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[quote=UCGal]
That said – I suspect FLU will benefit because of the ban on pre-existing conditions. He’s relatively young – and premiums are based on age. His medical issues will not jack his rates up or allow insurers to not insure him.

This will give FLU the opportunity to do consulting, entrepreneurial ventures, etc – and not be tied to an employer for healthcare.

As far as retirees – Any non-government retiree that was firmly counting on retiree healthcare hasn’t paid attention for the past decade. It’s gone away along with pensions. And it was NEVER protected under PBGC, the way pensions were.

I know a lot of folks on the early-retirement.org board who are waiting till October to verify the exchange rates – then turning in their notices at work… Access to insurance for the early retiree has been the big crap shoot preventing people who would otherwise retire from doing so.

Lots of discussion over on that board about 4x poverty rate thing (and the cliff on the other side if you don’t manage it right.) How that effects the roth conversion plans (don’t convert to roth because it might kick you above that threshold.)[/quote]

Yes, that freedom from insurance being tied to employment is a huge item.

The crap shoot on costs is the other. That cliff, when the parents are in the 40s is a $193/month for a family of 4. But in the mid-50s, that cliff is $548/month. Or about $6500/year.

For a two 60-64 year olds, that tipping point is $62,039/yr. The cost is $1600/month (for gold) and $1366 (for Silver) and the credit is $863/month. That’s huge.

Since I have a young child if I retire and push my realized income below $78,120 (today) I would get a $664/credit or $0 if I hit $78,120 or more. The difference is my insurance $750-$950/month between ages 40-64 or is it $950-$1750/month.

CD laddering and realizing five years income in one year will become necessary so that you pay high one year and reap benefits the other 4.

Or plan B, just insure you have $200K/yr in income.

[no_such_reality]

[quote=livinincali]
Think about the other side of the balance sheet for a little bit.[/quote]

Businesses and society clash on externality. Particularly of costs.

Can and should the Government force you to have a catalytic converter on your car exhaust?

The car would be cheaper if we didn’t have them.

Low wages are the same as the pollution coming from the car. The argument isn’t that the laborer is doing something that deserve more, the argument is that if the product or service cannot be produced unless it uses sub-living wages, then as society, we’re better off without it.

Obviously, few here would think I should be able to produce a product and pollute whilly-nilly. If I can’t produce it and create value to make a profit to cover the necessary pollution abatement, we shouldn’t do it.

Paying the workers a sub-living wage is just externalizing the real costs of your product and allowing you to practice predatory pricing against a business that isn’t externalizing the costs of having employees.

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New Energy Bill to alter Electricity Rates and Grid Charges

Cool, just as we ramp up solar, let’s impose a $10/month ‘grid maintenance’ charge.

[no_such_reality]

[quote=SK in CV][quote=no_such_reality]
Too many companies are, IMHO, abusing exempt worker status where the workers really aren’t exempt and do not have the freedom to decide when and where to get there work done and the companies use it as a way to sidestep hiring and paying overtime. Uncompensated on call, weekend work, etc.

We’ve got too much mindset going into slogging 60 hour weeks instead of working smart.

And no worries, I realize that’s a borderline nut-job viewpoint. :-)[/quote]

Makes perfect sense and I don’t disagree. If you had said $75K a year, I think would have understood the issue you’re addressing. At $150K, I had no clue. I’m guessing there aren’t a lot of $150K (or even $100K) a year salaried employees that are being abused under the exemption.[/quote]

I work in IT where the majority make $75K-$125K base and uncompensated time is pretty rampant.

I was a little surprised you picked that one and not some of the others.

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[quote=SK in CV][quote=no_such_reality]I also favor far more radical solutions such as changing the employment law so that if you make under $150K OR you do not have more than 3 direct report employees that you have hire/fire over you cannot be a salaried employee.

[/quote]

What is the point of this?[/quote]

Too many companies are, IMHO, abusing exempt worker status where the workers really aren’t exempt and do not have the freedom to decide when and where to get there work done and the companies use it as a way to sidestep hiring and paying overtime. Uncompensated on call, weekend work, etc.

We’ve got too much mindset going into slogging 60 hour weeks instead of working smart.

And no worries, I realize that’s a borderline nut-job viewpoint. 🙂

[no_such_reality]

CAR, if you haven’t seen any ideas from the capital side, you haven’t been reading.

There aren’t any easy solutions. As people have commented previously, the solutions range everywhere from tightening the safety net to restrict it to real need to structuring it to push people back into employment, to cracking down on employers and shutting the abused pipelines of illegal labor and H1B indentured servitude. Frankly, IMHO, the company in the original story with the 100s of illegal labor a few years ago SHOULD have had C-level executives wearing orange jumpsuits and spending time in prison.

Education is a major issue. I think we need more trade schools and apprenticeship programs. Our education is geared to pushing people into college and nothing else, it’s failing a large portion of the students.

I like the idea of a living wage, not because the worker is doing something that earns it, but because the citizens deserve not to have companies employing people that need government aid for the basics.

I also favor far more radical solutions such as changing the employment law so that if you make under $150K OR you do not have more than 3 direct report employees that you have hire/fire over you cannot be a salaried employee.

Similarly, I favor a change to the over time rules, overtime is 3x for companies employing more than 5 people. If a company provides health care to any employee, they need to provide it to all employees regardless if they work 1 hour or 40+.

Finally, I favor removal of the income tax and a replacement with a Federal Asset Tax and Sales Tax of 3%. The asset tax would apply to all financial instruments and holdings and real property on a quarterly basis. The sales tax would be on all retail/wholesale sold items.

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I’m stay waiting for someone to tell me what we gain by doing this?

Call me a cynic, but “what’s in it for us?”

other than a feel good, ‘we stopped a bad guy’. He’ll just be replaced by another.

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So why do we need to be the world’s police force again?

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[quote=spdrun]No: they need jailing.[/quote]

Yes they do, I mean LEA in general all across the state appear to continually escalate confrontations instead of defusing and they need a new training program.

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Actually the guy had been fighting in the street.

None of that matters, nor does being obstinate. There is a fundamental problem when the cops continue to use force on a person who is on their back in the street. You have a cop swinging a baton at your knees when you’re on your back and you won’t behave like a docile little cow that does whatever order they bark, you will attempt to block blows.

The cops need retraining. It is obvious as you watch police response that they been trained to use overwhelming force and IMHO, the cops have been trained to ESCALATE situations instead of defusing situations.

[no_such_reality]

[quote=CA renter]livin,

That’s what it looks like on the surface, but this is not how unions (are supposed to) operate, at least not that I’ve ever seen.

There would have to be a significant number of employees who are in favor or union representation. Note that the article states, “The Gerawans and their workers have been resisting the union power grab.” [italics mine] But if the workers were truly opposed to union representation, the union would not be doing this. The article does not state the percentage of workers who are opposed to organizing. Even the signatures gathered to oppose the union represent only ~20% of the employees. What about the others? Maybe the 20% are old-time employees who have different pay/benefits than the newer employees, or maybe they’ve been bribed or threatened by their employer to oppose the union. That’s why I’m saying that we do not know enough about this story.

Of course, if I have it wrong, and the majority of the employees really do NOT want union representation, then I would agree that the union is operating in a corrupt and unethical way.[/quote]

I thought the most interesting part of that story was the 1st and 4th paragraph below.

[quote]The United Farm Workers muscled its way onto the farm in 1990 but quickly lost support. In that year, the UFW won an election to organize Gerawan workers (with just 536 total votes) and in 1992 was certified by the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board. Yet after holding just one bargaining session, the union lost interest and never procured a contract.

Then, after nearly two decades without negotiations, UFW organizers turned up last October and demanded a contract that would require employees to pay 3% of their wages in dues (between $600 and $1,000 a year). Gerawan also says that the union wanted the company to fire workers who didn’t pay up.

The UFW needs the cash to pay its own bills. Since its heyday in the 1970s, the union has lost roughly 90% of its members. Last year, it spent $1.2 million more than it collected, based on Department of Labor filings. Hitting up Gerawan’s 5,000 workers could double the union’s revenues, and the easiest way to extract the money from workers was to enlist the state’s help.

Early this year, the Gerawans and UFW representatives met to discuss the union’s demands, but in March the union abruptly broke off negotiations and petitioned the Agricultural Labor Relations Board to compel Gerawan into binding arbitration to impose a contract. A 2002 state law allows farmworker unions to sidestep collective bargaining and demand state mediation of first-time contracts. No other labor group in the state has this right.[/quote]

[no_such_reality]

[quote=CA renter]
Remember, without human labor, there would be no capital (even land requires labor to make it productive/valuable). LABOR, not capital, created almost all the wealth that exists today, and labor should share in the ownership of that capital.[/quote]

CAR, you make much a similar statement whenever a thread like this comes up. That’s not really what CE was talking about. Nor I, nor other on the other side of the capital argument.

Most importantly, Labor has shared. The primarily problem is old school Labor is continuing to be a smaller and smaller component.

Today, four people and a combine harvester do the work of over 100 people.

The question is really simple, what are the other 96 going to do?

More importantly, how do lift everyone’s quality of life while addressing it?

Policy changes to increase the cost of capital compared to labor in effect makes less, not more. It’s kind of similar to artisanal foods. If you go into a supermarket, whole chicken is regularly $0.79/lb. A whole 5lb chicken is $4 and change. Go to Whole Foods and a organic chicken is $2.99/lb.

Walk down the meat counter, eventually you get to area with a small chicken label ‘pastured’. Birds raised on pasture supplemented with food. $5.99/lb.

Or grab a local CSA, get a real ‘free range’ chicken, it’ll be about a 4 lb bird and be $28-$35 depending on the CSA. A heritage turkey for a special occasion is a $140.

Why are they so expensive? The farmers need to make a living and they can’t raise many. Unfortunately, I can’t afford to buy many.

Everybody making artisanal products may not work as a solution, they simply make less. Buying American is good, things like dinnerware is easy, automobiles much more complex. Or the new Mac, assembled in the USA, not sure where all the parts are made.

Do we need complex labels on everything to declare what percentage of the COGS for the parts are made here and what percentage of the assembly is done here?

Finally, I don’t expect to a rewarded for the work my father did. Labor needs to quit talking about what they did in the past and talk about what they will do in the future.

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I must have hit a nerve BG. You’re not really contributing to the thread over that bloviated snark.

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SK, raising minimum wage will accelerate mechanization. And again, the issue isn’t ALL labor, just the fact that we can get by with way LESS labor.

Playing with taxes and minimum wage and tax advantages of labor is just changing the breakeven point. It will have the same challenge as outsourcing. Effectively you just make labor here more expensive compare to substitute labor elsewhere. AKA, GM in the 90s with automated factory machines and union workers sitting on the bench. We know how that turned out, GM automated anyway.

But maybe Boomers will eventually do some good, as they age, they’ll need care, and they’ll increasingly need to pay someone to change their Depends. The Millinials aren’t doing to deal with your sh*t for peanuts. 🙂

[no_such_reality]

[quote=bearishgurl][quote=no_such_reality]….Unlike the past in which the workers provide all the labor and were necessary, today, workers are quickly becoming unnecessary.[/quote]

nsr, come back and tell us all this next time you are looking to get a door or countertops installed or a new roof :=0

Or better yet, why don’t you just hire a “robot” to lay your tile while you stay home from work “supervising” the job :=D[/quote]

Walk into home depot, tile design are pre-fab. Counters are pre-fab. Cabinets are pre-fab.

Even in what you mention, 1/10th the labor is needed as what was needed 10 or 20 years ago.

As for my roof, I had it done, a crew of three guys did it in two days. I’m probably good for 20-30 years. Pneumatic nail guns, cranes setting all the materials on the roof, capital and 1/10th the labor.

We’ll never have no labor, but the problem is we can do it on 1/10th the labor.

The obvious question you didn’t answer is what the h*ll do we do with the 9/10th we no longer need? The answer is we need to convert them to think-labor. but even think labor is getting replaced and ultimately almost all of us need to go to creation labor.

As for tile robots, Carnegie Mellon did it back in the 90s, same concept as a DitchWitch.

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