5 ms·

>But due to the US strong dollar policy, that labor will never be available to US residents. that's a very keynesian way to say employers don't want to pay liv

>But due to the US strong dollar policy, that labor will never be available to US residents. that's a very keynesian way to say employers don't want to pay living wages. why are you putting that spin on it?

projektfu 7y ago
That’s not necessarily true. It could just mean that our exports are uncompetitive because of a dollar that trades too high, making foreign products cheap and domestic products expensive. After 30 years of a strong dollar with liberal trade agreements, there are now more structural reasons for the smaller manufacturing sector and the difficulty of ever moving expatriated production back on shore.
- throwlaplace 7y ago
  person i responded to claims that >There is a massive amount of demand for low skilled labor that means they're not alluding to manufacturing trade deficits (which you point out has greatly shrunk since nafta etc) but other industries.
  - projektfu 7y ago
    I responded because your reading of the comment appeared uncharitable.
ctdonath 7y ago
If an employee cannot earn a living wage, why must the employer sacrifice to provide a living wage? Honest question.
- throwlaplace 7y ago
  because the economy isn't a collection of uncoupled agents - if the employer doesn't "sacrifice" to provide a living wage then that employee can't buy goods from customers of the employer and so then those customers reduce their orders with the employer.
- dundercoder 7y ago
  I’ve often pondered this too. I think it is ok for jobs to exist that aren’t intended to provide a living wage due to the nature of the job, perhaps targeted for seniors in high school, or someone looking to add their very first entry to their resume. But what happens when those are the only jobs available for someone who _needs_ a living wage? I don’t know the answer. An example comes to mind of someone who gets caught needing to work two or three of these jobs just to make rent, who doesn’t have time to get educated, because there is no spare time. I would like to think that this is where some outside intervention supplements that persons income so they can devote a few hours a week to learning a trade. In my limited experience with state programs for this, it feels nigh impossible.
  - fennecfoxen 7y ago
    > I think it is ok for jobs to exist that aren’t intended to provide a living wage... But what happens when those are the only jobs available for someone who _needs_ a living wage? I don’t know the answer. The root of the problem is that a "living wage" in New York City is way, way too high. This is because the rent is too high, which is in no small part because of local housing policy, which does not want to see more apartments built, preferring to play games with rent control. (And economists are fractious in general, but the consensus position that rent control is destructive is as strong as the consensus of climate scientists on anthropocentric global warming.) (In part this reluctance to build is because of other broken policy, such as the transit-construction policy, which means that new subways to these new apartments are impossibly unaffordable.) But referring to it with the "living wage" mindset, we set about blaming employers for being evil, instead of fixing the broken housing policy. The consequence is that people who needed the higher wage to begin with are even more likely to be unemployed, as their employment is no longer profitable, and entry-level positions (for people who didn't get a fancy college degree in engineering, anyway) are unavailable. There are other policy failures, of course. For instance, New York's education policy continues to fail its most vulnerable population, preventing them from obtaining skills that would render their labor more valuable.
    - cjslep 7y ago
      > But referring to it with the "living wage" mindset, we set about blaming employers for being evil, instead of fixing the broken housing policy. Not really, maybe you have the connotation between "living wage mindset" and "blame employers as evil". But as an American living abroad in Switzerland, where a strong currency exists but is undesirable, no federal minimum wage exists, no local minimum wage exists (except in 1 Canton), and labour is well represented in the political economy (>50% workers under coverage of various Collective Bargaining Agreements), it's clear there's a lot of wiggle room where things are not black and white, where we could try to push for a culture that both respects the commons and community as well as individual freedom. This different mindset and culture is why a "livable wage" works here despite the lack of regulation and without workers demonizing employers and vice versa. I don't think such a mindset could be adopted by most Americans but it certainly shows there's no reason for a black-and-white mindset of "livable wage advocates" == "employer haters".
vinceguidry 7y ago
The fancy words need to be unpacked so the two perspectives espoused can be brought together, please allow me. First off, that's not quite what they said. They said, "that labor will never be available to US residents. Quite a different thing than "employers". The math changes when you, US citizen, have to sign the checks, with your own money, earned from a 'real' employer. Now the dollar policy in theory matters. With a stronger dollar, it's harder for US citizens to buy and sell goods domestically and it's cheaper to buy them abroad. Cheap Asian electronics, more expensive American goods. Applies to labor as well. Employers found it cheaper at some point to outsource labor whenever they could abroad. That's the theory. Reality is that the dollar hasn't been strong for some time now. Employers still outsource labor where the trade-off is worth it. But the trade-off isn't always worth it anymore. Jobs are coming back to America. But not the jobs that would pay a living wage to someone who would sell that labor gathering cans off the street. That would require the dollar to fall another order of magnitude, totally upending global commerce and jettisoning the idea of the dollar being the global reserve currency even deader than it already is as we fritter away our goodwill and the de facto hegemony it provided. The dollar floats on the public markets and there's been no political will to do anything more than pay lip service to strong dollar policy. America has never been kind to its underclass, temporarily embarrassed millionaires they must be like the rest of us. The problem is our over-reliance on markets. Markets do one thing and one thing well, serve individual self-interest. They cannot serve public interests except when the public interests align with individual self-interest. To a market, an incentive is an incentive, questions about how humane they are are questions that cannot be answered by a market. To a market, your labor is a good that you sell, and the market, being human interest, has as much interest in getting your offered labor for as cheaply as you're willing to offer it as you are interested in getting all the things you want for as cheaply as possible. This is all supposed to work, and by that I mean it requires the whole country to participate in the creation of a grand fiction. Religious society declined in the 70s and with it went the American predilection for grand fiction. Now we're left with the ugly truth behind the fiction and we don't even have comforting lies to sell to the underclass anymore. I don't know what the way out for us is, but I do know how some European countries found a way through it. There's the Nordic model. A ton of wealth was generated through resource extraction and is now held at the state level, creating the same effect that university endowments do for their ecosystem. This does not typically happen with resource extraction economies, particularly large ones, look to Russia for where that goes wrong. The Nords got lucky due to a shared culture and very few external geopolitical threats. We could discuss France and Germany, but this is getting long so I have to cut it short. Europe in general can leverage shared culture that goes back thousands of years, while the US built its in all of some 300 years, counting from around when the settlements first started taking off. This makes a lot of things much much easier, as culture is generally how humans solve coordination problems. In many ways we're more of an empire than a nation-state. Multi-ethnic empires have to be governed according to different principles than nation-states. "American" as an ethnic identity still needs to gel. The Internet is bringing about a "universal culture" that might get us further to an answer but in the meantime Americans are having to re-learn how to be charitable. I get the desire for living wages. I really do. But they're expecting the market to solve the problem for us. That fiction is deader than Jimmy Hoffa. America has spoken, and we do not want anything getting in the way of the almighty market. So it's humans that must solve the humanity problem that inhuman markets cause. Charity for your fellow man, expect more tipping culture and more browbeating to donate. Sorry.

projektfu 7y ago

That’s not necessarily true. It could just mean that our exports are uncompetitive because of a dollar that trades too high, making foreign products cheap and domestic products expensive. After 30 years of a strong dollar with liberal trade agreements, there are now more structural reasons for the smaller manufacturing sector and the difficulty of ever moving expatriated production back on shore.

throwlaplace 7y ago
person i responded to claims that >There is a massive amount of demand for low skilled labor that means they're not alluding to manufacturing trade deficits (which you point out has greatly shrunk since nafta etc) but other industries.
- projektfu 7y ago
  I responded because your reading of the comment appeared uncharitable.

ctdonath 7y ago

If an employee cannot earn a living wage, why must the employer sacrifice to provide a living wage? Honest question.

throwlaplace 7y ago
because the economy isn't a collection of uncoupled agents - if the employer doesn't "sacrifice" to provide a living wage then that employee can't buy goods from customers of the employer and so then those customers reduce their orders with the employer.
dundercoder 7y ago
I’ve often pondered this too. I think it is ok for jobs to exist that aren’t intended to provide a living wage due to the nature of the job, perhaps targeted for seniors in high school, or someone looking to add their very first entry to their resume. But what happens when those are the only jobs available for someone who _needs_ a living wage? I don’t know the answer. An example comes to mind of someone who gets caught needing to work two or three of these jobs just to make rent, who doesn’t have time to get educated, because there is no spare time. I would like to think that this is where some outside intervention supplements that persons income so they can devote a few hours a week to learning a trade. In my limited experience with state programs for this, it feels nigh impossible.
- fennecfoxen 7y ago
  > I think it is ok for jobs to exist that aren’t intended to provide a living wage... But what happens when those are the only jobs available for someone who _needs_ a living wage? I don’t know the answer. The root of the problem is that a "living wage" in New York City is way, way too high. This is because the rent is too high, which is in no small part because of local housing policy, which does not want to see more apartments built, preferring to play games with rent control. (And economists are fractious in general, but the consensus position that rent control is destructive is as strong as the consensus of climate scientists on anthropocentric global warming.) (In part this reluctance to build is because of other broken policy, such as the transit-construction policy, which means that new subways to these new apartments are impossibly unaffordable.) But referring to it with the "living wage" mindset, we set about blaming employers for being evil, instead of fixing the broken housing policy. The consequence is that people who needed the higher wage to begin with are even more likely to be unemployed, as their employment is no longer profitable, and entry-level positions (for people who didn't get a fancy college degree in engineering, anyway) are unavailable. There are other policy failures, of course. For instance, New York's education policy continues to fail its most vulnerable population, preventing them from obtaining skills that would render their labor more valuable.
  - cjslep 7y ago
    > But referring to it with the "living wage" mindset, we set about blaming employers for being evil, instead of fixing the broken housing policy. Not really, maybe you have the connotation between "living wage mindset" and "blame employers as evil". But as an American living abroad in Switzerland, where a strong currency exists but is undesirable, no federal minimum wage exists, no local minimum wage exists (except in 1 Canton), and labour is well represented in the political economy (>50% workers under coverage of various Collective Bargaining Agreements), it's clear there's a lot of wiggle room where things are not black and white, where we could try to push for a culture that both respects the commons and community as well as individual freedom. This different mindset and culture is why a "livable wage" works here despite the lack of regulation and without workers demonizing employers and vice versa. I don't think such a mindset could be adopted by most Americans but it certainly shows there's no reason for a black-and-white mindset of "livable wage advocates" == "employer haters".

vinceguidry 7y ago

The fancy words need to be unpacked so the two perspectives espoused can be brought together, please allow me. First off, that's not quite what they said. They said, "that labor will never be available to US residents. Quite a different thing than "employers". The math changes when you, US citizen, have to sign the checks, with your own money, earned from a 'real' employer. Now the dollar policy in theory matters. With a stronger dollar, it's harder for US citizens to buy and sell goods domestically and it's cheaper to buy them abroad. Cheap Asian electronics, more expensive American goods. Applies to labor as well. Employers found it cheaper at some point to outsource labor whenever they could abroad. That's the theory. Reality is that the dollar hasn't been strong for some time now. Employers still outsource labor where the trade-off is worth it. But the trade-off isn't always worth it anymore. Jobs are coming back to America. But not the jobs that would pay a living wage to someone who would sell that labor gathering cans off the street. That would require the dollar to fall another order of magnitude, totally upending global commerce and jettisoning the idea of the dollar being the global reserve currency even deader than it already is as we fritter away our goodwill and the de facto hegemony it provided. The dollar floats on the public markets and there's been no political will to do anything more than pay lip service to strong dollar policy. America has never been kind to its underclass, temporarily embarrassed millionaires they must be like the rest of us. The problem is our over-reliance on markets. Markets do one thing and one thing well, serve individual self-interest. They cannot serve public interests except when the public interests align with individual self-interest. To a market, an incentive is an incentive, questions about how humane they are are questions that cannot be answered by a market. To a market, your labor is a good that you sell, and the market, being human interest, has as much interest in getting your offered labor for as cheaply as you're willing to offer it as you are interested in getting all the things you want for as cheaply as possible. This is all supposed to work, and by that I mean it requires the whole country to participate in the creation of a grand fiction. Religious society declined in the 70s and with it went the American predilection for grand fiction. Now we're left with the ugly truth behind the fiction and we don't even have comforting lies to sell to the underclass anymore. I don't know what the way out for us is, but I do know how some European countries found a way through it. There's the Nordic model. A ton of wealth was generated through resource extraction and is now held at the state level, creating the same effect that university endowments do for their ecosystem. This does not typically happen with resource extraction economies, particularly large ones, look to Russia for where that goes wrong. The Nords got lucky due to a shared culture and very few external geopolitical threats. We could discuss France and Germany, but this is getting long so I have to cut it short. Europe in general can leverage shared culture that goes back thousands of years, while the US built its in all of some 300 years, counting from around when the settlements first started taking off. This makes a lot of things much much easier, as culture is generally how humans solve coordination problems. In many ways we're more of an empire than a nation-state. Multi-ethnic empires have to be governed according to different principles than nation-states. "American" as an ethnic identity still needs to gel. The Internet is bringing about a "universal culture" that might get us further to an answer but in the meantime Americans are having to re-learn how to be charitable. I get the desire for living wages. I really do. But they're expecting the market to solve the problem for us. That fiction is deader than Jimmy Hoffa. America has spoken, and we do not want anything getting in the way of the almighty market. So it's humans that must solve the humanity problem that inhuman markets cause. Charity for your fellow man, expect more tipping culture and more browbeating to donate. Sorry.