Federal employees COLA slashed

[Benton]

(02-15-2020, 02:02 AM)SunsetBengal Wrote: I'm not saying that worker pay doesn't need to be increased.  Heck, I've repeated that in post after post in this thread.  My whole point was that exaggerating statistics to prove a point is not the way to go about promoting change.  I still stand by that.  

Here's a "for instance" situation.  Let's say that I make $24/hr to work for an engineering firm to do Surveying work.  The Federal minimum wage raises from $7.25 to $15/hr.  Does that not mean that my skills are still not worth 3X the minimum wage for all of the study, time and experience that I've put in?  

The reason that I ask is because those in the know seem to keep bringing up inflation.  Well, it seems to me that if you increase the minimum wage by a significant figure, then all other wages must adjust to the same factor.  That sounds great on the surface, but what happens as a result?  We all know that in reality, prices go up at typically an even disproportionate ratio.

A lot of "what I'm worth" used to be controlled by supply/demand with a mix of labor negotiations. Republicans have stripped the negotiations part, and supply/demand doesn't mean much when there's a high demand for low skilled jobs that people have to take because there's no real alternative. Meanwhile, tax payers are supplementing low payers like Walmart that pay little taxes while having workers who have to work 2-3 jobs.