I'm cantoring through it....
"Minimum wage increase doesn’t add up to a living wage" by Katie Johnston | Globe Staff June 26, 2014
BRAINTREE — Arline and Ashley Urquhart are barely scraping by. Arline, 42, makes a little more than $10 an hour managing the liquor department at the Walgreens in Downtown Crossing. Ashley, 19, makes $8 an hour, plus a few dollars a day in tips, at Dunkin’ Donuts in Dorchester.
The mother and daughter, who share a two-bedroom, rent-subsidized apartment and get free health insurance from the state, sometimes subsist on ramen noodles and protein shakes when the grocery money runs out.
And they are not making it? Why not?
The new minimum wage law enacted Thursday — pushing the hourly rate in Massachusetts from $8 to $11 dollars over the next few years — gives the state the highest base pay in the nation. But while it will help workers such as the Urquharts, it is still not considered enough for an individual to live on.
In Massachusetts, the hourly rate a full-time worker needs to pay for food, housing, transportation, and other regular expenses is at least $11.31 an hour, according to the Living Wage Calculator developed by an MIT professor. In Boston and Braintree, where the Urquharts live, it’s $12.65 an hour.
The pay raise Arline and Ashley Urquhart will get from the new law means they’ll be able to afford fresh fruit and lower-fat hamburger meat. They might be able to buy a real couch to replace the blanket-covered bench in the living room that serves as a sofa now. They won’t worry as much about the 10-cent increase in bus fare. Ashley could buy a decent pair of shoes; Arline would have the $30 she needs to apply to Quincy College.
In other words, a higher minimum wage will make their lives a little more stable, a little less stressful. But not necessarily comfortable.
“It’s still not enough to survive,” said Arline, who pops ibuprofen to relieve the back pain she said is caused by lifting heavy liquor boxes at Walgreens, where she recently had to decrease her hours. “A couple of dollars wouldn’t really make the biggest difference. It really wouldn’t.” (Walgreen and Dunkin’ Donuts declined to comment.)
I've been saying this since the "debate" started. Raising chump change pay is not the answer to ever-increasing wealth confiscation by the upper cla$$es.
Arline pays 30 percent of her income to live in a subsidized apartment at a Braintree housing complex, about $430 a month when she was working full time; her daughter has to contribute 30 percent of half of her income. Through MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program, they get free health coverage, an average value of $550 a month per person.
Worth nothing if you never use it.
More than 600,000 Massachusetts workers, 1 in 5 in the state, stand to get a bump in pay from the minimum wage increase, according to the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center — 85 percent of them above the age of 20. The new law requires employers to pay workers no less than $11 an hour by 2017.
Still, the minimum wage increase won’t do much to address ever-widening income inequality. Boston has the fourth-largest gap between rich and poor among the country’s 50 largest cities, according to the Brookings Institution.
Maybe you want to take a $wipe at me.
In Boston, the top 5 percent of households earned more than $222,000 a year, 15 times more than the lowest 20 percent, which had incomes of less than $14,600 a year.
I love corporate liberali$m.
“The
story for the Massachusetts economy, if you ignore high levels of
unemployment and inequality, is the economy has been performing very
well.”
I $ee!
In addition, Massachusetts’ minimum wage is not tied to inflation, which means as the prices of groceries, rent, and electricity rise, workers will fall further behind, advocates said. The Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center estimates that by 2017, $11 will be worth $10.32 in today’s dollars.
What a $hitty deal!
Related: Unemployment insurance costs decrease under new law
As part of a compromise to raise the state’s minimum wage.
So now you will be getting LESS when you get LAID OFF!
This whole thing was done -- again -- for bu$ine$$!
As the plight of low-wage workers gets more attention, the push to raise the minimum wage has gained momentum.
Must be an election year. They are literally trying to buy the votes of the poor.
The Senate recently voted down a bill that would have raised the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour. But a handful of states, including California, have moved to lift their minimum wages above $10 an hour, and $15 an hour was just passed in Seattle.
Compare that with the tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of tax dollars that goes for corporate subsidies.
The next step, workers’ advocates say, is shifting the conversation from a minimum wage to a living one. Across the country, fast food and other low-paid workers have demonstrated for $15 an hour, an amount that organizers in Massachusetts say is needed to meet the basic needs of working families.
Related: Fast Food Workers Co$ting Taxpayers
Bastards!
“The economic glass of a low-wage earner earning $8 to $9 an hour is pretty empty, so to move up to $11 an hour is like getting the glass around 40 percent filled toward a living wage,” said Lew Finfer, co-chair of Raise Up Massachusetts, which had been pushing for a minimum wage increase indexed to inflation. “We know we’re not finished creating the opportunity and dignity that people need.”
The bump to $11 would give full-time workers making between $8 and $10 an hour an extra $6,000 and $2,000 a year, respectively, before taxes, said MIT professor Amy Glasmeier, who developed the Living Wage Calculator. That’s not trivial.
“To somebody who’s making $22,000 a year, if you added $2,000 a year to their lives,” she said, “it could keep them from potentially losing their job because they can’t get there because they can’t fix their car.”
But those who oppose the higher minimum wage say it will hurt opportunity by forcing employers to reduce hours, hire fewer people — especially teens and college students — and possibly even move out of state. That, they say, will hurt the economy overall.
It will.
Erin Calvo-Bacci, owner of a chocolate manufacturing business in Swampscott and the Chocolate Truffle shop in Reading, said she already is dealing with higher chocolate prices and smaller profit margins, so increased labor costs will be a serious blow.
Passing along higher costs by raising prices for distributors such as Whole Foods Market and TJX Cos. isn’t really an option, she said. That could lead them to replace her products with cheaper ones, said Calvo-Bacci, who had to sell her home in Wakefield in 2010 to keep the business running.
“There’s this big push to raise up the American families, but they’re doing it on the backs of American family businesses in Massachusetts,” she said. “Now we have to look long and hard at: Can we afford to stay in Massachusetts?”
Meanwhile, Arline and Ashley Urquhart, the mother and daughter roommates in Braintree, bring home less than $1,500 a month between them — plus a little extra when Arline sings in a cover band.
They are trying to get more hours and are eager for the minimum wage increases to kick in, which they say could allow them to put some money in their empty savings account. But they don’t expect it to lift them out of a world where every penny counts.
“I’m already making $10,” Arline said, “and it’s just nothing to live on.”
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"Ikea raises hourly pay for US retail workers" by Anne D’Innocenzio | Associated Press June 27, 2014
NEW YORK — Ikea’s US division is raising the minimum wage for thousands of its retail workers, pegging it to the cost of living in each location, instead of its competition.
How big was the tax break?
The 17 percent average raise, announced Thursday, is the Swedish ready-to-assemble furniture chain’s biggest in 10 years in the United States.
The pay increase will take effect Jan. 1. It will translate to an average wage of $10.76 an hour, a $1.59 increase from the previous $9.17.
About half of Ikea’s 11,000 hourly store workers will get a raise. How much will vary based on the cost of living in each store location.
Ikea, which has cultivated a reputation for fair treatment of its workers, evaluates its benefits plans every year and had always adjusted wages based on its competition. But Rob Olson, Ikea’s acting US president, says the latest move shifts its approach.
‘‘Now, we decided to focus less on the competition and more about the co-workers,’’ Olson told The Associated Press in an interview this week. He says he was guided by its vision of ‘‘creating a better life’’ for its workers. That will improve the company’s relationship with employees and reduce worker turnover, which he says is already well below the retail industry’s average. About 19 percent of full-time retail workers leave their jobs annually, according to the National Retail Federation.
Ikea’s raises come when a push to raise wages for hourly workers has made headlines.
Fast-food workers asking for higher pay in cities have staged protests across the country. Union groups have also held protests at Walmart Stores Inc., the nation’s largest private employer. And President Barack Obama is endorsing a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2016.
Many business groups have opposed the measure, saying it would hurt the economy and lead to job losses.
Yup!
Still, some are making public splashes with across-the-board raises.
Must be an election year.
Gap Inc. said in February that it will set the minimum wage for workers at $9 an hour this year and $10 an hour in 2015. Most retail workers already make more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, though not necessarily much more.
Olson said Ikea is basing its wage increase on the MIT Living Wage Calculator, which considers housing, food, medical, and transportation costs plus annual taxes.
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Let's go somewhere else for lunch.
"Stock market’s 5-year rally hits milestone" by Peter Eavis | New York Times July 04, 2014
The stock market, continuing a remarkable ascent that began in the darkness of the last recession, surged past a milestone Thursday after a strong jobs report indicated that the economy might finally be gaining steam....
The stock market’s rally has taken place even as a tepid economy has failed to lift the incomes of many Americans.
Make that most.
The economy unexpectedly shrank in the first quarter. Still, there are signs that economic growth is starting to pick up.
Do I even need to point out the contradiction in those sentences?
The stock market records were set after the government announced Thursday that the economy had added 288,000 jobs in June, more than analysts had expected.
The unemployment rate — 6.1 percent — is now at its lowest level since the financial crisis struck with full force in the fall of 2008, according to the Associated Press.
All rigged numbers that will later be revised downward.
“While the economy has been slower than people would have liked, there are signs that it has continued to improve,” Shep Perkins, a portfolio manager at the Putnam Global Equity Fund, said. “You could see the S&P at 3,000 in three to four years.”
The bull market has lasted nearly 64 months, making it the fourth longest since the crash of 1929, according to an analysis by S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Meaning the next one is going to be a doozy.
And in recent years, the US stock market has substantially outperformed those of Europe, Japan, and China.
Because the Fed has been propping it up to the tune of $100 billion a month.
Some individual investors have benefited from the rally. The value of stocks and mutual funds held by households increased more than $3 trillion in the 12 months through March, according to data from the Federal Reserve. But such gains have mostly gone to the wealthier households, where stock ownership is concentrated.
Tell us something we don't know and are not repeating.
“The trickle down is not working,” said Douglas Kass of Seabreeze Partners Management, a hedge fund firm, “The schism between haves and the have-nots has widened.”
And it does every minute of every day as the people are pi$$ed on from up high.
Stronger corporate profits have helped sustain the rally. Some companies have bolstered their bottom lines in part by restraining expenses.
That means they CUT JOBS!
But investors seem most excited about younger companies with strong growth prospects. Stock in Facebook, for instance, has risen more than any other in the S&P 500 over the past 12 months, soaring 170 percent. Netflix is up 114 percent.
One of the most surprising features of the most recent bull market is that it has taken place during a drawn-out period of economic sluggishness. During the extended rallies of the 1990s and the 2000s, the economy grew at about 3 percent a year, double the growth rate during the latest ascent.
Not all investors are convinced that growth is poised to accelerate. The mood in the bond market, for instance, is circumspect. Yields on bonds have fallen this year, indicating that investors believe the Fed will have to keep interest rates low to prevent the economy from stalling....
The Fed has pumped more than $3 trillion into the economy and the banking system since the financial crisis.
And look where we are.
But some investors assert that this stimulus has helped generate speculation in the stock market while having a limited effect on the real economy.
It was meant to do that and put money in the pockets of them.
“There has been no escape velocity in the economy,” Kass said. “We are dependent on the kindness of the Federal Reserve.”
And that is NOT A WORLD I WANT TO LIVE IN!
As the economy recovers, the Fed is gradually injecting less money into the financial system. If profits and the economy grow robustly, stock market investors may not care that there is less monetary stimulus. But if the withdrawal causes a tightening in financial conditions, the appetite for stocks might dwindle.
One big question the skeptics have is whether the rally has made stocks overvalued, and potentially vulnerable to a decline. There are many different ways to assess how expensive stocks are, and bullish and bearish investors use different yardsticks to make their case.
Optimists, for instance, note, but the skeptical analysts contend....
Ooops. Bubble burst!
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Really is nothing left to say.
