Minimum wage $9.50?

[Steve]

What is a living wage? What should it be set at? How would this effect your business? Minimum wage issue caused maximum debate - Ivan Cornejo may be one of the highest paid bank tellers of his kind in the country. Without any previous experience, Cornejo began working four months ago as a teller for Wells Fargo here. He makes $9.50 an hour. Cornejo, 19, isn't alone. Across this resort community, dishwashers, janitors, painters, landscape workers, all make $9.50 an hour as a starting wage. Two years ago, Santa Fe became one of the first cities in America to enact a living wage, an ordinance that set a higher minimum wage based on Santa Fe's higher cost of living.

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I am for making more money and everything, but the problem is that if you jump the minimum wage too quickly too fast it will hurt businesses in my opinion, and other employees. My points: 1. When you raise a minimum wage from like $7.50 to $9.50 over night, businesses will cut back on employees because they can't afford them, and so the unemployment rate will rise. 2. What about the guy that was hired on two years ago at $8.00 an hour, and after two years he is up to $9.50 an hour. Well, then a new employee just gets hired in at $9.50 an hour and working at the rate that took the guy two years to get to. What will happen then, is that old employee is going to demand an increase in pay because he has been there longer. Instead of being at $9.50 an hour, he now wants $11.00 an hour. 3. Businesses are going to go broke and lay off people, and the quality of work with the business will faulter, because every 2-3 years the business will go though and clean house and fire the people making $11.00 hour, and hire new guys at $9.50 an hour. That is just my whole opinion in the matter. I think that it's wrong. We are doing the same thing here in Michigan. Our minimum wage is like $5.65, and in less than two years it will be around $7.50 an hour.

[Steve]

Very good and well thought out points.

What I wonder to is when you raise minimum wage, does that just raise the bar and then ultimately everything is raised up to that level. So now your expenses are raised up to, making the new minimum wage as bad as the last one?

If that is the case, what's your view on how a person should go about dealing with being on minimum wage? How should our government deal with it?

Yes, everything will be raised. *Including the employers worker comp as well. *It's very bad for business I feel. *Employers will also start to cut back on benefits; vacation, retirement packages, health care, etc. *Employers are going to look at a lot more ways to save money now and yes it will be nice that employers will start to think outside the box, but basically what it will come down to when they have to make cuts it will end up being employees.

I know that it's bad to say this, but a lot of businesses need the lower waged people to survive. *Perhaps have it where employees need to at least have a high school diploma to earn that $9.50 an hour. * That will be an extra incentive for those that don't have a high school diploma to go back to school, but at the same time kids that are in school are not making huge mimimum wages when they should not be making it. *It will also add an extra incentive for high school kids to finish with a high school diploma in order to make more money. *That just my opinion though