Remember!

Teenagers’ unemployement rates are completely out of control:

Employers are choosing older workers, saying it’s cheaper to hire a more experienced worker, than, say, two teenagers, who will need more training, experts say.

“It’s too expensive for us to hire teens that don’t have experience,” said Karin Devencenzi, the general manager at Southpark Seafood Grill & Wine Bar in Portland, Ore. “By the time you get them on board, with a lack of experience, it doesn’t make sense.”

Margaret Anderson-Kelliher’s response:  If the minimum wage is killing jobs, let’s kill them some more!

Devencenzi also blames the minimum wage. At $8.40 an hour, Oregon has one of the highest minimum wages in the country. The national minimum rose from $6.55 to $7.35 in July 2009. (Several other states have a rate higher than the federal mandate.)

In a tough economy, keeping wages down is more important than ever, says Saltsman. “Passing costs to consumers isn’t an option because people’s wallets are pinched in a recession,” he says.

The problem is, the DFL hears “pinched wallets” and says “let’s start a program to help with wallet-pinching, and pay for it with a tax on small businesspeople!”

22 thoughts on “Remember!

  1. Illegals are also part of the problem, flooding the market with cheap labor. Employers hire them – and that makes them complicit.

  2. But Mitch, that’s just free market forces at work!

    If kids aren’t as experienced as older workers, if they aren’t competitive, then they are going to lose out in this kind of an economy. You don’t want us subsidizing the less qualified workers do you, just because you have teenagers?

    Because that kind of free market for labor is what happens when wages are forced down. Older workers market those skills they have that teenagers don’t have at a lower price. They market their maturity and their reliability and their less volatility at a rate which is too competitive for teenagers to get some of those traditional low paying jobs.

    It’s just your free market at work! You can’t have it both ways.

    I understand though that there are plenty of seasonal agricultural jobs that had been being done by immigrant labor – both legal and sometimes illegal – that were supposedly jobs ‘Americans wouldn’t do’.

    Being legal, all those teens could try competing for those. They have a built in advantage being legal that makes them competitive where illegals can’t be.

  3. that’s just free market forces at work

    No, DG. It’s the market responding to a distortion in the market – the minimum wage.

    It’s economics 101; if you make people (or businesses) pay something other than what they’d naturally pay, it distorts the market.

    If you artificially lower the price, the supply gets bought up instantly.

    If you artificially raise the price (say, raising the price of labor with a minimum wage), people buy less of it.

    DG: Go read some Hayek or Thomas Sowell before commenting on the “Free Market”.

  4. Aw, Mitch, let DG demonastrate how compassionate she is with Other Peoples Money. Harshing her mellow like that!
    In the Self Proclaimed Progressives mind, The “Market” only exists to be blamed when something business oriented like unemployment rises or investments turn down. Funny, when the Dow is rising or full employment is achieved, that is attributed to some successful government policy, not the market.
    Gee, DG, do you ever think government policy can have a negative effect on the economy? Does giving an implicit guarantee that every obligation made by FannieMae and FreddieMac will be backed by the Federal Government make bankers think they have unlimited money to gamble with and the taxpayer in the end would take the hit if the bet went sour? Could mandating that a particular cost of running a business, such as labor, benefits or dealing with regulatory paperwork be at a certain level cause an investor or business owner to decide not to invest more or to add employees? Does having numerous hoops and hurdles to jump through and over just to open a business make someone not want to open a business? You seem to act as if government policy has nothing to do with how the market works or doesn’t work. The laws of supply and demand are like the laws of gravity, you can defy them for a while artificially, but when the Goverments check bounces or the plane runs out of fuel, you are going to come crashing down.

  5. I don’t know whether or not this was covered, but there is another part of this trend; older workers are generally more reliable. They get to work on time, call in sick only when they actually are and don’t have the seemingly endless social events that teenagers feel compelled to attend, especially during the school year. Further, as a sales person, I’m out and about in our communities all day. My observations are that teenagers seem to stigmatize a job in fast food as demeaning, what I like to call the “would you like fries with that”? syndrome.

    Re Oregon; just like CA and WA, this is another left coast state that is run by the commie unions. Last year, Oregon experienced the full weight of their leftist government policies when Daimler Trucks (Freightliner, Western Star) told them to pound sand when they expanded their manufacturing in South Carolina and Mexico. Due to the usurious union contracts there, they can’t move out fully without making a huge pension fund payment to cover the retired union leeches, but they are definitely sending a message.

  6. But Mitch, that’s just free market forces at work!

    You really have to hand it to her. People don’t just jump out of bed and say mind bendingly idioTIC crap like that…..no way.

    Maintaining that level of stupidity requires real commitment, hard work and many, many gallons of Victory gin and kool-aid.

  7. You don’t have to read Sowell or Hayek. It’s textbook economics, and it even has a name — the price-demand curve. Artificially put a ceiling on a price and you get a surplus of buyers (a shortage) because they place a greater value on the product than it is priced at. People buy all they can until the supply runs out.
    Artificially put a floor on a price (aka a minimum wage) and you get a surplus of sellers, in this case people who are willing to work for the minimum wage but cannot find an employer.
    This doesn’t mean that a minimum wage is necessarily a bad thing, it means that it has some unpleasant consequences. People who are all rah! rah! about raising the minimum wage should realize that they making it harder for the least employable people to find jobs.

  8. While I’ll restrain my comments – seriously, DG, what Terry said.

    THe only thing that’d make that comment funnier is if Pen chimed in with a next-door neighbor who happened to be a world-renowned economist who agreed with you in every particular, but had to stay off the record. 🙂

  9. Terry Says:

    July 22nd, 2010 at 8:32 am

    I don’t know if anyone else realizes it, but it’s 3:30 am in Hilo right now. You having a party over there Terry? 😉

  10. It’s 3:30 am in Hilo, we have half a tank of gas, the world’s largest optical telescope, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.

  11. It goes both ways…..artifcially high minimum wage on low skilled work prevents hiring, especially in the case noted above. But also, bringing in tons of illegeal aliens to work for peanuts artifically lowers the wages. Why pay market rates for your labor when you can hirer people who snuck in from Hundurous for much less.

  12. I am doing a pointing test with the world’s largest optical telescope.

    You’re in La Palma?

  13. Raise the minimum wage and what do you get? Increase in the price of bread, milk, and a quarter pound burger. When the price of those items reaches market balance the Lib interpretation of a minimum wage worker will struggle to afford those items. And so with the brilliant thinking of the Lib panderers there will a demand for yet another increase in the minimum wage, and so the cycle starts again.

    They’ll decry that someone can’t raise a family of four on at minimum wage, or as they would put it “poverty level wages”. I don’t know of any teenagers or people looking to augment their family income with part-time work, or retirees looking to work a minimum wage job for a couple extra bucks or for something engaging to do with their time, whose primary motivation is feeding a family of four.

    I have an idea; let’s employ all the politicians on a part-time minimum wage basis!!! We’ll probably get better government.

  14. There have been times in the US where we actually had maximum wage laws due to a shortage of laborers. That’s generally worked out about as well as the minimum wage does (not). In fact, the whole issue of health care delivery and financing can be tied to wage controls in WWII, where producers had to try and recruit workers and started offering health “insurance.” That’s worked out about as well as most other governmental ideas on controlling costs and the economy.

  15. I will not comment on the La Palma telescope, Swiftee. Put that down to “professional courtesy”.

  16. Isn’t this for all practical purposes, the invisible hand giving a bitchslap to my generation? Oh and by the way we TOTALLY deserve it. 2 years ago I was making $9.45 an hour being a unionized bag boy (I wish I was kidding) for a local grocery store. I was massively overpaid for my work and frankly I quit (in a lot of glory) because it was soul-crushing. I have enjoyed my life since but haven’t found anything close to that kind of pay, nor should I in this miserable economy. Maybe I should file for unemployment insurance…

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