I don't understand why people are talking as if paying a minimum wage is a must for every person paying someone and thus not good.
Salty, YOU NEVER LISTEN TO ME! Okay, you do, lol. It's raining and I felt like yelling but actually, you did ask me the same question after I'd already answered it...the one about paying less than minimum for having a lawn mowed or babysitting of kids without special needs by a teenager.
I am not an employer when I personally hire a babysitter or someone to mow my lawn. Why does minimum wage have anything to do with this?
There are ways to get work done that do not require paying minimum wage. Like one person stated, he was paid a percentage. I've worked as an independent contractor and sometimes I made great per hour, sometimes what I made an hour could be counted in change. If I'm paid by production, and it is legal to do so, the person paying me isn't my employee...I'm either my own business or working on my one. I forget the difference, but when I worked on my own, I paid a ridiculous amount of taxes, but when I worked under a business name, I was able to claim deductions and reduce how much tax I owed overall. The first year, they offer a 50% deduction for first time business owners.
However, have any of you considered that a business may also be protected by minimum wage and that it may help the economy? Think about how it was before they started requiring waiters/waitresses to be paid minimum wage. Many would lie about their income and get away with not paying taxes on their total income. Then it changed (at least in the state I was in at the time) to the restaurants being required to pay minimum wage. All of a sudden, owners were MUCH more interested in just how much their employees were making and claiming, because the employer had to pay tax on those employees for at least the basis of minimum wage. So now they could only lie their income down to minimum, more taxes were paid, the cruddy servers received less hours, the better ones got prime hours. Those who were poor workers...many of them were lying an on welfare to boot anyhow, so they had to find another employer who would put up with them since welfare laws changed and it's very difficult to get cash benefits without working, and the employees who may have otherwise qualified for welfare didn't have to anymore because the low producers were gone and the good workers picked up their tips plus extra because many people are willing to tip hard workers better.
One of the things I noticed with that change was a sudden decrease in the desire of restaurants to hire illegal immigrants. Many stopped or at least hired less. It just wasn't as attractive anymore, although some still did, but the government is fairly decent at figuring out cost of operations and such and how many employees it takes to run a business who claims they bought x amount of product and such, so red flags go up and they consider the place may be using illegals if the numbers aren't typical enough. Less work for illegal immigrants meant more work for citizens and more money staying here in the USA since it wasn't being sent out of the country to relatives or saved up over the years to be taken out of country so they could go home and live much better there on the same amount than they ever could in the USA.
I don't like to see people losing jobs, but I do see a lot of people who need to. My husband recently took a job and it makes me really sad that he has less hours than he applied for, yet he's often told that he is their best employee and management is relieved when he comes in because they know things will get done. Then he goes and does other people's work because he's bored and like me, would rather be doing something on the job than just sitting around. Yet he gets paid the same. That's just poor business management. They could save a lot of money by having just him and the other person who works, rather than having a high producer, a medium producer, and two people who spend the majority of their time finding something to do in an area without cameras, which is usually nothing and even if they did find something to do, it isn't what they were hired to do.
So I don't feel too bad about the prospect of people losing their jobs. Often, it proves to a small business employee that he/she CAN manage with less workers and be paying less benefits and have less risks of accidents and such by reducing the number of workers. The lower end producers can go get more education or learn that the harder they work, the more likely they are to be retained.
Now have lots of good people lost their jobs anyhow due to our recent economy. Yep. My husband was one of those and it took a couple years for him to find another job, and it was a lesson in humility as is the pay for the job I ended up taking.
I don't blame the minimum wage for that though. In fact, I'm rather thankful for it because I'm pretty sure that if it wasn't for that, we'd be taken advantage of and not be able to provide for our kids. Minimum wage didn't tank this economy, idiotic spending with poor oversight of the spenders higher up managed to do that.
