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> [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 mi

> [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.

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.