6 ms·

I agree it's a luxury to live well without needing an alarm. But "killing" low wage jobs (how?), might put people in even worse situations.

adrianN 6y ago
We could "kill" low wage jobs by making sure that 35h a week pay enough for yourself and a child or two.
- aminozuur 6y ago
  You can start a company and pay your otherwise underpaid employees whatever you want. Be the change you want to see in the world.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    If you see companies using child labour, the solution obviously isn't to start your own company that doesn't exploit children just to prove a point. This stuff is regulated for a reason. You could argue that an employer should be able to offer any wage they want, but the argument against it is that people on poverty wages then have to use public assistance to survive. So essentially private companies use public money to have cheap labour which they wouldn't be able to access otherwise - that's obviously not ok either.
  - gerbler 6y ago
    Why do you assume I have not done this? (I have) My main point about this article is that it's not considering why we are roped into an alarm clock culture - it's not because we want to be woken up this way, it's because sometimes it's an economic necessity.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    You don't fix races to the bottom by individual action.
    - nvoid 6y ago
      This is exactly how you do it! If everyone is encouraged to take responsibility and make a good life for them and their family, a society will improve massively.
      - adrianN 6y ago
        Companies have no family and making a good life for themselves means externalizing as many costs as possible on society. You might enjoy skimming this very long essay https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations-on-moloch https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...
      - gambiting 6y ago
        If you run a company that produces something, but your competitor undercuts your prices by half because they don't pay taxes, dump their waste in a river and hire children, you doing all things right will have absolutely zero impact on fixing the situation. You will be priced out of the market because you can't possibly compete with someone who has lower costs through illegal actions. Again, the answer is regulation, not hoping that people will behave morally and decently out of the goodness of their hearts.
        nvoid 6y ago
        The answer can sometimes be -good- regulation. But another solution would be to employ a skin in the game approach. If a company behaves in this way, they will be sued to the heavens, therefore discouraging this kind of behavior. Besides, the way the regulatory system works now, new regulations only seem to benefit large corporations who can afford to lobby and get around the regulations. They actively hurt small businesses.
- jpxw 6y ago
  How do you propose doing that? Minimum wage increases? Why not increase the minimum wage to $10,000 an hour?
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Yeah why not? I mean you're doing an argumentum ad absurdum but you have the right idea. Minimum wage and employee protection laws are the way forward. Everybody should be able to live comfortably, working at most 40 hours / week. Minimum wage is bad in its own way, because it sets a "what is the least we can get away with" boundary for employers, but in the current employment climate, employers can and do get away with paying less (see the service industry where employees are expected to collect tips to stipend their wages, see the gig industry where the employer doesn't give a shit that the employee has to struggle full days to get enough work to get paid).
    - jpxw 6y ago
      > Everybody should be able to live comfortably, working at most 40 hours / week. What if they aren’t productive enough to earn that amount of money? Where does the money come from?
      - adrianN 6y ago
        Other people of course. Just like for people who can't work at all, for example because their health doesn't allow it.
        jpxw 6y ago
        How is this any different to a welfare state, then?
        AndrewDucker 6y ago
        It's not any different. If by "welfare state" you mean "a decent social safety net". Which the USA should definitely have.
- nvoid 6y ago
  Pretty much the first thing about economics. You have/raise a minimum wage, consumer prices inflate and then it costs more to live with that minimum wage. What do you want to do, keep raising it every year? The market will outrun the government. This kind of thinking is how you end up with a welfare state, where the only way people can live is with their pitiful stimulus check from the government. People want to earn their own money not freeload of other taxpayers whilst sitting on the couch. I am not going to be that guy that points out a problem and doesn't propose a solution though. The solution is cut back corporation tax and regulation and make it easier for companies to hire people. This of course is what made the west as great as it is today.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    I'm not sure whether you're joking or not. Just have a look at rich countries other than the US how they treat workers and what the rate of people having more than one job but still living in poverty is.
  - zajio1am 6y ago
    Not really, in countries with reasonable sized minimum wage (say 1/2 of median wage) only small percentage of workers have minimum wage.
  - eertami 6y ago
    >You have/raise a minimum wage, consumer prices inflate and then it costs more to live with that minimum wage. I've never understood why people continue to make this argument when there are easily demonstrable counter-examples to the "But you won't be able to afford anything!!!" line of thought. Look at countries like Switzerland, or even in the US there is Washington DC where minimum wage is $15, and society isn't collapsing.
    - nvoid 6y ago
      Have you been to Switzerland? If you had, you would understand that exactly what I said would happen has happened has happened there. No society wouldn't collapse with a minimum wage, that is not my argument. Logic would dictate that if everyone in a town was making $15 an hour then prices would naturally increase. How can you not see this?
moonchild 6y ago
Well, one way of killing low wage jobs is to turn them into high wage jobs.
- smeej 6y ago
  How, exactly? How do you propose making low wage jobs generate enough revenue to become high wage jobs? Or do you mean to apply this rule only to large, profitable corporations and spare the mom-and-pop shops and other small businesses that are already having trouble staying open? Low wage jobs are already being replaced by high wage jobs, but not 1:1. There are already higher wage jobs programming the machines that automate away a dozen low wage jobs. I'm guessing that wasn't what you meant by "turn into" though.
  - saberdancer 6y ago
    It's a solution people come up with when they think in one dimension. Increase minimum wage = no poverty When in reality, for some people it would be: Increase minimum wage = they get fired and can't find a job, end up homeless.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      If people without a job end up homeless something is seriously wrong with the social safety net.
      - saberdancer 6y ago
        What do you think happens with single people renting when they lose their income?
        adrianN 6y ago
        Where I live social security kicks in.
    - teataster 6y ago
gerbler 6y ago
Yeah, fair. But perhaps higher minimum wages, and no zero hour contacts? Better worker protections? If economic survival requires depletion of your sleep (which is so important), it's highlighting an imbalance in the overall system.
- saberdancer 6y ago
  Higher minimum wage is not without problems. If someone is not highly skilled and works low end jobs, he could be left jobless if minimum wage increases. Some businesses already have low profitability and they can't absorb an increase in minimum wage. I know where you are getting from but I don't see a simple solution. UBI might help but from my perspective the cost of UBI is too large to pull off in any normal economy (petro states in the gulf can probably pull it off).
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    That's a risk, but I don't think it's as big as you think it is; it implies that an employer already has more staff than they need to have. Social safety nets is another thing that needs to be improved though. I don't believe in UBI myself, I think (and I'm not an economist) that the cost of living will just go up by an equal amount, negating the whole thing. It seems to work on a small scale, but cost of living is not changed significantly if only a small section of a country receives UBI. Anyway, back to unemployment, in theory automation causes unemployment too, but in practice, while people lose jobs over automation, the overall unemployment rate is not significantly affected. Or in other words, there's always more work to be done.
  - Shacklz 6y ago
    > If someone is not highly skilled and works low end jobs, he could be left jobless if minimum wage increases. If you made this argument 100 years ago I might be inclined to agree with you, but "reasonable" minimum wages (i.e.: a 40h/week job pays always enough to feed a family and a roof over your head) have been tried and tested in countries all over the world and as far as I'm aware, they're almost always a success. The 'low skill worker' losing job opportunities because of too high minimum wages is a myth that just doesn't hold up to reality, no matter how many times conservatives afraid of losing their own bottom line or relative status repeat it.

adrianN 6y ago

We could "kill" low wage jobs by making sure that 35h a week pay enough for yourself and a child or two.

aminozuur 6y ago
You can start a company and pay your otherwise underpaid employees whatever you want. Be the change you want to see in the world.
- gambiting 6y ago
  If you see companies using child labour, the solution obviously isn't to start your own company that doesn't exploit children just to prove a point. This stuff is regulated for a reason. You could argue that an employer should be able to offer any wage they want, but the argument against it is that people on poverty wages then have to use public assistance to survive. So essentially private companies use public money to have cheap labour which they wouldn't be able to access otherwise - that's obviously not ok either.
- gerbler 6y ago
  Why do you assume I have not done this? (I have) My main point about this article is that it's not considering why we are roped into an alarm clock culture - it's not because we want to be woken up this way, it's because sometimes it's an economic necessity.
- adrianN 6y ago
  You don't fix races to the bottom by individual action.
  - nvoid 6y ago
    This is exactly how you do it! If everyone is encouraged to take responsibility and make a good life for them and their family, a society will improve massively.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      Companies have no family and making a good life for themselves means externalizing as many costs as possible on society. You might enjoy skimming this very long essay https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations-on-moloch https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...
    - gambiting 6y ago
      If you run a company that produces something, but your competitor undercuts your prices by half because they don't pay taxes, dump their waste in a river and hire children, you doing all things right will have absolutely zero impact on fixing the situation. You will be priced out of the market because you can't possibly compete with someone who has lower costs through illegal actions. Again, the answer is regulation, not hoping that people will behave morally and decently out of the goodness of their hearts.
      - nvoid 6y ago
        The answer can sometimes be -good- regulation. But another solution would be to employ a skin in the game approach. If a company behaves in this way, they will be sued to the heavens, therefore discouraging this kind of behavior. Besides, the way the regulatory system works now, new regulations only seem to benefit large corporations who can afford to lobby and get around the regulations. They actively hurt small businesses.
jpxw 6y ago
How do you propose doing that? Minimum wage increases? Why not increase the minimum wage to $10,000 an hour?
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Yeah why not? I mean you're doing an argumentum ad absurdum but you have the right idea. Minimum wage and employee protection laws are the way forward. Everybody should be able to live comfortably, working at most 40 hours / week. Minimum wage is bad in its own way, because it sets a "what is the least we can get away with" boundary for employers, but in the current employment climate, employers can and do get away with paying less (see the service industry where employees are expected to collect tips to stipend their wages, see the gig industry where the employer doesn't give a shit that the employee has to struggle full days to get enough work to get paid).
  - jpxw 6y ago
    > Everybody should be able to live comfortably, working at most 40 hours / week. What if they aren’t productive enough to earn that amount of money? Where does the money come from?
    - adrianN 6y ago
      Other people of course. Just like for people who can't work at all, for example because their health doesn't allow it.
      - jpxw 6y ago
        How is this any different to a welfare state, then?
        AndrewDucker 6y ago
        It's not any different. If by "welfare state" you mean "a decent social safety net". Which the USA should definitely have.
nvoid 6y ago
Pretty much the first thing about economics. You have/raise a minimum wage, consumer prices inflate and then it costs more to live with that minimum wage. What do you want to do, keep raising it every year? The market will outrun the government. This kind of thinking is how you end up with a welfare state, where the only way people can live is with their pitiful stimulus check from the government. People want to earn their own money not freeload of other taxpayers whilst sitting on the couch. I am not going to be that guy that points out a problem and doesn't propose a solution though. The solution is cut back corporation tax and regulation and make it easier for companies to hire people. This of course is what made the west as great as it is today.
- adrianN 6y ago
  I'm not sure whether you're joking or not. Just have a look at rich countries other than the US how they treat workers and what the rate of people having more than one job but still living in poverty is.
- zajio1am 6y ago
  Not really, in countries with reasonable sized minimum wage (say 1/2 of median wage) only small percentage of workers have minimum wage.
- eertami 6y ago
  >You have/raise a minimum wage, consumer prices inflate and then it costs more to live with that minimum wage. I've never understood why people continue to make this argument when there are easily demonstrable counter-examples to the "But you won't be able to afford anything!!!" line of thought. Look at countries like Switzerland, or even in the US there is Washington DC where minimum wage is $15, and society isn't collapsing.
  - nvoid 6y ago
    Have you been to Switzerland? If you had, you would understand that exactly what I said would happen has happened has happened there. No society wouldn't collapse with a minimum wage, that is not my argument. Logic would dictate that if everyone in a town was making $15 an hour then prices would naturally increase. How can you not see this?

moonchild 6y ago

Well, one way of killing low wage jobs is to turn them into high wage jobs.

smeej 6y ago
How, exactly? How do you propose making low wage jobs generate enough revenue to become high wage jobs? Or do you mean to apply this rule only to large, profitable corporations and spare the mom-and-pop shops and other small businesses that are already having trouble staying open? Low wage jobs are already being replaced by high wage jobs, but not 1:1. There are already higher wage jobs programming the machines that automate away a dozen low wage jobs. I'm guessing that wasn't what you meant by "turn into" though.
- saberdancer 6y ago
  It's a solution people come up with when they think in one dimension. Increase minimum wage = no poverty When in reality, for some people it would be: Increase minimum wage = they get fired and can't find a job, end up homeless.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    If people without a job end up homeless something is seriously wrong with the social safety net.
    - saberdancer 6y ago
      What do you think happens with single people renting when they lose their income?
      - adrianN 6y ago
        Where I live social security kicks in.
  - teataster 6y ago

gerbler 6y ago

Yeah, fair. But perhaps higher minimum wages, and no zero hour contacts? Better worker protections? If economic survival requires depletion of your sleep (which is so important), it's highlighting an imbalance in the overall system.

saberdancer 6y ago
Higher minimum wage is not without problems. If someone is not highly skilled and works low end jobs, he could be left jobless if minimum wage increases. Some businesses already have low profitability and they can't absorb an increase in minimum wage. I know where you are getting from but I don't see a simple solution. UBI might help but from my perspective the cost of UBI is too large to pull off in any normal economy (petro states in the gulf can probably pull it off).
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  That's a risk, but I don't think it's as big as you think it is; it implies that an employer already has more staff than they need to have. Social safety nets is another thing that needs to be improved though. I don't believe in UBI myself, I think (and I'm not an economist) that the cost of living will just go up by an equal amount, negating the whole thing. It seems to work on a small scale, but cost of living is not changed significantly if only a small section of a country receives UBI. Anyway, back to unemployment, in theory automation causes unemployment too, but in practice, while people lose jobs over automation, the overall unemployment rate is not significantly affected. Or in other words, there's always more work to be done.
- Shacklz 6y ago
  > If someone is not highly skilled and works low end jobs, he could be left jobless if minimum wage increases. If you made this argument 100 years ago I might be inclined to agree with you, but "reasonable" minimum wages (i.e.: a 40h/week job pays always enough to feed a family and a roof over your head) have been tried and tested in countries all over the world and as far as I'm aware, they're almost always a success. The 'low skill worker' losing job opportunities because of too high minimum wages is a myth that just doesn't hold up to reality, no matter how many times conservatives afraid of losing their own bottom line or relative status repeat it.