What would be considered a fair wage to american workers.

Today I hear a lot about corporations saying if they had lower corporate tax and less regulations smaller government ect. they would furnish more jobs for American workers.

OK, suppose corporations got that, suppose the rich corporations got all they wanted from the government and the American labor force.
What would the average wage be for the American worker?
We all know what the average wage is for white collar jobs
What would the average wage be for blue collar unskilled labor and repetitive work?
Taking into consideration all the rich corporation's demands are met including tax cuts and the golden parachute in case their profits go down,

It has been said that there are certain jobs Americans refuse to do.
To that I ask what jobs are they.

The CEO of NIKE' said that during an interveiw with Micheal Moore .
A challenge was put forth to go on line and ask the people of one town Flint, Michigan.
Over 2000 American workers said they would work for NIKE' if they had a factory in America.

Which brings up another fact,
If corporations want to do business in America and depend on American consumers to buy their products and taxpayer money to bail them out of financial chrises they should want to reward the American workers with jobs , for every American worker that has a job is a consumer, who they buy from is up to them.
Every American worker that loses their job and eventualy their house and lifestyle might not be so eager to buy from American corporations that has turned their back on them, they may turn their back on American products and American investmentseace.

We all know? I don't know - what is the average wage?

An acceptable wage is what is necessary to get someone to do the job in return for that pay while being able to see to your other necessities such as expenses and so on.

For me $8.00 to work in a retail setting as a parttime employee was very reasonable - good money. To others it's chump change and not worth their time. Meanwhile: some people work in factories for twice that yet you couldn't get me to work on an assembly line for any price.

If I were a business owner, I would base wages on the complexity of the tasks the employee has to perform, or the level of physical exertion they have to give to get the task done. More simply, wage should be based on how much effort a person expends.

If we were talking about salaries I would probably have different criteria.

A fair wage is a wage that someone is willing to offer you and one you are willing to accept. Pretty simple actually.

If you have no skills and your unskilled labor can only create $10 of value per hour of labor, then you're never going to find someone willing to pay you $10.01 or more for your labor, in fact, you'd be lucky if you could find someone to hire you for $10 because that would mean that the employer is receiving no benefit at all from hiring you.

Aunt Spiker said:

We all know? I don't know - what is the average wage?

An acceptable wage is what is necessary to get someone to do the job in return for that pay while being able to see to your other necessities such as expenses and so on.

For me $8.00 to work in a retail setting as a parttime employee was very reasonable - good money. To others it's chump change and not worth their time. Meanwhile: some people work in factories for twice that yet you couldn't get me to work on an assembly line for any price.

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As the old saying goes "DIFFERANT STROKES FOR DIFFERANT FOLKS.

Actualy I was concentrating more on the cost of living the working class or average class has never been even wit the cost of living but if you can pay for your necessities and have money left over that's somewhere in the ball park.

8dollars an hour part time is not going to pay rent, utilities, food and even if it did what would you have left to buy American products with especially if you drive to work when gas prices go up?eace

Temporal said:

If I were a business owner, I would base wages on the complexity of the tasks the employee has to perform, or the level of physical exertion they have to give to get the task done. More simply, wage should be based on how much effort a person expends.

If we were talking about salaries I would probably have different criteria.

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The American consumer could use the same tactic when buying products just how much effort from the corporate owners went into this product.eace

RiverDad said:

A fair wage is a wage that someone is willing to offer you and one you are willing to accept. Pretty simple actually.

If you have no skills and your unskilled labor can only create $10 of value per hour of labor, then you're never going to find someone willing to pay you $10.01 or more for your labor, in fact, you'd be lucky if you could find someone to hire you for $10 because that would mean that the employer is receiving no benefit at all from hiring you.

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A fair wage is a wage someones willing to offer you, and one you are willing to accept.
Simple right?

Has any corporation before outsourceing offered a lower wage to the people working at their factory when they outsourced their job?eace

Well for blue collar work, according to prevailing wage laws and union labor setting basically the going rate for non union labor, I would guess around 15.00 to 32.50 per hour. I say this through my own experience and what I have learned through out my years of blue collar work. Although there will be those who wish to get something for nothing and pay nothing, with these places i vote with my feet. Now as for myself I am doing rather well, I am not rich but I am definitely not hurting.

presluc said:

As the old saying goes "DIFFERANT STROKES FOR DIFFERANT FOLKS.

Actualy I was concentrating more on the cost of living the working class or average class has never been even wit the cost of living but if you can pay for your necessities and have money left over that's somewhere in the ball park.

8dollars an hour part time is not going to pay rent, utilities, food and even if it did what would you have left to buy American products with especially if you drive to work when gas prices go up?eace

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It's called living within your means - something that a large percentage of Americans don't do . . . debt and credit makeup for what payday doesn't cover. Personal whims and desires tends to net an adequate pay inadequate.

It is easier to say what an unfair wage is than what a fair one is. Workers create revenue by working. Some of that revenue goes to covering actual expenses of operating the business like rent or whatever. Then the owners skim some portion of the remaining revenue off the top to keep for themselves. Whatever is left goes to the workers. If the owners are skimming so much that they are getting rich while the workers are struggling to get by, then that strikes us as being unfair.

Aunt Spiker said:

An acceptable wage is what is necessary to get someone to do the job in return for that pay while being able to see to your other necessities such as expenses and so on.

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This would make sense in idealized circumstances. If there were an infinite number of employers and all the employees had perfect information and there was no transaction cost to switch jobs and there was no collusion, then yeah, that would be a good measure of a fair wage. But in reality things are much less simple. For example, people learn a type of work, then maybe there is only one employer in the place they live that hires anybody to do that type of work, so that isn't a free market where some invisible hand sets the wage correctly, they employer can pretty much dictate whatever they want. In reality, the employers hold almost all the cards and it dramatically distorts the results in their favor.

teamosil said:

It is easier to say what an unfair wage is than what a fair one is. Workers create revenue by working. Some of that revenue goes to covering actual expenses of operating the business like rent or whatever. Then the owners skim some portion of the remaining revenue off the top to keep for themselves. Whatever is left goes to the workers. If the owners are skimming so much that they are getting rich while the workers are struggling to get by, then that strikes us as being unfair.

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At the same time - what is 'barely getting by' - what I see as being a decent and comfortable living someone else sees as living in squallor.

It's tough to call.

teamosil said:

It is easier to say what an unfair wage is than what a fair one is. Workers create revenue by working. Some of that revenue goes to covering actual expenses of operating the business like rent or whatever. Then the owners skim some portion of the remaining revenue off the top to keep for themselves. Whatever is left goes to the workers. If the owners are skimming so much that they are getting rich while the workers are struggling to get by, then that strikes us as being unfair.

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And the solutions here are simple:

1.) Negotiate for a higher wage,
2.) Take your talents to someone else,
3.) Do it yourself in your own business or form a cooperative with your fellow workers who feel the same as you.

If you're producing $10 of value per hour and it costs your employer $1 per hour to provide the material you need to work, and you're only keeping $5 of that, then another employer will still benefit by offering you $6 per hour for your time and by doing so deprive your employer of employees and drive him out of business.

RiverDad said:

And the solutions here are simple:

1.) Negotiate for a higher wage,
2.) Take your talents to someone else,
3.) Do it yourself in your own business or form a cooperative with your fellow workers who feel the same as you.

If you're producing $10 of value per hour and it costs your employer $1 per hour to provide the material you need to work, and you're only keeping $5 of that, then another employer will still benefit by offering you $6 per hour for your time and by doing so deprive your employer of employees and drive him out of business.

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That would be true in a perfect economic theoretical vacuum, but it doesn't happen like that in reality. The average American worker produces over $90k/year in GDP, but the median wage is only $44k/year. So the employers are taking more than half. If reality worked like that theory, that wouldn't be the case, right?

The truth is that reality is much more complicated. In a given town there may only be a couple of companies who hire people with a particular skillset, so there isn't really anywhere else to go if they don't offer enough. Companies that don't explicitly collude on salaries still tend to prefer to keep their salaries basically the same as the others rather than get into a salary war that would hurt them all. Etc.

teamosil said:

That would be true in a perfect economic theoretical vacuum, but it doesn't happen like that in reality. The average American worker produces over $90k/year in GDP, but the median wage is only $44k/year. So the employers are taking more than half. If reality worked like that theory, that wouldn't be the case, right?

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Let me interject a dose of reality into your liberal fantasy. Here is the data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis:




This table breaks down our Gross National Income.

Fourth Quarter 2010

Employee wages = 54.72%
Taxes on Production = 7.23%
Profits, Owner's salary, Operating Expenses = 25.58%, Corporate Profits = 10.08%
Consumption of Fixed Capital = 12.87%

First Quarter 2008

Employee wages = 56.58%
Taxes on Production = 7.22%
Profits, Owner's salary, Operating Expenses = 23.88%, Corporate Profits = 6.57%
Consumption of Fixed Capital = 12.68%

So, things are not like you paint them to be. If we use your example of the average employee producing $90,000 of value per year and we pretended that all the other costs were zeroed out, leaving only the split between employee wages and corporate profits, the split in Q4 2010 would be $76,000 for the employee and $14,000 for corporate profits and in Q1 2008 it would have been $80,636.58 for the employee and $9,363.42 for corporate profits.

The reason that employees fared better under President Bush than President Obama is that employers have been shedding a lot of dead wood employees - employees who were getting paid but not really producing that $90,000 of economic value. This means that the value is still being produced but with fewer employees, so corporate profits have increased in relation to wages paid to employees.

Despite all of the above, I find it hard to buy the Leftist argument that Capital, that is the money that is put up to pay for all of the equipment and working capital of a corporate operation, is taking unfair advantage of employees, when the employees are getting paid for 84% of the value that they create. Boo hoo. That's completely fair.

RiverDad said:

And the solutions here are simple:

1.) Negotiate for a higher wage,
2.) Take your talents to someone else,
3.) Do it yourself in your own business or form a cooperative with your fellow workers who feel the same as you.

If you're producing $10 of value per hour and it costs your employer $1 per hour to provide the material you need to work, and you're only keeping $5 of that, then another employer will still benefit by offering you $6 per hour for your time and by doing so deprive your employer of employees and drive him out of business.

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which 1 through 3 I did for the first ten years of me being in the private work force. Now I have become a skilled and very knowledgeable employee and at one time self employed...FOR HIRE ALWAYS

RiverDad said:

Fourth Quarter 2010

Employee wages = 54.72%
Taxes on Production = 7.23%
Profits, Owner's salary, Operating Expenses = 25.58%, Corporate Profits = 10.08%
Consumption of Fixed Capital = 12.87%

First Quarter 2008

Employee wages = 56.58%
Taxes on Production = 7.22%
Profits, Owner's salary, Operating Expenses = 23.88%, Corporate Profits = 6.57%
Consumption of Fixed Capital = 12.68%

So, things are not like you paint them to be. If we use your example of the average employee producing $90,000 of value per year and we pretended that all the other costs were zeroed out, leaving only the split between employee wages and corporate profits, the split in Q4 2010 would be $76,000 for the employee and $14,000 for corporate profits and in Q1 2008 it would have been $80,636.58 for the employee and $9,363.42 for corporate profits.

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What are you talking about kiddo. You say above that 36% goes to profit taking- which is very close to what I estimated- then you toss out some made up numbers that are nowhere near to close to that... Seems like you're getting confused somewhere.

teamosil said:

What are you talking about kiddo. You say above that 36% goes to profit taking- which is very close to what I estimated- then you toss out some made up numbers that are nowhere near to close to that... Seems like you're getting confused somewhere.

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That's the best you've got, making up some bogus claim? Here is some unsolicited advice for you - you'd have done better just remaining silent and letting this subthread die. Your decision to post this tripe actually makes you look worse than if you had stayed silent.

RiverDad said:

That's the best you've got, making up some bogus claim? Here is some unsolicited advice for you - you'd have done better just remaining silent and letting this subthread die. Your decision to post this tripe actually makes you look worse than if you had stayed silent.

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Huh? Your source is the one that says 36% goes to profit taking...

teamosil said:

Huh? Your source is the one that says 36% goes to profit taking...

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Then help a blind guy out here. Show me where my source says 36% of National Income is going towards "profit taking" and I'll retract.

RiverDad said:

And the solutions here are simple:

1.) Negotiate for a higher wage,
2.) Take your talents to someone else,
3.) Do it yourself in your own business or form a cooperative with your fellow workers who feel the same as you.

If you're producing $10 of value per hour and it costs your employer $1 per hour to provide the material you need to work, and you're only keeping $5 of that, then another employer will still benefit by offering you $6 per hour for your time and by doing so deprive your employer of employees and drive him out of business.

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What does that Mean "Producing $10 of value"? Nothing I'm afraid.

Employers will hire at as a Low a wage as they can- Regardless of Value created.
If they make More they will move jobs overseas.
Business is for profit.

What's completely unfair is current low wages for menial jobs due to Illegal immigrant labor.
Let's see what a REAL supply/demand wage is by putting sanctions on illegal hiring by EmployERS- -- say a $5000 for first offense, double for 2nd, Jail for 3rd.
Let's see what a fair wage is for bussing restaurants, Day laborers, Checkout counters, and other menial jobs.
It would lower unemployment by 1/4-1/3 overnight. (allow needy retirees and college students to make a decent wage)
And Probably at about 3x the $3 they are paying Illegals-- or more.

"Value created" is less important than what the market will bear in Fair auction.
Most jobs left in America are Service jobs.
Employers will pay what they Have to (not value created) and then raise the prices a few percent for Restaurants, socks, dry cleaning, etc.
Well worth a little inflation to put our own back to work.

presluc said:

A fair wage is a wage someones willing to offer you, and one you are willing to accept.
Simple right?

Has any corporation before outsourceing offered a lower wage to the people working at their factory when they outsourced their job?eace

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Would you ever accept less pay? If you would, what do you think the chances are many would?

presluc said:

The American consumer could use the same tactic when buying products just how much effort from the corporate owners went into this product.eace

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If we did that, then product quality and durability would probably rise substantially. Money would actually equal value. It would cut down on waste over time.

RiverDad said:

Then help a blind guy out here. Show me where my source says 36% of National Income is going towards "profit taking" and I'll retract.

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Am I misreading what you posted? You said 25.58% was for the owner's profits and salary and 10.08% was for corporate profits. No? Add those up, round, and you get 36%.

deltabtry said:

Well for blue collar work, according to prevailing wage laws and union labor setting basically the going rate for non union labor, I would guess around 15.00 to 32.50 per hour. I say this through my own experience and what I have learned through out my years of blue collar work. Although there will be those who wish to get something for nothing and pay nothing, with these places i vote with my feet. Now as for myself I am doing rather well, I am not rich but I am definitely not hurting.

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Well what if factory workers or blue collar workers were willing to work for say 9.00 to 25.00 per hr.
without unions, and if that's not enough corporate and working class could negoiate on a somewhere in the middle.eace