Democrats Turn to Minimum Wage as 2014 Strategy

[seabeckind]

40. I don't think it works that way.

No employer has any incentive to change their current wage unless they are forced to. You can't drive wages up by pushing from the bottom, it has to be pulled from up above.

What made the midde class advance was that big employer in town who had positions at tiers from common laborer clear thru skilled up to mgmt levels. There was an established career path and people could advance inside the company.

The bottom tier was usually more than the prevailing wage in the area because the employer valued loyalty and paid for it. There was quite an investment in even the lowest worker.

Add in the deferred compensation in pensions and benefits and that one large employer drove the whole economy of the town. Any other employer had to offer similar benefits to retain their better people.

Then there were the unions that guaranteed that the big employer couldn't start lowballing and use the threat of terminations. That union also guaranteed that the employer couldn't point to the next town over that was offering non-union job at a lower wage and using that as an extortion threat to force the lower wages at the current location.

(Picked up the economic model name the other day for that...beggar-thy-neighbor or race-to-the-bottom).

Then we lost the unions as the outsourcing took away the town's big employer and blamed the union (f'in lie).

So now, where's there to go? Our labor is like the battered wife who has no alternative.

That's wht the democratic platform should be fighting to fix. Get rid of that disgusting right-to-work at the federal level by using the NLRB and NLRA. That's what was promised long ago when that Taft-Hartley screwjob happened.