Cover Sheet for Fast Food Employment App.

[oldr_n_wsr]

I get a kick out of the excuses for rising gas prices. Every year in the fall they say, "we are switching to the more expensive winter gas farmula", then in the spring they say, "we are switching to the more expensive summer formula".

[Crackpot]

We always see a drop in fall

[oldr_n_wsr]

We just don't see as much of a rise as we do in spring. I am guessing consumption has something to do with that also.

[Econoline]

The women in my store were making the then-current, West Virgina ECONOMIC MINIMUM WAGE, which was, coincidentally, just over the legal Minimum Wage. We set the wage at whatever it took to attract a large number of applicants, and a steady supply of replacements when someone moved on (which was rare). This is how wages are SUPPOSED TO BE SET, not by government fiat.

"Coincidentally"????? Color me skeptical--and IMO skeptical is a FABULOUS color, it's a MARVELOUS shimmering shade of pale mauve, and it sets off my clothes, my hair, my furniture and everything PERFECTLY!--but...oh wait, where was I? Oh yeah: I have trouble believing that the Powers That Be at Hill's department store in Bridgeport, West Virginia, in the 1970s set their wages without regard to the legal minimum wage. I guess if you were in charge maybe you would have actually said, "Hmmm...we're paying $2 an hour now and getting all the applicants we can handle, so let's see if we still get enough if we drop that to $1.80...or $1.50...or how about just an even dollar an hour? Heh heh heh." But I don't think that's what actually happened.

Who knows? Maybe they actually would have been able to fill some positions for considerably less than the legal minimum wage if they had tried. Maybe there would have been some families desperate enough for a little extra cash that they would have taken whatever they could get. Maybe the only disadvantage they would have felt would have been a higher rate of turnover in those jobs. Or even if whoever ran that store was too ethical to try that experiment, maybe some competitor could have tried it and made a little more profit and pushed everyone's wages down.

The purpose of the minimum wage is not to set wages by government fiat, but rather to set a reasonable floor for wages to prevent predatory or unethical employers from taking advantage of the most vulnerable members of the bottom rung of society (similar to the way usury laws don't set interest rates by government fiat, but rather just set a ceiling). If we do it right--and the studies cited by Andrew and rubato seem to show that by and large we are doing pretty well--it has no effect on unemployment, and a beneficial effect on corporate culture and society in general.

[Econoline]

As gas prices go up, the people for whom it is a problem DRIVE LESS, the try to BUY MORE ECONOMICAL CARS, the TAKE MASS TRANSPORTATION. For people who value other things more than the cost of fuel (image, driving enjoyment, comfort), they ignore the increases in fuel cost.

Diesel prices have gone up more than gasoline prices, and I haven't yet seen any Priuses towing semi-trailers...

[oldr_n_wsr]

I saw a guy pouriing gas into his prius in the middle of an intersection one day. Guess he ran out of gas and battery.



ETA
And the gas station was a left turn about 50 feet away.

[Econoline]

dgs49, meet francis1.

You might have to start looking for a different religion, Dave. Maybe Scientology?

Pope Compares Bangladesh Factory Workers To 'Slave Labor'

Pope Francis has equated the wages paid to Bangladeshi workers who died in last week's building collapse to "slave labor."

More than 400 people were killed in the April 24 collapse of the Rana Plaza building outside Dhaka; the building housed several garment factories that made products for Western brands.

News reports say that workers at the factories housed in the building were paid about 38 euros a month (about $50).

"This was the payment of these people who have died," the pope said, according to Vatican Radio. "And this is called 'slave labor!' "

Francis' comments came at a Mass Wednesday to mark the feast of St. Joseph the Worker.

"Not paying a just [wage], not providing work, focusing exclusively on the balance books, on financial statements, only looking at making personal profit. That goes against God!" the pope added, according to Vatican Radio.

(follow the link above to the rest of the story)

So let's see, we have this perfectly utopian situation there in Bangladesh, in which employers are able to pay their workers the *TRUE* "economic minimum wage" (i.e., the minimum they can get away with and still find workers) and because they, the employers wind up with (surprise!) vastly more money and economic (=political) power than their workers they can also provide whatever working conditions they can get away with. And into this economic Eden steps some bossy old South American bishop with a direct line to God who thinks that just because he now lives in Rome, Italy, he can dictate wages by religious FIAT! The nerve!

Well I guess if you want to continue to call yourself a good Catholic, you should, please, heed the call: Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall, for he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled. There’s a battle outside and it's ragin’. It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls, for the times they are a-changin’

[rubato]

"...

The women in my store were making the then-current, West Virgina ECONOMIC MINIMUM WAGE, which was, coincidentally, just over the legal Minimum Wage. We set the wage at whatever it took to attract a large number of applicants, and a steady supply of replacements when someone moved on (which was rare). This is how wages are SUPPOSED TO BE SET, not by government fiat.
... " .

In California during the 1930s the "ECONOMIC MINIMUM WAGE" caused people by the thousands to die of starvation and disease in labor camps. Fathers, mothers, children all died while working their asses off for what you say is a 'fair wage'.

Only someone who hates humankind would support such an idea.


yrs,
rubato

[dgs49]

Rube, please cite some reliable sources that indicate, "people by the thousands [dying] of starvation and disease in labor camps," in the United States.

And dying in John Steinbeck novels doesn't count.

[dales]

It's a good bet that Rubato got his info here:

Researcher: Famine Killed 7 Million in U.S. During “Great Depression”




Dmitry Lyskov
Pravda
May 22, 2008

Another online scandal has been gathering pace recently. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, deleted an article by a Russian researcher, who wrote about the USA’s losses in the Great Depression of 1932-1933. Indignant bloggers began to actively distribute the article on the Russian part of a popular blog service known as Livejournal. The above-mentioned article triggered a heated debate.

The researcher touched upon quite a hot topic in the article – the estimation of the number of victims of the Great Depression in the USA. The material presented in the article apparently made Wikipedia’s moderators delete the piece from the database of the online encyclopedia.

The researcher, Boris Borisov, in his article titled “The American Famine” estimated the victims of the financial crisis in the US at over seven million people. The researcher also directly compared the US events of 1932-1933 with Holodomor, or Famine, in the USSR during 1932-1933.

In the article, Borisov used the official data of the US Census Bureau. Having revised the number of the US population, birth and date rates, immigration and emigration, the researcher came to conclusion that the United States lost over seven million people during the famine of 1932-1933.

“According to the US statistics, the US lost not less than 8 million 553 thousand people from 1931 to 1940. Afterwards, population growth indices change twice instantly exactly between 1930-1931: the indices drop and stay on the same level for ten years. There can no explanation to this phenomenon found in the extensive text of the report by the US Department of Commerce “Statistical Abstract of the United States,” the author wrote.

The researcher points out the movement of population at this point: “A lot more people left the country than arrived during the 1930s – the difference is estimated at 93,309 people, whereas 2.960,782 people arrived in the country a decade earlier. Well, let’s correct the number of total demographic losses in the USA during the 1930s by 3,054 people.”

Analyzing the period of the Great Depression in the USA, the author notes a remarkable similarity with events taking place in the USSR during the 1930s. He even introduced a new term for the USA – defarming – an analogue to dispossession of wealthy farmers in the Soviet Union. “Few people know about five million American farmers (about a million families) whom banks ousted from them lands because of debts. The US government did not provide them with land, work, social aid, pension – nothing,” the article says.

“Every sixth American farmer was affected by famine. People were forced to leave their homes and go to nowhere without any money and any property. They found themselves in the middle of nowhere enveloped in massive unemployment, famine and gangsterism.”

The then state of affairs in the US society can be seen in Peter Jackson’s movie King Kong. The movie starts with scenes of the Great Depression and tells the story of an actress who did not eat for three days and tried to steal an apple from a street vendor. There is food in the city, but many people had no money to buy it in unemployment-paralyzed New York. People starve in the streets against the background of stores selling a variety of foodstuffs.

At the same time, the US government tried to get rid of redundant foodstuffs, which vendors could not sell. Market rules were observed strictly: unsold goods should always be categorized as redundant and they could not be given away to the poor because it could cause damage to businesses. A variety of methods was used to destroy redundant food. They burnt crops, drowned them in the ocean or plowed 10 million hectares of harvesting fields. “About 6.5 million pigs were killed at that time,” the researcher wrote.

The consequences of those policies were predictable, the author of the article wrote. “Here is what a child recollected about those years: “We changed our usual food for something for available. We used to eat bush leaves instead of cabbage. We ate frogs too. My mother and my older sister died during a year.” (Jack Griffin).”

So-called public works introduced by President Roosevelt became a salvation for a huge number of jobless and landless Americans. However, the salvation was only a phantom, Boris Borisov wrote. The works conducted under the aegis of the Public Works Administration and the Civil Works Administration were about building channels, roads or bridges in remote, wild and dangerous territories. Up to 3.3 million people were involved in those works at a time, whereas the total number of people amounted to 8.5 million, not to count prisoners.

“Conditions and death rate at those works are to be studied separately. A member of public works would make $30, and pay $25 of taxes from this amount. So a person could make only $5 for a month of hard work in malarial swamps.”

The conditions, under which people were working for food, could be compared to Stalin’s GULAG camp.

“The Public Works Administration (PWA) bore a striking resemblance to GULAG. The PWA was chaired by “American Beria,” the Secretary of Interior Affairs, Harold Ickes, who threw about two million people into camps for the unemployed youth,” Borisov wrote. “Harold LeClair Ickes (1874–1952) later interned USA’s ethnic Japanese in concentration camps. The first stage of the operation took only 72 hours (1941-1942).

“In 1940, the US population was supposed to make up at least 141.856 million people upon the preservation of previous demographic trends. As a matter of fact, the USA had the 131.409-strong population in 1940, of which only 3.054 million can be explained with changes in migration dynamics. Thus, 7.394,000 people simply do not exist as of 1940. There are no official arguments to explain the phenomenon,” Boris Borisov wrote.

It is worthy of note that modern-day Russian patriotic historians reject methods of research based on the general estimation of demographic losses. They believe that demographic processes are not linear and depend on a number of factors. Such historians think that victims of communism estimations made on the base of demographic research works by Stephan Kurt and Richard Pipes, which George Bush and Helen Bonner announced at the opening of Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, are false.

On the other hand, these methods are widely used in contemporary science of history. Ukrainian historian Stanislav Kulchitsky used the method to calculate the number of victims of the Ukrainian Holodomor (famine), which was subsequently officially recognized. Parliaments of eleven countries that recognized Holodomor use those numbers in their research works. To crown it all, the US Congress and the European Union also use Kulchitsky’s numbers considering the problem.

[rubato]

Millions and thousands are three orders of magnitude apart.

I would not attempt to explain anything to someone who does not grasp this.

Yrs,
Rubato

[Lord Jim]

It appears you were wrong Dale...

Rube has no source at all....

[dales]

It would seem that "old reliable" shot hisself in the foot again.

[Andrew D]

There's an interesting study here:

Abstract

Recent events highlight the importance of examining the impact of economic downturns on population health. The Great Depression of the 1930s was the most important economic downturn in the U.S. in the twentieth century. We used historical life expectancy and mortality data to examine associations of economic growth with population health for the period 1920–1940. We conducted descriptive analyses of trends and examined associations between annual changes in health indicators and annual changes in economic activity using correlations and regression models. Population health did not decline and indeed generally improved during the 4 years of the Great Depression, 1930–1933, with mortality decreasing for almost all ages, and life expectancy increasing by several years in males, females, whites, and nonwhites. For most age groups, mortality tended to peak during years of strong economic expansion (such as 1923, 1926, 1929, and 1936–1937). In contrast, the recessions of 1921, 1930–1933, and 1938 coincided with declines in mortality and gains in life expectancy. The only exception was suicide mortality which increased during the Great Depression, but accounted for less than 2% of deaths. Correlation and regression analyses confirmed a significant negative effect of economic expansions on health gains. The evolution of population health during the years 1920–1940 confirms the counterintuitive hypothesis that, as in other historical periods and market economies, population health tends to evolve better during recessions than in expansions.

Maybe people's health improves when they can't afford unhealthy food?

[Crackpot]

Because fast food was on every corner back then...

[dgs49]

Fast food is not cheap. It is much cheaper to buy the ingredients and make your own food at home, from scratch - assuming you do so judiciously.

To anyone who knows any of the history of the old Soviet Union, the "research" by the Russian was an obvious counter to the millions of Ukrainian deaths caused by the Russians during the same period. It is garbage.

[dales]

And they had Mikey Dee's in the Old Soviet Union.