THAT should be the question. Everyone deserves a thriving wage.

Disingenuous article.

Had some slick work arounds to increase the boards pay without making it look like they did.

1. Company paid club memberships across the world.

2. Corporate jets.

3. Cut rate stock buys every quarter. They could buy stock at a discounted price in the morning and sell them that day at a profit. The biggest trade I saw allowed the board member to pick up a extra quarter million in one day.

4. Not being what I would call a full time employee. Some of the board members also were board members at a different company.

For someone working 40 hours per week, that would be $104,000 per year.

Not even close.

Probably need closer to $110 or $120 for it to be respectable.

Make that minimum wage and a lot of surgeons and every teacher west of the International Date Line would be applying for easier minimum wage jobs. (And then live in Bakersfield.)

But not everybody could live in Holmby Hills, and if that was the minimum wage the housing prices would really show a lot of "inflation".

There are a lot of businesses out there that are only profitable because they pay subpar wages, while still clearing a healthy profit for their owners. Many of these are franchises, where the franchiser provides (frequently subpar) equipment, signage, and the use of related marketing material while taking a significant percentage of the profits. This gives them all of the benefits of having a store while incurring almost none of the costs, including labour, health care, or other benefits. If the franchise fails, they can even take a loss in taxes without actually losing money.

A minimum wage probably does kill barely profitable businesses, but that's the point. If a company is barely profitable by taking money that could go to paying workers a living wage, it shouldn''t be in business in the first place. Making a profit is not a guaranteed right, even though there are all too many people who believe wholeheartedly that it is.

Causing many of their customers to pull their business and outsource to overseas competitors. I worked for an auto supplier that made parts for the car manufacturers (Tier II) Every single job that was awarded required beating out a competitor in another part of the world, making profit margins pretty minimal. Can't raise prices because your customers won't accept it and will take their tooling and move it to another country. They paid above minimum wage, but not the wages people are advocating.

I guess they all deserve to go out of business

Why are manufacturers buying from overseas in the first place?

I've watched this same phenomenon in tech. Corporate managers looked for ways to goose profits, and one key way was to use foreign labor in a form of arbitrage. Had the money they saved gone into R&D, to develop more efficient engines, better drive trains, etc., this may almost have been a worthwhile trade-off. Instead, the money went into dividends, and from there into luxury homes, high end cars, expensive trips, and so forth. It hollowed out the expertise of American companies, and made them in turn vulnerable to foreign takeover.

Many "American" companies are now majority-owned by foreign shareholders, especially in tech and healthcare, but manufacturing and finance is not far from the top. They really don't care if American consumers or workers are getting hurt - indeed, in many cases they are happier if they are getting hurt.

not maximum wage

$26+ near any city!

If a job requires a college degree but pays only $18 an hour, how does it make sense for someone working a low skill, minimum wage job to earn $23 an hour. Maybe the college degree jobs need to adjusting, but that is a long, slow process.

minimum wage for lower skilled workers shouldn’t be held back just because some college requiring jobs are paying less than they should. It’s up to those businesses to raise their compensation accordingly.

But people on the next rung are going to complain if they are suddenly equal to the bottom rung. And businesses won't raise the compensation if they don't have to.