the impact a $15 per hour minimum wage on the trucking industry

Increase in minimum wage won't affect truck drivers. What it does is cause companies that pay minimum wage to trim the fat and lay off people, plus cut hours so they don't have to pay benefits. If the government says 38 hours is considered full time work, then the employer cut your work schedule to 37 hours and now doesn't have to pay benefits.
Also, increase in minimum wage puts many people above the threshold of qualifying for government freebies.
Increase in minimum wage means employers will expect you to earn that pay raise; now you don't just fry potatoes, you must also clean the grill at the end or your shift because we laid off the worker that was cleaning the grill. Added responsibility comes with a pay raise.

 

If a job naturally requires $15/hour to fill it then that’s a good thing. Good for everyone because it says the demand for workers is going up. Nice.

But if a bureaucrat tells a biz sorry, all your first time employees start at that same high wage. That’s bad for workers. No business is going to pay an artificial wage. Oops, no jobs available at this time...

 

Or just get a robot to do it, and pay one person $15 / hr to service and refill the various bins in 10 stores. Heck, they have a custom pizza vending machine that takes a pre made crust, adds toppings, cooks and dispenses.
If they can do that, I wonder what else there is that will be automated once labor becomes too much.

 

If we are luckly Stevens Transport might raise their owner operator pay from $0.85 a mile to $0.90 a mile

 

People act like the minimum wage has never gone up before. I'm 47 now and remember when it was under 5 bucks an hour for a student. Iirc it was 9 bucks an hour when l started driving. We hauled baled tobacco so l had a helper to load the trailer with me. He got 9 and l got 11 as a green horn driver. My dad was a machinist and was around 17.50 that was in 1990.
My point is wages will adjust to the new minimum wage. Tradesman will be around 10 bucks an hour higher and "unskilled" labour like truck drivers will be around 5 bucks higher than minimum. Its alwsas been that way. Btw l ate lunch at the same family owned place today as l did back then. Apparently they didn't get the memo that they were supposed to go broke because of the minimum wage going up back then or now.

 

I think the same thing when I see some daycabber plodding along running local, "Better him than me."

 

I had that very argument with someone about that:

"Yeah you make good money, you can afford a $4.25 Tim Horton's coffee"

Spoiler alert: The coffee still costs the minimum wage earner $4.25

 

The issue isn't that is going up... It's that it's nearly doubling, you said under 5 bucks so say it was 4 that is only an increase of 3.25 vs federal mn wage of 7.25 now... 15 is more than double that.... It will be to large of a shock to the economy it took what 30+ years to reach a min wage increase of 3.25 and now they want to increase it by 7.75 over 5 to 10 years?

I'm no economist but I don't think small businesses will be able to handle they much of a change so quickly.

Min wage increase is fine... Doubling it to appease the lower classes ( in reality government wants more tax money cause they are seriously in debt) is just fool Hardy.



I won't speculate on whatit may cause and until a 1/3 or more states do the same it won't have a large impact on the nation as a whole but I don't believe such a large increase can be a good thing.

 

Ny state managed to run off most of they're business and industry years ago with sky high cost of living and taxes .
That's why there isn't much to haul out of there at a decent rate ...they don't make anything .