Originally Posted by
minimoke
I’m sorry. In the context of my post I didn’t think I needed to explain “wages”. Obviously I do so here goes.
Lets take two workers “A” and “B”
Before Working For Families they both worked 8 hours a day, five days a week and made 500 widgets each. Each worker took home $500 in their pay.
Then WWF came in. Employee B has 1 child so that entitles him, to lets say $100 extra. So now you have Employee A taking home $500 for his 500 widgets and Employee B taking home $600 for his 500 widgets. Net cost per widget has gone up. Employee B is no more productive but there is a greater cost.
It gets worse. Say Employee B takes a day off without pay. So he only produces 400 widgets. That week Employee A takes home $500 for his 500 widgets and Employee B takes home $600 for his 400 widgets. See the problem?
But there is a perversion as well. Say Employee B does 8 hours overtime and produces 600 widgets. He gets paid an extra $100 for his labour. But because he gets paid more gross he gets less WWF - lets call it $100. So now we have employee A taking home $500 for his 500 widgets and Employee B $600 for his 600 widgets. He gets nothing for his increase in productivity. So what does Employee B do – of course he doesn’t work overtime.
Do you see where I am going with this?
Now lets say we ditch WWF. And lets say Employee A wants to start a family and Employee A has figured it costs $100 a week to have a child.
He has a few options. One is to work more hours and increase his productivity. Kinda good. Except he is worker harder not smarter – that’s not productive.
So instead he decides to educate himself a bit more, upskill, train and get a better job,
Lo and behold he is now part a higher wage higher skill economy