Anti-labor, anti-youth Republicans David and Al Novstrup resisted raising South Dakota’s minimum wage on the ridiculous argument that cutting wages gives young workers more opportunities. But as I’ve reported previously, South Dakota’s decision to raise and annually index its minimum wage isn’t causing any teenagers to lose their jobs. Instead, as KELO-TV reports, kids aren’t choosing jobs:
…Recreation Program Coordinator for Sioux Falls Parks and Recreaction, Jean Pearson… has more than 100 lifeguard positions to fill every season. In recent years, she’s had to get creative.
“I’m helping those kids out that are looking for employment but may not have a wide open schedule, that says I can work any time between 5:30 and 8. Okay, well those people aren’t there! They don’t exist. And if they do, come see me because I haven’t met you yet,” said Pearson.
“Kids are hard to find. We actually tried to do some marketing and outreach to youth, and ironically we had problems finding a group of youth to do a focus group with us on how to reach them,” said Marcia Hultman, South Dakota Secretary of Labor and Regulation.
Secretary of Labor and Regulation, Marcia Hultman, says the struggle Pearson has been facing is becoming more and more common.
The rate of teens in the workforce in South Dakota has dropped more than 50-percent since the late 1980s [Sammi Bjelland, “Fewer Teens Entering Workforce,” KELO-TV, 2019.05.21].
The problem is not that South Dakota’s minimum wage is too high. The problem could be that our minimum wage—not to mention many of the wages above minimum—aren’t high enough.
Here’s the deal. All of these comparisons with the late 1980s ignores how much the job market has changed since then. Adults are now involved in competing for those entry level jobs for a number of reasons. Go to a McDonald’s and you will see few kids working these days. It used to be fast food. Now it moves as fast as the retiree who has to supplement his social security check because it’s not sufficient.
Every Tuesday, at least in my town, McDonald’s holds open interviews for jobs. Anyone can go in and apply, sit and have a soda, and snag an interview. Kids do interview for these jobs. In the past kids were just competing against other kids for summer jobs. Now they are competing against adults, because
management knows the adults are usually are more reliable. They have more desperation, because they have to work to keep a roof above their children’s heads. With welfare reform in the 1990s, we made many entry-level jobs a punishment for adults, not a step up the ladder of the American dream for teens. There are lots of requirements now for adults to work for the crumbs the social safety net provides. Kids see Jobs, especially entry-level jobs, are as punishment, not as experience, certainly not as fun, and not as money in the bank. These kids aren’t wrong, by the way. They have it exactly right.
Now, as far a lifeguarding goes, that used to require quite a bit of training, because lives depend on it. Not just anyone off the street could do that job. The kids I knew who had that job were not only expert swimmers, but had first aid training. Maybe the prerequisites have changed since I was a lad.
Most kids do not want to work.
Actually here’s the deal. Wages here are higher than minimum wage and more. Companies all over are begging for people and even though Cory and others keep hitting the raise minimum wage button it won’t solve jack. It never does. We do not have the population for the jobs available. There are at a minimum 10 million more jobs available than we have people for. Before you throw in illegals, please stop. These are jobs necessary for skills that they don’t have. Manufacturing companies in SD start, on average, at $15/hr or higher.
Just imagine if we hadn’t aborted the 54 million Americans since Roe V Wade? Doubtful we’d have a social security crisis and we had millions more people working. I know that won’t fit your pro-choice argument either and I’m sure I’ll see someone say that more would be on the Govt tit but it wouldn’t be that high. We’d have more people available.
The worker shortage is going to continue regardless. Keep crying higher minimum wage. Its dumb.
Pay enough money, and people will fill those jobs. There is distorted thinking going on if people believe $15 an hour is a great wage. That’s a tiny bit above what the minimum wage was in 1968, accounting for inflation. That $15 per hour wage should be given to entry level workers, not someone in a manufacturing position, which, if we are going by 1968 rates, would be double or triple $15 per hour. If you worked at Morrell’s it would be 5 times the minimum wage. Pay decent wages, you’ll have so many people applying you’ll have to hire them just to do the paperwork for the other folks rushing to apply.
Kids understand that they are being paid slave wages and that neither they nor their work is respected. Look at the SD Legislature. They used to work five days a week for much less. Now they work three days a week and gave themselves a raise!!! Great example they are showing these kids. Making entry level jobs a punishment for being poor makes kids think those jobs aren’t worth having.
Any kid with a licka sense gets outa SoDak as quickly as (s)he can scrape up bus fare. That is, the kids who haven’t already been snagged by the barbaric laws here.
Obviously Mr. Brown has the inside track on lazy teens that “don’t want to work”. What would you have them do for 40 hours a week (benefits)? Who would hire a teen for a full time 40 hour a week job that already has 2 dozen older workers scrambling for the same job but only for 14 hours a week in our gig economy (no benefits). Nope, the reason there is a shortage of teen workers is because the Jamaican’s and wherever else the I-90 corridor tourist places hire for summer help make everything else not worth it. Teens want to work, they just want a job on the farm or the ranch where they are appreciated in a very dangerous occupation.
Brown sounds like one of the old people who like to disparage young generations. The teens I see in Minnesota work their hineys off at multiple jobs.
BTW, immigrants ARE an answer to higher skilled jobs too. A young Latina just graduated from high school in Fairmont, MN, with a high GPA. Oh yeah, she also received her ASN degree as an RN the same week. She expects to be a pediatric surgeon by the time she’s 25 since she’ll be receiving her BS in 2 years, then starting med school. Her 4 little sisters have similar plans.
Immigrant children do that kind of thing regularly. Because Minnesota welcomes immigrants we have medical, legal, business, tech, building and all others kinds of professionals of all skin colors and religions. That’s because they’re smart, extremely motivated and *work harder than nearly every white skinned person.
So yeah. The teenage labor shortage is not lazy high schoolers. Long term Americans, mostly white, aren’t having many children. Immigrants can help fix what ails us.
(*That’s really why white supremacists are afraid of them.)
Clint Brown, I assume you post comments because you would like others to hear and value your opinions. I have to let you know that when you call people who are simply seeking freedom, safety and opportunity to work at decent jobs “illegals,” you immediately make me and readers who share my views question the validity and accuracy of everything you have written. To us, that term is no different than calling blacks the “n” word, or calling other groups names that seem designed to denigrate and dehumanize rather than add any postive or truthful meaning to a comment.
If it matters to you how others interpret your comments I would urge you to refrain from using this type of harmful name-calling.
BCB, I know you know you are simply peeing into the wind when you try to talk sense to Clint.
CIRD, I could be wrong but I am guessing that if Clint didn’t want to be taken seriously then he wouldn’t post his comments and opinions on DFP.
From my perspective as a member of the DFP audience, and from the perspective of many others that read DFP, comments that arbitrarily use adolescent dehumanizing labels are counterproductive to being taken seriously. Instead, such labels triggers a pyschological reaction that the comment is presumptively factually inaccurate, offers only a weak or spurious argument and is simply not worth serious consideration.
And it is quite easy to avoid undermining one’s own comment – simply avoid unnecessarily using labels when you know they tend to dehumanize and hurt strangers without adding an iota of persuasiveness to whatever point you hope to make with the comment.
I only raise the issue because Clint might not have even considered how using such language would affect readers’ perceptions of his comment. Now he knows. He seems like a thoughtful guy. Whether he deems continuing to use dehumanizing labels in his public comments will help him persuade readers that his ideas have merit is up to him.
Donald is correct about the core of the workforce issue: pay. SD continually looks at $15.00 an hour like it is the doorway to extravagant living. When we define the poverty line income for a household of four at $25,750, the $30K of that salary gets the proper context.
South Dakota must consider how it feels to work hard at a job knowing that the end is still near-poverty existence. I have posted before about teens specifically; why work when wages are so low and school expenses are SO high that you cannot make any serious dent in your potential post-high school education debt?
Ruh oh, factory orders at 9 year low. Teens will not be hired because their parents will need the work. “U.S. factory activity took a hit this month as the tariff war with China and an overhang of inventory dampened orders, adding to signs the economy could slow in the second quarter.
The preliminary U.S. manufacturing purchasing managers’ index from IHS Markit fell two points to 50.6, the lowest reading since 2009, according to data Thursday. The drop was led by the new orders gauge, which showed a contraction for the first time since August 2009. IHS Markit’s gauge of U.S. services also fell to a three-year low.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-23/u-s-manufacturing-gauge-drops-to-nine-year-low-amid-trade-war?srnd=markets-vp
Looks like we’re gonna have to nationalize everything, including farming. Nikita trump is at the helm of the communist ship of state.
Donald—and the kids who pay attention to the Legislature also see that the only way to get really good jobs in Pierre is to lick boots, marry into, or be the children of the current Executive Family.
Donald seems to have a firmer, more market-based grasp of why teens are crowded out of the workforce than anyone who sees the need to distract us with a hypothetical debate about an alternate Handmaid’s Tale universe. I see the same phenomenon Donald sees: we’re sliding back into the pre-New Deal days when older people had no retirement security. We have fewer close family members to take care of the elderly due to mobility (which helps kids move away but doesn’t translate into easy trips back to provide regular care). More people have to postpone retirement… or they retire, then realize they can’t balance the household budget, and have to jump back in to whatever crap jobs they can find. That both sticks older folks in a drudgerous and undignified retirement in which employers can take advantage of their desperation and denies teenagers the chance to get their hands dirty the way we want them to in the workforce.
That said, why we wouldn’t want to allow more immigrants who want to work to come to our country is beyond me. They work hard, they extend the life of Social Security and Medicare… heck, they make America greater than anything the current administration is doing as it pretends to boost the country while screwing it for one man’s gain.
But let’s not forget the main original point, which no one has refuted: Trumpy Republicans like David Novstrup told us that raising the minimum wage would prevent teenagers from getting jobs. Evidence, including the KELO story above, shows that was a false argument against good policy. We can raise the basic wage that we promise to every entrant in the workforce without harming the opportunities young people have to participate in the workforce.
Here’s the latest perk employers are using, in addition to at least $15/hr.
“Branch [payroll business] , which also provides its service to Taco Bell franchisees, charges a $2.99 fee for workers to get up to half of their wages the same day they worked. The startup has seen 150% growth among restaurant employees since introducing the early-wage part of the app in September.
“Most Branch early-pay users are spending the fast cash on transportation, groceries and unexpected bills, Branch CEO Atif Siddiqi said. Expedited pay can ‘help keep employees happy.’ ”
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/07/conservatives-scramble-to-spin-new-economic-analysis-that-shows-clear-benefits-of-minimum-wage-increase/
What wingnuts have to say about positive benefits of new minimum wage.