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> Give America back the monopoly it had in the fifties and sixties and minimum wage would be $24 an hour. It would take a lot more than that. Remember that th
by danans 6y ago
> Give America back the monopoly it had in the fifties and sixties and minimum wage would be $24 an hour.
It would take a lot more than that. Remember that the gains labor made after world war II were built upon decades of struggle by labor, including frequently being targets of violence by armed militia hired by corporations [1]. Despite that, America desperately needed labor for world war II (where the alternative was defeat at the hands of the Nazis), so for that moment in history capital and labor found themselves in a obvious win-win scenario. Most of the gains made by labor in America were made during this period.
The minimum wage does not naturally rise - it is a policy decision, one implemented under pressure from labor. And as labor's political power has waned and capital's political power has increased, minimum wage has stagnated.
Under our current system that heavily favors returning productivity gains to capital instead of labor, returning America to that global monopoly (which would require the highly improbable destruction the industrial capacity of the rest of the world while leaving America's untouched) would just turn the hypothetical gains of that monopoly over to the owners of capital.
Realistically, any attempt to return to the prior American monopoly would result in a massive regression in the American standard of living, through the destruction of purchasing power abroad for American goods and services (remember, we have a lot more people today than we did back then, and many of them - especially farmers - work in occupations that sell to other countries).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...
- gridlockd 6y ago> The minimum wage does not naturally rise The minimum amount of money you have to pay for someone to show up for any job rises (and falls) alongside demand for labor in the broader economy. > Under our current system that heavily favors returning productivity gains to capital instead of labor... If you look at the profit margins of those companies that employ a lot of low-end labor, you will find that they're generally in the single digit percentages. I think that's a pretty fair deal for organizing all that labor and taking on the capital risk. Profits aren't guaranteed, after all. There just isn't that much money to redistribute here, you would have to raise prices, which can make you uncompetitive.
- danans 6y ago> The minimum amount of money you have to pay for someone to show up for any job rises (and falls) alongside demand for labor in the broader economy. Oh, what that it were so simple. There are far more factors governing "market wages", which you are describing, including labor supply at a given skill level, automation, political representation of laborers vs employers, and how that representation manifests as power in the local and global economic contexts. The "minimum wage" specifically is a policy designed to put a floor under the standard of living of people whose market wages in the economy would provide a standard of living below what the society considers humane. Some societies have no such humanity based floor.
- gridlockd 6y ago> The "minimum wage" specifically is a policy designed to put a floor under the standard of living of people whose market wages in the economy would provide a standard of living below what the society considers humane. Some societies have no such humanity based floor. Maybe that's the intention, but what a minimum wage actually does is remove the possibility for anyone to work below an arbitrary number of dollars. If that value is lower than the going market rate for low-skilled labor, minimum wage makes no difference. Above that, it removes more and more people from the "eligible to work" pool. There's nothing humane about preventing people from being able to work, especially when you don't have a welfare system to pick up those who are now doomed to unemployment.
- danans 6y ago> what a minimum wage actually does is remove the possibility for anyone to work below an arbitrary number of dollars. It should be paired with a federal jobs guarantee and universal healthcare then.
- andrewjl 6y agoI think to work right the jobs guarantee needs to be a temporary guarantee with the aim of upskilling and not purely a "make work" program. Something more like college, though not academic, with built-in accountability mechanisms. It shouldn't be normalized to be a "lifelong" thing, in the same way we think it's unusual for someone to be a lifelong college student. At least one without milestones such as degrees, etc.