Companies raising their minimum wages is the way to go.
They're going to raise it to something that keeps them profitable, but also attracts better employees. Which can also help them be more profitable through better customer services, thereby attracting more customers, and good public relations.
Germany's lower house, with support from "conservative" President Angela Merkel, has approved the nation's first-ever minimum wage. The baseline pay rate will be 8.50 Euros an hour, roughly $11.56 today, 59 percent higher than the United States' federal minimum wage.
It's nowhere near as simple as you're making it out to be. Germany for the longest time has been extremely resistant to the mere concept of a minimum wage. This is the first time Germany has ever even implemented a minimum wage. When I was partaking in a simulation about implementing a European minimum income/wage in the Netherlands, the ones who were role-playing as the Germans (and the British) were one of the most vigorous opponents to the proposed legislation and it took a lot of coaxing out of me to try and get them on board by really watering it down.
The fact is that Merkel had no choice to do it. It has nothing to do with how German conservatives are acting like rational human beings. Unless you count dragging your feet kicking and screaming as rational.
While her conservative CDU/CSU alliance gained seats in the last German elections, one of the junior parties in her coalition government, the FPD, lost seats and as a result came up 5 seats short of forming a conservative coalition government. She had to make a grand coalition government with the center-left SPD since Merkel refused to work with Die Linke and the Greens. And one of the SPD's major demands was that Germany finally implement a minimum wage. If this demand wasn't acted upon, her government would have fallen apart.
Employees and now customers are boycotting Market Basket over fired President.
On June 24, employees of the Northeast grocery chain Market Basket first began organizing rallies and efforts to reinstate their fired president.
More than a month later, there appears to be little sign the unusual saga is coming to an end. Many shelves remain empty, the ousted leader has made a bid for the company, and employees are prompting customers to spend their dollars elsewhere.
Over the past few weeks, workers at the 71-store chain, which has locations in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine, have held rallies with thousands of people. They've walked off the job, started protest Facebook pages and asked customers to boycott their own stores. They've halted deliveries that have resulted in barren shelves and drops in customer traffic.
If you make less than $50,000 per year, you will soon be entitled to overtime pay. Me? you wonder, glancing around with uncertainty. Yes: You.
We are referring here to the Department of Labors overtime rule, which is widely expected to be updated some time later this summer. Though we wont have an official number until the rule is final, it now appears that even if you are a salaried employee or some sort of manager, you will still be entitled to time-and-a-half pay for working more than 40 hours per week, as long as your total salary falls under the threshold. The DOL itself promotes this Wall Street Journal story which says that The threshold would be increased to $970, or $50,440 annually. That level is about the 40th percentile of weekly earnings for salaried workers.
This rule has been a matter of political contention for years. But now that it is actually approaching, its import is becoming clear: overtime pay, which has long been isolated to a minority of workers, is about to be extended to almost the entire middle class. This is a very big ****ing deal. Nick Hanauer, a billionaire activist who pushed for the rule change, told us last year that The overtime threshold is to the middle class as the minimum wage is to low-wage workers. The battle to raise the minimum wage has gotten more attention, but the battle to raise the overtime threshold could have a similar impact. One report estimates that nearly half of black or Hispanic workers or single mothers could see their pay newly increase thanks to the rule change.
If your employer doesnt like it, they can either raise your pay over $50K, or stop asking you to work extremely long hours without overtime pay.
I'm salary and make overtime. We weren't always that way, though. The company switched over a few years back. We're still trying to figure out what they gain from it since it's they'd be out more money. Best I can figure, it was a way to compete with other companies without having to actually offer higher salaries than they have been.
But I've always thought salary positions should make overtime. Even wrote about it in a paper in college. Not only is it fair compensation, but managers can't ignore their employees cries for more help when they actually have to cough up more money in OT than a new employee would cost.
That being said, our managers don't get overtime. But they do get a 'bonus' based on the goals they and their team met during the year.
Prompted by Panama Papers, Obama Administration Cracks Down on International Tax Evasion
On Thursday night, the Obama administration announced that it was taking executive action to close loopholes that enable the kind of tax evasion and money laundering recently revealed by the Panama Papers. The new regulations will compel companies to disclose more information about their owners, the Associated Press reports.
The Panama Papers underscore the importance of the efforts the United States has taken domestically, and the efforts we have undertaken with our international partners, to address these shared challenges, the White House said in a statement.
Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew sent a letter to Congress asking it to pass legislation that would increase transparency in the financial system. Illicit financial activity is a critical concern for the United States and our partners around the world, he wrote.
Additional statutory authority is necessary to put the United States in the strongest position to combat bad actors who seek to hide their financial dealings and evade their tax responsibilities.
According to the Guardian, the transparency regulations imposed by Obama include:
-Immediate executive action to combat money laundering, terrorist financing, and tax evasion with tighter transparency rules
-New treasury rules closing a loophole allowing foreigners to hide financial activity behind anonymous entities in the US.
-Stricter customer due diligence rules for banks handling money of behalf of clients
The White House and Treasury also called on Congress to pass a series of detailed measures they say would more directly tackle the problem of offshore tax avoidance in the longer run.
Glad to see this happening and the crackdown starting. I highly doubt the GOP house or senate will be motivated to do anything about it but we shall see what the landscape looks like after Nov.
Hopefully with the slow trickle of info being doled out from the massive Panama papers dump it will keep the public pissed off enough to keep the pressure on them. The public tends to have a pretty short-term memory.
A new proposed rule that would ever so slightly curb the excesses of the payday loan industry is an exciting thing: the government, which represents us, acting against awful exploitative money vampires. The system works, a little bit!
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (an agency that you can thank Elizabeth Warren for) today announced a proposed rule aimed at making the payday loan industrywhich lends relatively small amounts of money to poor people at exorbitant interest ratessomewhat less blatantly terrible. The rule would take the revolutionary action of requiring lenders to take steps to make sure consumers have the ability to repay their loans. In normal lending businesses, making sure consumers can pay back their loans is already viewed as a necessary step in giving a loan. But in the payday loan business, they would rather consumers not be able to pay back their loansthat is how you force them to constantly take out new loans to cover the payments on the old loans, building up ever larger mountains of debt until they are in a debt trap from which it is impossible for a low-income person to escape.
This sort of downward debt spiral is one of the most common financial hazards of being poor. And it is not just a risk of payday loans; it is the business model of payday loans. Research by the CFPB found that in a ten month study of payday loan borrowers, more than 80 percent of payday loans taken out by these borrowers were rolled over or reborrowed within 30 days, incurring additional fees with every renewal. Eighty percent! That figure speaks for itself.
The payday loan industry will say that regulations like this will make it harder for needy people to get credit. True. Which is why reducing the chance that poor people will fall into long term debt traps due to short term money needs is only the second best way of dealing with this issue. The best way is to make poor people less poor.
I use to live in an area of Houston that the demographics were high Black, high Hispanic populations on ONE ROAD, had 9 different pay day loan offices within 3 miles of each other.....NINE. It is ridiculous....and it feeds on those two demos.
1. Overly generous public union contracts.
2. Politicians promising way too much in terms of benefits.
3. Growing life spans--i.e., people are living longer now than they were at the time the benefits were promised/planned.
4. Increased medical costs.
5. Actions by individual employees to game the system to maximize benefits--i.e., working extra overtime only in the last couple of years of employment that leads up to retirement to set a higher benefits payout. This is likely only a small part, if you ask me.
As a result, cities/states currently only have around 75% of what the promised benefits are. And, they are looking at either raising taxes on citizens, cutting government services, or reducing the promised benefits to retirees. Or, of course, a combination of the three.
Personally, I'm grateful that I don't have a pension with defined benefits waiting on me. Instead, I have a 401k through my corporation that I own--that I can take with me if I were to leave my current job. In addition to that, last year I started work on building a personal portfolio made almost entirely of ETF index funds* that is geared toward providing a regular payout.
And, if my company offered me the option of a pension instead, I would forego it. Companies can go out of business, and governments can make promises they can't entirely keep (like I'm expecting to happen with Social Security by the time I retire). I'd rather put my trust in something that own and manage myself.
*ETF Index funds trade like regular stock in the stock market. But, they consist of a "basket" of stocks or bonds. The idea is that your portfolio ups and downs are more leveled out, because a single share of your index fund stock may consist of partial shares of hundreds of stocks. And, because index funds aren't actively managed by a portfolio manager, the costs of owning an Index Fund are lower.
It's not perfect, of course; but, in an imperfect world, I'm a big fan.
At the end of the second quarter, 168,000 people with 401(k)s managed by Fidelity Investments had at least $1 million in their accounts, a rise of 50,000 people from a year earlier when there were 118,000, according to a new study by Fidelity, one of the nation's largest administrators of workplace retirement accounts. While gaining, that exclusive group of savers is still just a fraction of the 16.1 million people who have a 401(k) account managed by the fund company.
Building a million bucks-sized nest egg doesn't happen overnight and is a result of workers who invest for the long term and put a chunk of their savings into stocks.
So, these workers are in a good place now because they exercised financial discipline:
1. They likely put as much into their 401(k) each pay period as they could manage. It's good to hear that the average salary percentage invested went from 4% in 2008 to 6.7%.
2. They didn't borrow from the 401(k) unless they absolutely had to.
3. They didn't freak out and withdraw money during market downturns--rising or falling market values, they continued to steadily invest.
So, especially if you're young, consider the idea of putting as much into a 401(k) as you can afford. Sit down, make a budget if you don't already have one, include savings/retirement planning in that budget, and stick with it. Retirement may seem like an eternity away, but unless you die before you get there, you will get there one day. It would be nice to have a good nest egg and not be dependent upon Social Security for survival, wouldn't it?
U.S. small business optimism surged to a record in August as the tax cuts and deregulation efforts . . . led to more sales, hiring, and investment, according to a survey by the National Federation of Independent Business.
The survey has been conducted for 45 years and hit its highest point in August 2018.
They also hit "record readings for job creation plans and the amount of owners saying it was a good time to expand. Capital spending plans were the highest since 2007."
Who would have thought that reducing taxes (reducing costs to business) and reducing regulations (reducing compliance costs to business) would actually help spur small business along . . . besides anyone with business sense, of course?
I had no idea that the path to salvation lay in desiring higher taxes and moar regulationz!
Seriously, though, you remind me of those Republicans who couldn't let any good news be reported while Obama was President without trying to find some way to piss all over it.
Hi, I'm from Michigan. We have been having some issues with our water. So, you will pardon me if deregulation is not that big of a draw as you think it is.
It boggles my mind that "deregulation" is considered a good thing, despite the rampant evidence that the corporations will screw over the little guy as quickly as possible.
I wonder if the employees of those businesses actually make a livable wage, or if they're like Amazon employees and end up on welfare because they're underpaid.
Hi, I'm from Michigan. We have been having some issues with our water. So, you will pardon me if deregulation is not that big of a draw as you think it is.
It boggles my mind that "deregulation" is considered a good thing, despite the rampant evidence that the corporations will screw over the little guy as quickly as possible.
Hi. These are small business owners who are encouraged by a reduced regulatory burden on their small businesses, not regulations on a public utility like the water department. Suggesting that a reduction on the former is seen as beneficial isn't automatically an endorsement on "deregulation" of the latter.
Look, I know you've probably never met a regulation that you didn't think was totally vital and absolutely necessary unless you want people to literally die . . . but, did you ever think that there may be at least one regulation out there whose cost is worth more than its benefit to small businesses and maybe should be done away with or modified?
Did you ever think that these blanket regulations that hit businesses actually benefit larger corporations at the expense of smaller businesses? After all, the larger corporations already have in-house lawyers to run through the traditionally constant flow of new regulations, where a small business owner may have to go through and try and figure it out for himself, taking away time that could be spent in other areas of his business? Or, he'll have to hire outside attorneys at great expense to decipher it for him? I know you'll probably want to pretend these differences don't exist and these regulatory costs don't matter, but they do.
Hi. These are small business owners who are encouraged by a reduced regulatory burden on their small businesses, not regulations on a public utility like the water department. Suggesting that a reduction on the former is seen as beneficial isn't automatically an endorsement on "deregulation" of the latter.
Look, I know you've probably never met a regulation that you didn't think was totally vital and absolutely necessary unless you want people to literally die . . . but, did you ever think that there may be at least one regulation out there whose cost is worth more than its benefit to small businesses and maybe should be done away with or modified?
Did you ever think that these blanket regulations that hit businesses actually benefit larger corporations at the expense of smaller businesses? After all, the larger corporations already have in-house lawyers to run through the traditionally constant flow of new regulations, where a small business owner may have to go through and try and figure it out for himself, taking away time that could be spent in other areas of his business? Or, he'll have to hire outside attorneys at great expense to decipher it for him? I know you'll probably want to pretend these differences don't exist and these regulatory costs don't matter, but they do.
That definitely happens, as well. The more government inserts itself into the operations of business, the more motivation business has to ally with government to write laws and regulations to help it out.
The deeper your pockets, the better the chance of getting new rules that just so happen to benefit you.
A record-low 12% of Americans currently cite some aspect of the economy as the most important problem facing the U.S., down from 17% last month and one percentage point below the previous low of 13% recorded in May 1999. Mentions of the economy as the top problem reached 86% in February 2009, the highest in recent decades.
Those surveyed rated the most important problem as "dissatisfaction with government/poor leadership," with it garnering 29% of that particular vote. I would agree with that being the top concern as well, although the constantly increasing National Debt is a potentially devastating future economic problem facing the U.S. that is the direct result of years of poor leadership at the federal level. OK . . . decades.
Psh, of course they don't consider the economy to be the biggest issue right now. We're propping the economy up by injecting billions of dollars into the markets via unpaid for tax cuts. Increased economic activity should be thought of as a given in those circumstances. But the deficit is going up and up, and it aint sustainable. When those bills start coming into the light, Americans will care again.
Bill Clinton had a surplus. W. threw it down the toilet through expensive tax cuts and unpaid for wars. Obama had to stimulate the economy to save us from W's trickle down economics, but he reversed course and reduced the deficit year after year and rebounded the economy. Now, Trump is doing the exact same thing W. did by cutting taxes and pretending they'll pay for themselves. We've seen this movie before.
This ticking time bomb is set to explode after Trump's presidency ends. And that even assumes he wins a second term. Sometime in the mid 2020's we're going to feel this go off and no one who is for it gives a damn right now because they don't have to pay for it (yet).
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