There has been a lot of talk about minimum wage laws coming out of the federal government lately. The proponents say that all companies must increase the pay they provide their minimum wage employees. There is no perspective given as to what these laws will do to those employees and the employers who must pay these new wages.
It is stated that everyone should get as close to what is referred to as a living wage as possible. The current minimum wage is standing at a little over seven dollars an hour. This was an arbitrary amount when it was established. Many states have larger amounts that are required to be paid to all starting employees, some almost as high as 10 dollars.
A new, mandatory, pay rate will influence the expenses of each business affected in a discriminatory way. The payroll expenses will go up and that means other things will have to go down. Arbitrary increases of this kind will make the almost four percent of employees affected, almost not worth the extra pay for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is the fact that one size fits all programs rarely fit all or even most.
Legislators, working in Washington, DC, do not have payrolls for which they must be responsible. Many of them never have and do not understand how raising all employee expenses, for any company, impacts their ability to be flexible. All of this nanny state interference comes from the belief that all private companies have slush funds that they can dip into whenever new taxes are imposed.
These types of arbitrary laws discriminate against the teenager, just getting into the work force, preventing them from being hired. As these new comers do not have much training or experience, they are not valued as being worth the newer pay rates. This makes employers look for the older, more experienced workers and not someone that does not have a lengthy resume.
Making the new employees work with the newer rate will discriminate against the senior employees. This will cause raises from the new persons supervisor through the rest of the vertical organization to eliminate employee morale problems. This creates a problem for future plans as monies will have to be allocated for all of the extra expenses associated with payroll to be held onto.
One of the biggest problems with a new federal law dealing with the establishment of new minimum wages is that it does nothing for production. Minimum wage people begin that way and only stay at this level for a very short time. They either become more valuable and gain raises, naturally, or they do not produce and are let go. With a higher required pay to begin with, a raise will come much later and firings will be sooner.
The largest problem with these federal laws is what they do for people who do not even work at those wages. Most union contracts are based on a factor of the minimum wage in the area. By raising the wage to an unsupportable level, union contracts, already extremely confining to many companies, will be even more so as they use the new rates to demand more pay for their members.
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