Minimum Wage

The minimum wage might have been bumped up to $7.25 an hour in 2009, but that number means little to the over 300 workers with mental disabilities working at state-run homes for the people with disabilities in Iowa. That's because they were making, on average, $0.60 per hour for their work. One employee was even making an average of a mere $0.11 per hour, a sweatshop-level wage in any country. Yet paying employees with mental disabilities...  

The new minimum daily wage increases expected to come into force on Jan 1 are no more than chicken feed and can hardly be considered a New Year's gift for the workers, as suggested. They deserve much better treatment.  

Lawmakers support jump to $8.25, but business owners fret Connecticut's minimum wage will increase to $8.25 an hour on Jan. 1, and as the economy slowly recovers from the Great Recession the debate continues over the effects of the pay raise. The 25-cent increase from $8 an hour is the second in two years. Rates increased Jan. 1 of this year by 35 cents from $7.65, making the two-year increase nearly 8 percent. The new rate is $1 per hour, or...  

State unable to police minimum wage Associated Press DAYTON -- Ohio's budget contains no money to enforce the state's minimum wage in the upcoming budget year, a problem Gov. Ted Strickland promises to fix. The current year's budget contains $1.4 million  

But the Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria rose from a closed door meeting held at the Federal Secretariat Complex in Benin on Tuesday to call for a narrowing of the salaries’ disparity and urgent implementation of the expected new ...  

It wouldn't be the holidays if we didn't have grinches. In the spirit of the season, this week we saw calls to lower the federal minimum wage thinly disguised as a way to help the economy.  

It is possible to live on minimum wage.[1] For most people, however, it's not likely to be very much fun. Whether you're forced to live in this situation, or you want to know that it's an option, this article will show you how it can be done, assuming you bring home $1000 USD a month after taxes.  

PHUKET CITY: The Phuket Labor Office has requested a daily minimum wage increase of nine baht for Phuket workers, which, if approved in full, would give the province the highest minimum wage rate in the country.Labor committees in 70 of Thailand’s 76 provinces have submitted proposals to the Labor Department requesting minimum wage increases of between one and nine baht.Phuket is asking for a nine-baht increase, which would raise the rate to...  

Calls for an even higher minimum wage are severely misguided ("Just making ends meet is hard for area families, report finds," Dec. 9). Decades of economic research show that mandated minimum-wage increases spike job losses, particularly among vulnerable groups like teens,  

The Minimum Wage Machine (work in progress), by Blake Fall-ConroyThe minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 5.04 seconds, for $7.15 an hour (NY state minimum wage). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money. The machine's mechanism and electronics are powered by the hand crank, and pennies are stored in a plexiglas box.Contrary to some other art...  

Despite a commitment from the previous government, the federal economics minister Rainer Brüderle of the FDP liberal party has refused to back a minimum wage for the waste sector. Ver.di had agreed with the BDE employers' organization that a legal minimum wage for the sector was needed to stop companies undercutting wages, with hourly wages falling as low as €4-€6 an hour. The union was preparing demonstrations around the country on 10...  

Paul Krugman suggests that cutting the minimum wage won't help employment. My hope here is to uncover his errors. First, Krugman makes the argument for cutting the minimum wage. He states: Here's how the fallacy [of composition] works: if some subset of the work force accepts lower wages, it can gain jobs. If workers in the widget industry take a pay cut, this will lead to lower prices of widgets relative to other things, so people will...  

Paul Krugman repeats his argument that wage cuts are an individually rational but socially destructive way to reduce unemployment.  His motive: To quash a politically impossible effort to cut the minimum wage.  Paul does address the real balance effect, but...  

Photo via Republican Gubernatorial candidate Andy McKenna, son of millionaire business executive Andrew McKenna, feels that $8.00 an hour is just too much for minimum wage workers. According to the Daily Herald, cutting minimum wage is becoming a higher priority for some Republican candidates. In an interview with WBBM, McKenna called it a "problem" that Illinois minimum wage workers garner almost $1.00 more per hour than the federal rate...  

The new federal minimum wage went into effect at the end of July this summer, and non-coincidentally teenage unemployment rose. Everyone is facing a tougher than usual job market, but teens found work to be especially scarce this summer. Even though it wasn't until the middle of summer that the new higher minimum wage went into effect, employers are forward looking.To get some rough estimate as to the magnitude of the effect, my RA and I...