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If your business is only viable when paying people below what they need to live, then your business shouldn't exist. The fact that you can do that now is simply

If your business is only viable when paying people below what they need to live, then your business shouldn't exist. The fact that you can do that now is simply people in power exploiting the weak. Effectively what is happening is that those without power are subsidising the business by supplying them labour below cost. Generally in economics, making a business only viable through subsidies is a bad thing. It is much more efficient to give that labour to better businesses.

vonmoltke 7y ago
> Effectively what is happening is that those without power are subsidising the business by supplying them labour below cost. How do you define "cost"?
- rocqua 7y ago
  The 'cost' of labour is the income required for such labor to maintain itself. I.e. living costs + healthcare costs + groceries & other expenses + a little saving. This is the base cost of a person, and thus the base cost of labour.
  - xamuel 7y ago
    You're just pushing the bubble around under the wallpaper: who defines "living costs" etc? A person can technically stay alive in extremely spartan conditions.
dantheman 7y ago
To provide a slight counter example: 1. Employee A produces 20 widgets an hour 2. Employee B produces 100 widgets an hour There is a wage where employee A costs more than the value they create. By mandating a wage that is higher than their productivity they are simply not hired, they do not get a chance to gain experience/knowledge, they loose the chance to be as productive as Employee B. The result is they are now on welfare/unemployed/etc. They lose the chance to get on the employment ladder. In general people improve so we you shouldn't be making the low wages for long. But what do we do about people who don't improve - either we push them out of the workforce or we subsidize their lifestyle to meet a minimum threshold.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  > The result is they are now on welfare/unemployed/etc. They lose the chance to get on the employment ladder. > In general people improve so we you shouldn't be making the low wages for long. But what do we do about people who don't improve - either we push them out of the workforce or we subsidize their lifestyle to meet a minimum threshold. That's only assuming that the ladder is just that, and not a single rung. Time spent in most minimum wage jobs are hard to sell as giving you a leg up when moving into the higher professional strata.
Frondo 7y ago
The first sentence is the "how do we want society to work" and it is the right one. Businesses are a thing we've invented to shuffle resources around; there's currently enough resources for everyone in the world to be fat and happy (the world produces 3,500 calories per capita per day), it's just so very unequally distributed that 1 in 10 working Americans faces food insecurity, and 1 in 8 Americans overall lives in poverty. Anyone working a full-time job should be able to live comfortably, and if you can't work full-time, society should take care of you anyway.

vonmoltke 7y ago

> Effectively what is happening is that those without power are subsidising the business by supplying them labour below cost. How do you define "cost"?

rocqua 7y ago
The 'cost' of labour is the income required for such labor to maintain itself. I.e. living costs + healthcare costs + groceries & other expenses + a little saving. This is the base cost of a person, and thus the base cost of labour.
- xamuel 7y ago
  You're just pushing the bubble around under the wallpaper: who defines "living costs" etc? A person can technically stay alive in extremely spartan conditions.

dantheman 7y ago

To provide a slight counter example: 1. Employee A produces 20 widgets an hour 2. Employee B produces 100 widgets an hour There is a wage where employee A costs more than the value they create. By mandating a wage that is higher than their productivity they are simply not hired, they do not get a chance to gain experience/knowledge, they loose the chance to be as productive as Employee B. The result is they are now on welfare/unemployed/etc. They lose the chance to get on the employment ladder. In general people improve so we you shouldn't be making the low wages for long. But what do we do about people who don't improve - either we push them out of the workforce or we subsidize their lifestyle to meet a minimum threshold.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
> The result is they are now on welfare/unemployed/etc. They lose the chance to get on the employment ladder. > In general people improve so we you shouldn't be making the low wages for long. But what do we do about people who don't improve - either we push them out of the workforce or we subsidize their lifestyle to meet a minimum threshold. That's only assuming that the ladder is just that, and not a single rung. Time spent in most minimum wage jobs are hard to sell as giving you a leg up when moving into the higher professional strata.

Frondo 7y ago

The first sentence is the "how do we want society to work" and it is the right one. Businesses are a thing we've invented to shuffle resources around; there's currently enough resources for everyone in the world to be fat and happy (the world produces 3,500 calories per capita per day), it's just so very unequally distributed that 1 in 10 working Americans faces food insecurity, and 1 in 8 Americans overall lives in poverty. Anyone working a full-time job should be able to live comfortably, and if you can't work full-time, society should take care of you anyway.