11 per hour, and not just yet, since times are tough now for business owners. Despite my moderate view, he was set OFf. He said “have you set payroll lately?” And “how about paying them what they’re worth?” I responded with something about Living Wage” and the fact that we taxpayers have to foot the bill to have them fed, housed, and treated medically because of their low wage. He then asked “do you own a small business?” He also said a minimum wage job is just a supplemental income.
I’m tired of many business owners’ arrogant attitude.

[OhNo-Really]

1. I paid $10-$12.50 an hour in the 1980s

My teams worked hard & happy and never left. 11 years we worked happily & I was just fine.

People don’t understand Sufficiency Capitalism

[Claire Oh Nette]

2. Changing the subject

He is not addressing the living wage issue. He is distracting and creating bullshit false equivalencies. Minimum wage jobs are not supplemental income. Income is income. He views these people who work for him as worth less.

If he can't afford to pay living wages, he shouldn't be in business.

[Dirty Socialist]

6. THIS!

Exactly.
I told him if he can’t pay a living wage, he should rethink his business model. He didn’t like that.

[Claire Oh Nette]

18. I bet not

You called him out. You spoke truth.

Fun fact: $1 hour raise is just $2000 for a full time employee.
Fun fact: $15 min wage = $31,000. THat's scarcely above the poverty level. Their own stimulus via unemployment last spring gave away they know $15/hr is an appropriate minimum wage.

WHat's your brother got? a dozen employees? Are his profit margins so tight he can't pay his own people enough to afford to dine at his establishment?

We have to stop letting them change the subject to avoid the uncomfortable parts.

[Dirty Socialist]

29. He has two employees

That’s it

[Claire Oh Nette]

30. Cheap, greedy, selfish bastard

If paying those two more will break him, he's not a very good business man.

Show him the math. I can make a power point if he needs one.
By his own admission he pays 2 people ~$11.50 an hour.
$3.50 x 2 employees x 40 hours x 52 weeks in a year = $14,560.

If this breaks him, he deserves it.


Return to Eisenhower tax rates.

[Initech]

3. It has nothing to do with minimum wage. It has everything to do with profit margins.

[Meowmee]

4. Many self employed small biz owners

in our areas who do landscaping and all sorts of home improvement work, hire non citizens as employees, or they have small working teams. I am not sure what they pay their employees, but I am sure they all cheat on taxes and hide income. It was part of the reason so many voted for the monster.

[Claire Oh Nette]

19. This...

They cheat.

I have a friend who runs a massage therapy business out of her home. Keeps busy, give a good therapeutic massage, has several MS clients.

She adjusts her "income" to be sure she pays no income tax. Cash payments. She records the credit card payments, but not the cash.

My guess is anyone with a cash business cheats.

[Meowmee]

23. Yes

And the underpaid employees prolly cheat as well, being underpaid. I see lots of people paying in cash for everything at various stores which is usually much less common now.

[Grasswire2]

24. I would turn that friend in to the IRS.

Anonymous tip line. That's outrageous.

[Claire Oh Nette]

25. I thought about it.

An ex.

So....

[Grasswire2]

26. heheh. nt

[Grasswire2]

27. I turned someone in once who was grifting off the charity she started in her daughter's name.

Pissed the hell out of me. Blatant misuse of charitable money raised off her late daughter's illness.

Well, she was also trying to get a man I was seeing. But the complaint I filed was filled with documentation and legit.

[brewens]

5. I was at a mini Anheuser Busch convention in the late 80's. It was a bunch of distributors in Idaho

together for it. Some brewery reps were there and showed us a couple of the speeches from the big bosses from the national convention. I think it was Auggie Busch III that gave the be careful what you ask for speech. He actually warned them about right to work laws that would hurt the working class.

The gist of it was you sell premium beers for top dollar to people that earn good money at those union jobs and you don't want to change that. That was about the start of some changes in the beer business they never wanted to see. The big one was expanding their cheaper Busch beer line nation wide. Beating down the working class forced them to. People that drank a lot of beer didn't have enough money for that much of the good stuff. It was undeniable we ended up doing more work hauling stacks of that stuff that yielded less in profit.

[Yavin4]

7. Does he demand that his landlord rent him space at below market rates?

Or that his suppliers lease him equipment at rock bottom prices? Why is it that labor has to be the ones that must be sold at rock bottom prices?

If he cannot afford to pay his workers a decent wage, then he should go out of business.

[KentuckyWoman]

8. Yes, I have owned a business.

Small business owners who don't respect their workforce tend to lose sleep, feel much greater stress, die younger ... the list goes on. Over time the ugly eats the body as well as the soul. I've seen it over and over again.

My business was doing taxes for fairly wealthy small business owners. We employed anywhere from 7 to 25 people. We shared the profits all along, and I handed the business over to the employees a while back and retired.

[applegrove]

9. $11 an hour is nothing in some cities. Most places. It is not a living wage.

[onecaliberal]

11. 20 dollars an hour is not a living wage here.

[Withywindle]

10. "How about paying them what they're worth?"

So he straight up says he doesn't think his employees are worth much.

"He also said a minimum wage job is just a supplemental income."

Supplement to what, exactly? The two or three OTHER jobs they have to have to pay rent?


edit: I know you can't reveal the name of the brewery and I'm not asking it, but I sure do wish I knew so I'd never buy that brand.

[SheltieLover]

12. The real unaddressed problem is housing costs

$15-$20/ hour is insufficient when one has to pay ridiculous rent / mortgage.

Jmo.

[BannonsLiver]

28. It's sufficient in some parts of the country, but not others.

You probably can’t live in the Bay Area or NYC on it but there are places in between where you can. I’m in a Midwestern city of 1.5 million. You could do pretty well here on $20 an hour.

One can’t live anywhere on the current federal minimum wage, however. It is a poverty wage.

[SunSeeker]

13. You don't need to own a small business to know that he is cheating taxpayers.

Why should taxpayers subsidize his business by paying his workers what he should be paying them? Minimum wage workers end up on food stamps, Medicaid, and subsidized housing, because they can't afford to live on $7.25/hour.

Minimum wage workers aren't just teenagers working for supplemental fun money. They're typically adults working to feed themselves and their families.

It is a common myth that very low-wage workers—workers who would see a raise if the minimum wage were increased—are mostly teenagers. The reality is that raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would primarily benefit older workers. Eighty-eight percent of workers who would be affected by raising the minimum wage are at least 20 years old, and a third of them are at least 40 years old.

https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-workers-older-88-percent-workers-benefit/

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

14. Every time this comes up, I remind people that in 1914 Henry Ford doubled,

yes that is, doubled the wage for his employees. From $2.50 per day to $5.00 per day. At the new wage they could potentially afford to purchase the cars they were building. What a novel concept! Pay workers enough to buy what they were making!

Every time anyone looks at benefits for low-income workers, they see that those people return every single penny of benefits back into the economy. Any sort of justification not to give money to the poor enrages me. And I happen to be a bit above the poverty level, and so don't really need those benefits for myself. But in my past I have been poor enough to understand.

Let's please have some sort of universal minimum income. Oh, dear lord I wish that had been around when I was young. It's far more needed now. So what if I, a somewhat lower income person, must pay more taxes. Others will benefit. Oh, and I do volunteer work at a homeless shelter and so I have a sense of who benefits from this.

[LSFL]

15. Your brother did the impossible Dirty Socialist

He makes a beer that I don't like.

And I can find good in Natty Daddy.

[Klaralven]

16. If a job isn't worth $15 / hour, it shouldn't exist.

[AmyStrange]

17. A higher minimum wage is a sneaky way of taxing capital gains, and...

-

I LOVE that idea.

It also keeps more money in each state rather than going to the 1%.
=============

[Wounded Bear]

20. Higher wages attract more workers...

and better ones, too.

[Generic Brad]

21. Paying them what they're worth?

Does he fancy himself a slave owner of sorts? Perhaps he makes the profit he deserves.

[Johnny2X2X]

22. $15 will mean the world to millions of people

It will mean hope for tens of millions of people. A chance to have some dignity for young families.

[alphafemale]

31. Walmart is an example

They pay their employees so little that the employees need SNAP (food stamps)

Walmart also sees a large part of profits by collecting SNAP as payment.

See what a fraud it is?