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A minimum wage is moral. It ensure that you and I do not enter into an employment agreement where one side excessively benefits. The government as third party i

A minimum wage is moral. It ensure that you and I do not enter into an employment agreement where one side excessively benefits. The government as third party is ensuring we have minimum amount of fairness in our interaction. The right-wing philosophy of wage bargaining is ironically hurting the workers of their countries. The reality is that first-world nations have predatory labor practices because citizens are systemically and by their own lack of resources unable to realize what fair wage is or how to effectively bargain for it. Instead of giving workers, who are almost certainly less educated and capable the ability live off their wage so they may better their lives constructively, we indenture them into subsistence living, where the minorest of life disruption can decimate savings. It's just bad for the people living in the lower rungs of society. Being able to work at a living wage is fantastic for mitigating these shortcomings. You can actually do things like plan for the future and interact with people without worrying about the next big life problem. You can learn more labor laws to further advocate for yourself and others, and even the customs of other cultures, rather than fear someone cutting even your meager floor from under you. Without fair wage, workers can often find themselves being the "working poor", people whose jobs won't ever let them save enough money to do anything meaningful. And fair employment inevitably leads to high quality of life. Institute a living wage. Give people the opportunities they want.

firethief 11y ago
> [A minimum wage] ensure[s] that you and I do not enter into an employment agreement where one side excessively benefits. I don't see how that is a goal of minimum wage. People can be underpaid at any pay level, and a lot of jobs just aren't worth very much to the employer. A sweatshop paying pennies an hour for extremely unskilled labor could be a fair wage for that work. Minimum wage serves important functions, but I don't see how they include preserving work value : pay level equity. Free counseling to help inform people of an appropriate wage for their skill level and find an employer who would pay that seems like more of a way to meet that goal.
- vertex-four 11y ago
  > A sweatshop paying pennies an hour for extremely unskilled labor could be a fair wage for that work. Sure - in which case said sweatshop probably shouldn't exist. Sorry, but if you need to pay people less than they can live on to stay in business, and it's "not profitable" to replace them with robots, you can damn well go out of business and be replaced with a company that will automate it, allowing humans to do things that actually matter (and I'm not talking about "find less automatable work" here). That is - in a perfect world, everyone poor would be given enough money to live on and not have to feel guilty about it. If they find a job that they can survive on, they can take it and drop their benefits. What would be immoral would be to force people to take a job that pays less than they can live on to receive benefits - that's outright punishment for not being able to find a job. We tried punishing people for being poor/unskilled in the UK, it's called the workhouses, and to some degree our Job Centre wants to bring the concept back. Of course, if you're calling for both a lack of minimum wage and cutting benefits further than they already are in many places... I think you'll find most would call you immoral. "Let them die so that my ideology wins."
  - firethief 11y ago
    I'm not sure you saw the post that I was replying to. I'm disagreeing with that post's argument that the function of minimum wage is to ensure people are paid what the work they do is worth to their employer. Such an argument would condone sweatshops, which I thought would be understood to be a bad thing but I guess something like Poe's Law applies.
    - vertex-four 11y ago
      I didn't read it as that. "An employment agreement where one side excessively benefits" includes one where the employer gets to stay in business and make a healthy profit, but the employee can't survive on their pay.
nostrademons 11y ago
The grandparent post is highlighting an important point, though: you can't consider questions of morality without also considering morality for whom. There's often a hidden loser in decisions like this, and their perspective is ignored. Say that a certain business unit has a labor budget of $3M/year. (Because that's how these things really work: a manager gets a budget to work with, driven either by his business's revenues or by the decisions of higher-ups.) He can hire 100 people at $15/hour, or he can hire 150 people at $10/hour. The business owner, obviously, would prefer to hire 150 people at $10/hour. He can get more work out of them (in any industry other than R&D or software, where you have negative economies of scale). That part is not in dispute, but most commenters here don't care; business owners and managers have plenty of money & power already. The person hired, obviously, would rather get $15/hour. It could be the difference between poverty and a decent middle-class lifestyle. The minimum wage is great for them. But there's a third group: the 50 people who weren't hired because the business has decided they only have 100 positions instead of 150. They're fucked. They go back in the unemployment pool, and have to fend for yourself. And they're even more powerless and vulnerable than the minimum wage workers who have jobs. I don't actually have a strong opinion on the morality of minimum wage laws, but I fear that the perspective of the workers who aren't hired is lost, and if you really want to talk morals, you need to account for all people involved. Would you still support minimum wage laws if they were sold as "Employment caps for low-wage industries"? Because that's their actual effect.
tempestn 11y ago
As the original article argues though, couldn't a basic income be a better solution to most of these problems, while avoiding the negatives of a minimum wage?

firethief 11y ago

> [A minimum wage] ensure[s] that you and I do not enter into an employment agreement where one side excessively benefits. I don't see how that is a goal of minimum wage. People can be underpaid at any pay level, and a lot of jobs just aren't worth very much to the employer. A sweatshop paying pennies an hour for extremely unskilled labor could be a fair wage for that work. Minimum wage serves important functions, but I don't see how they include preserving work value : pay level equity. Free counseling to help inform people of an appropriate wage for their skill level and find an employer who would pay that seems like more of a way to meet that goal.

vertex-four 11y ago
> A sweatshop paying pennies an hour for extremely unskilled labor could be a fair wage for that work. Sure - in which case said sweatshop probably shouldn't exist. Sorry, but if you need to pay people less than they can live on to stay in business, and it's "not profitable" to replace them with robots, you can damn well go out of business and be replaced with a company that will automate it, allowing humans to do things that actually matter (and I'm not talking about "find less automatable work" here). That is - in a perfect world, everyone poor would be given enough money to live on and not have to feel guilty about it. If they find a job that they can survive on, they can take it and drop their benefits. What would be immoral would be to force people to take a job that pays less than they can live on to receive benefits - that's outright punishment for not being able to find a job. We tried punishing people for being poor/unskilled in the UK, it's called the workhouses, and to some degree our Job Centre wants to bring the concept back. Of course, if you're calling for both a lack of minimum wage and cutting benefits further than they already are in many places... I think you'll find most would call you immoral. "Let them die so that my ideology wins."
- firethief 11y ago
  I'm not sure you saw the post that I was replying to. I'm disagreeing with that post's argument that the function of minimum wage is to ensure people are paid what the work they do is worth to their employer. Such an argument would condone sweatshops, which I thought would be understood to be a bad thing but I guess something like Poe's Law applies.
  - vertex-four 11y ago
    I didn't read it as that. "An employment agreement where one side excessively benefits" includes one where the employer gets to stay in business and make a healthy profit, but the employee can't survive on their pay.

nostrademons 11y ago

The grandparent post is highlighting an important point, though: you can't consider questions of morality without also considering morality for whom. There's often a hidden loser in decisions like this, and their perspective is ignored. Say that a certain business unit has a labor budget of $3M/year. (Because that's how these things really work: a manager gets a budget to work with, driven either by his business's revenues or by the decisions of higher-ups.) He can hire 100 people at $15/hour, or he can hire 150 people at $10/hour. The business owner, obviously, would prefer to hire 150 people at $10/hour. He can get more work out of them (in any industry other than R&D or software, where you have negative economies of scale). That part is not in dispute, but most commenters here don't care; business owners and managers have plenty of money & power already. The person hired, obviously, would rather get $15/hour. It could be the difference between poverty and a decent middle-class lifestyle. The minimum wage is great for them. But there's a third group: the 50 people who weren't hired because the business has decided they only have 100 positions instead of 150. They're fucked. They go back in the unemployment pool, and have to fend for yourself. And they're even more powerless and vulnerable than the minimum wage workers who have jobs. I don't actually have a strong opinion on the morality of minimum wage laws, but I fear that the perspective of the workers who aren't hired is lost, and if you really want to talk morals, you need to account for all people involved. Would you still support minimum wage laws if they were sold as "Employment caps for low-wage industries"? Because that's their actual effect.

tempestn 11y ago

As the original article argues though, couldn't a basic income be a better solution to most of these problems, while avoiding the negatives of a minimum wage?