4 ms·

Sweatshops and unsafe workplaces were also just people doing stuff, yet long ago they were considered such a problem that laws were passed to reign them in (aga

Sweatshops and unsafe workplaces were also just people doing stuff, yet long ago they were considered such a problem that laws were passed to reign them in (against much resistance). I'm not really interested in returning to the status quo ante.

bhupy 7y ago
The problem with sweatshops and unsafe workplaces is that the employees in question don't have the leverage to walk away from those jobs, since...they would just starve and die. Again, this sounds like a welfare problem, because if we instead redistribute money to these folks (expand EITC and even remove the employment requirement), then they have the leverage necessary to negotiate better pay and better conditions. Such workers can walk away from unsafe working conditions without worrying about being able to feed themselves. Higher paid workers do this all the time, and this feeds into the market price for certain labor.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
There is a long history of a business practice harming workers, the workers objecting and getting companies to change the practice, and then just as the practice is falling out of favor in the market, the government will pass a law against it and claim credit for eliminating it. Most of those laws are not very useful, because the practice was already on its way out, but also not very harmful, because the practice was already on its way out. (Notice that there is also a major distinction between "worker protections" which workers can generally negotiate for themselves, and laws pricing externalities like pollution, which really do need to be there to keep companies from doing that.) The problem in this case is that paying low wages isn't actually universally harmful. In many cases, prohibiting employees from working for lower wages only prohibits them from working at all, because no one will hire them for more than that. Moreover, the benefit is quite attenuated because the difference for the workers who did receive higher wages is still not dramatically more than they would be paid in the alternative, and even they are a very small percentage of overall workers, the large majority of which make more than minimum wage to begin with. It's not clear that giving a small raise to a small group of people is actually worth causing another group of people to lose their jobs, while raising the prices that everyone has to pay. Particularly when there are alternatives for subsidizing compensation that spread the cost more evenly instead of concentrating it on the exact people you don't really want to tax in general. Compare this to a law requiring saws to have blade guards on them, which costs hardly anything and has no apparent major negative consequences at all to anyone.

bhupy 7y ago

The problem with sweatshops and unsafe workplaces is that the employees in question don't have the leverage to walk away from those jobs, since...they would just starve and die. Again, this sounds like a welfare problem, because if we instead redistribute money to these folks (expand EITC and even remove the employment requirement), then they have the leverage necessary to negotiate better pay and better conditions. Such workers can walk away from unsafe working conditions without worrying about being able to feed themselves. Higher paid workers do this all the time, and this feeds into the market price for certain labor.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

There is a long history of a business practice harming workers, the workers objecting and getting companies to change the practice, and then just as the practice is falling out of favor in the market, the government will pass a law against it and claim credit for eliminating it. Most of those laws are not very useful, because the practice was already on its way out, but also not very harmful, because the practice was already on its way out. (Notice that there is also a major distinction between "worker protections" which workers can generally negotiate for themselves, and laws pricing externalities like pollution, which really do need to be there to keep companies from doing that.) The problem in this case is that paying low wages isn't actually universally harmful. In many cases, prohibiting employees from working for lower wages only prohibits them from working at all, because no one will hire them for more than that. Moreover, the benefit is quite attenuated because the difference for the workers who did receive higher wages is still not dramatically more than they would be paid in the alternative, and even they are a very small percentage of overall workers, the large majority of which make more than minimum wage to begin with. It's not clear that giving a small raise to a small group of people is actually worth causing another group of people to lose their jobs, while raising the prices that everyone has to pay. Particularly when there are alternatives for subsidizing compensation that spread the cost more evenly instead of concentrating it on the exact people you don't really want to tax in general. Compare this to a law requiring saws to have blade guards on them, which costs hardly anything and has no apparent major negative consequences at all to anyone.