9 ms·

>>which force working employees into poverty I think you have a widely unorthodox defination of "force" as no one is forced to take any job at any wage. Force

by syshum 6y ago

>>which force working employees into poverty I think you have a widely unorthodox defination of "force" as no one is forced to take any job at any wage. Force in the equation would come from the government using the threat of government violence to force a wage on a business owner. A person that voluntary accepts a job for X wage is not "forced" to do so.

rbg246 6y ago
You don't think needing to survive forces or keeping your human dignity forces you to find a job? That's the way I see it.
- nostromo 6y ago
  That job might not exist at all if the government mandates your wage to be higher than the value of your labor.
  - rbg246 6y ago
    Certainly, it's a balancing act. But equally is it ok for people to work hard and long hours and only barely make Or not quite make ends meet? Sorry I should note that I am not saying you are advocating for the above(could be misread).
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      I guess the question is what do you do when you find people who present with that situation: that they’re perfectly capable to hold down a job but only to create $10/hr of economic value by their labor. If you set the minimum wage at $15/hr and do nothing else, you have made that person worse off than today. Everyone around them now has more money, so everything is becoming more expensive. They now can’t find or keep a job, because any employer who employs them is losing at least $200/week, $10K/year by employing them. I don’t know what the optimal solution is, but it’s not clear to me that the above is it.
      - rbg246 6y ago
        Equally the status quo is not tenable and clearly not the solution. There are many people coming up with solutions but clearly 'free market' adjustments have failed an increasing number of workers. But I will disagree with your economic value question, I think service workers are undervalued greatly. There is a giant disconnect between wage and economic value, the market is terrible at connecting the two.
      - lanstin 6y ago
        Generally the math works the other way. I worked in a Wendy's for a while; I made minimum wage and most of the people made a little bit more. We cleared $30,000 a month profit for the owner ($100K revenue, $70K for expenses including all of our wages). If a company is so inept they can't generate a bit of value from people, then to be frank, as a society we can afford to be without them. Look at the minimum wage as a filter to remove companies that are so unsuccessful, that they disappear before dragging down the citizens.
        tomcam 6y ago
        Pretty amazing! Way way better than any of my friends who have owned restaurants. Did that $30,000 profit include paying off the mortgage, various forms of insurance, legal fees, accounting fees, taxes, and so on?
        refurb 6y ago
        So if someone else is willing to work for those wages (they don’t really need the income or have minimal expenses) you’d tell them “tough, it’s illegal to work for that wage now”?
        6510 6y ago
        That question never happens in places with a minimum wage. What you can do is support your employer by showing up early and/or helping out a few extra hours after the shift. Nothing in writing or by force.
  - 8note 6y ago
    More specifically, the value of your labour minus the profit that the capitalist wants to make off your labour
  - scaramanga 6y ago
    The government has much better options than mandating a living wage. It can simply pay you the wage as an indirect subsidy to stimulate production. It can employ you in the construction of infrastructure. The infrastructure of the US is dilapidated to the point of national disgrace. It should still mandate living wages, the same way it should not allow employers to lash their employees or own them as chattel, or any number of other practices which are both immoral, and cannot find any temporary justification due to exigent circumstances (eg. literal struggle for national survival...)
  - didibus 6y ago
    I think something is missing from this equation, which is the balancing act. The value of labor is dynamic, it depends what people are willing to pay, and what is the price of other costs. How I see it, labor cost have been cut, while rent has gone up and prices have gone down. If you increased minimum wage, it would put pressure on prices to go up and rent to go down, both would increase the value of the labor itself. I think this whole dynamic is way way harder to model and predict how it'll play out then everyone makes it out to be. None of people's simple projection account for it all. Even economists with fancy models backed by simulations, math, and all that can't figure out the real outcome and often disagree with one another on what would happen. It's not as easy as saying, half the restaurants are going to shut down, and leave empty all those commercial space. What happens next? Maybe some customers start to be willing to pay even more to get back some of the great restaurants they lost, or their proximity to them. Maybe landlords have to lower their rent for something else to fill in the vacancy, etc. Maybe everyone is happy with only half of the restaurants remaining, and each of those restaurant is making twice as much now allowing them to hire more staff and pay even higher. There's a lot of balancing act that could happen.
- syshum 6y ago
  I think we as a society have put in place lots of social programs, to the tune of billions and billions of dollars a year to ensure "survival" is not at play here. Further at the end of the day wages are not the problem, cost of living is, economic value of labor is. Waving a magic wand and proclaiming a new min wage does not resolve those root issue, it may in some limited circumstances help a few people for a limited amount of time, but you need to resolve the root issue which mandated minimum wages increases is not going to do and often harms the very people you are looking to "help"
atoav 6y ago
Yeah but the job market is not a free market, because not getting a job is existential for those seeking the job, while the company can usually just survive when a position is not filled for a certain time. This means to make this a free market many nations did the reasonable thing and introduced measures like minimum wages and unemployment benefits. This way when you loose your job the balance of power evens out a little and the job market works better for all involved (workers have a highee chance of finding a job they like, companies have a higher chance of getting people that like them, really shitty companies get an incentive to change). In the US all shitty work places have no incentive at all to change, because everybody and their dog is struggling to make ends meet. That means no matter how slavishly they treat your people, there will always be another person desperate enough to throw themselves into the grinder. Result: No incentive to change for the company and people who feel like society ows them nothing. I don't think that is recipe for a bright future, but who am I to judge. So from a systemic perspective minimum wage is like a limit you can set for how desperate you allow people to get. And quite frankly. 15 USD is still less than if you had adjusted the original minimum wage for inflation, so come on.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > Yeah but the job market is not a free market, because not getting a job is existential for those seeking the job, while the company can usually just survive when a position is not filled for a certain time. This is, to begin with, not true. It's common for small businesses to be operating at the margin. If you don't have someone making the sandwiches then you don't have revenue and you still have rent and utilities. That math puts you out of business in a hurry and then the owner (whose wages came out of the revenue they now don't have) is facing the same circumstances as the employee. But on top of that, even if you existentially need a job, that doesn't mean you need that job. You can pick the one that pays the most. Where this falls down is when all of your alternatives are terrible. But if all of your alternatives are terrible, prohibiting you from choosing the one that was the least terrible (e.g. because it's right across the street but pays $2/hour less instead of being a two hour commute for $2/hour more) is not actually helping you. To do that you need something like lower housing costs (so the wage you can earn is enough to live), or some kind of free community college so you can learn a trade that pays better, or a UBI. Not a minimum wage that could take away the job you currently existentially need.
andrei_says_ 6y ago
No one is “forced” to pay rent or food or for education or healthcare. Yes, you are correct.
8note 6y ago
People are required to eat. Charging for food and only being able to work at X wage is force through collusion. It wouldn't be by force if people did not need to pay for the basic necessities
andrei_says_ 5y ago
Literally everyone who is taking jobs paying less than a living wage is forced to - by the lack of better options. You know this and are making a bad faith argument. What is your goal?

by syshum 6y ago

rbg246 6y ago

You don't think needing to survive forces or keeping your human dignity forces you to find a job? That's the way I see it.

nostromo 6y ago
That job might not exist at all if the government mandates your wage to be higher than the value of your labor.
- rbg246 6y ago
  Certainly, it's a balancing act. But equally is it ok for people to work hard and long hours and only barely make Or not quite make ends meet? Sorry I should note that I am not saying you are advocating for the above(could be misread).
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    I guess the question is what do you do when you find people who present with that situation: that they’re perfectly capable to hold down a job but only to create $10/hr of economic value by their labor. If you set the minimum wage at $15/hr and do nothing else, you have made that person worse off than today. Everyone around them now has more money, so everything is becoming more expensive. They now can’t find or keep a job, because any employer who employs them is losing at least $200/week, $10K/year by employing them. I don’t know what the optimal solution is, but it’s not clear to me that the above is it.
    - rbg246 6y ago
      Equally the status quo is not tenable and clearly not the solution. There are many people coming up with solutions but clearly 'free market' adjustments have failed an increasing number of workers. But I will disagree with your economic value question, I think service workers are undervalued greatly. There is a giant disconnect between wage and economic value, the market is terrible at connecting the two.
    - lanstin 6y ago
      Generally the math works the other way. I worked in a Wendy's for a while; I made minimum wage and most of the people made a little bit more. We cleared $30,000 a month profit for the owner ($100K revenue, $70K for expenses including all of our wages). If a company is so inept they can't generate a bit of value from people, then to be frank, as a society we can afford to be without them. Look at the minimum wage as a filter to remove companies that are so unsuccessful, that they disappear before dragging down the citizens.
      - tomcam 6y ago
        Pretty amazing! Way way better than any of my friends who have owned restaurants. Did that $30,000 profit include paying off the mortgage, various forms of insurance, legal fees, accounting fees, taxes, and so on?
      - refurb 6y ago
        So if someone else is willing to work for those wages (they don’t really need the income or have minimal expenses) you’d tell them “tough, it’s illegal to work for that wage now”?
        6510 6y ago
        That question never happens in places with a minimum wage. What you can do is support your employer by showing up early and/or helping out a few extra hours after the shift. Nothing in writing or by force.
- 8note 6y ago
  More specifically, the value of your labour minus the profit that the capitalist wants to make off your labour
- scaramanga 6y ago
  The government has much better options than mandating a living wage. It can simply pay you the wage as an indirect subsidy to stimulate production. It can employ you in the construction of infrastructure. The infrastructure of the US is dilapidated to the point of national disgrace. It should still mandate living wages, the same way it should not allow employers to lash their employees or own them as chattel, or any number of other practices which are both immoral, and cannot find any temporary justification due to exigent circumstances (eg. literal struggle for national survival...)
- didibus 6y ago
  I think something is missing from this equation, which is the balancing act. The value of labor is dynamic, it depends what people are willing to pay, and what is the price of other costs. How I see it, labor cost have been cut, while rent has gone up and prices have gone down. If you increased minimum wage, it would put pressure on prices to go up and rent to go down, both would increase the value of the labor itself. I think this whole dynamic is way way harder to model and predict how it'll play out then everyone makes it out to be. None of people's simple projection account for it all. Even economists with fancy models backed by simulations, math, and all that can't figure out the real outcome and often disagree with one another on what would happen. It's not as easy as saying, half the restaurants are going to shut down, and leave empty all those commercial space. What happens next? Maybe some customers start to be willing to pay even more to get back some of the great restaurants they lost, or their proximity to them. Maybe landlords have to lower their rent for something else to fill in the vacancy, etc. Maybe everyone is happy with only half of the restaurants remaining, and each of those restaurant is making twice as much now allowing them to hire more staff and pay even higher. There's a lot of balancing act that could happen.
syshum 6y ago
I think we as a society have put in place lots of social programs, to the tune of billions and billions of dollars a year to ensure "survival" is not at play here. Further at the end of the day wages are not the problem, cost of living is, economic value of labor is. Waving a magic wand and proclaiming a new min wage does not resolve those root issue, it may in some limited circumstances help a few people for a limited amount of time, but you need to resolve the root issue which mandated minimum wages increases is not going to do and often harms the very people you are looking to "help"

atoav 6y ago

Yeah but the job market is not a free market, because not getting a job is existential for those seeking the job, while the company can usually just survive when a position is not filled for a certain time. This means to make this a free market many nations did the reasonable thing and introduced measures like minimum wages and unemployment benefits. This way when you loose your job the balance of power evens out a little and the job market works better for all involved (workers have a highee chance of finding a job they like, companies have a higher chance of getting people that like them, really shitty companies get an incentive to change). In the US all shitty work places have no incentive at all to change, because everybody and their dog is struggling to make ends meet. That means no matter how slavishly they treat your people, there will always be another person desperate enough to throw themselves into the grinder. Result: No incentive to change for the company and people who feel like society ows them nothing. I don't think that is recipe for a bright future, but who am I to judge. So from a systemic perspective minimum wage is like a limit you can set for how desperate you allow people to get. And quite frankly. 15 USD is still less than if you had adjusted the original minimum wage for inflation, so come on.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> Yeah but the job market is not a free market, because not getting a job is existential for those seeking the job, while the company can usually just survive when a position is not filled for a certain time. This is, to begin with, not true. It's common for small businesses to be operating at the margin. If you don't have someone making the sandwiches then you don't have revenue and you still have rent and utilities. That math puts you out of business in a hurry and then the owner (whose wages came out of the revenue they now don't have) is facing the same circumstances as the employee. But on top of that, even if you existentially need a job, that doesn't mean you need that job. You can pick the one that pays the most. Where this falls down is when all of your alternatives are terrible. But if all of your alternatives are terrible, prohibiting you from choosing the one that was the least terrible (e.g. because it's right across the street but pays $2/hour less instead of being a two hour commute for $2/hour more) is not actually helping you. To do that you need something like lower housing costs (so the wage you can earn is enough to live), or some kind of free community college so you can learn a trade that pays better, or a UBI. Not a minimum wage that could take away the job you currently existentially need.

andrei_says_ 6y ago

No one is “forced” to pay rent or food or for education or healthcare. Yes, you are correct.

8note 6y ago

People are required to eat. Charging for food and only being able to work at X wage is force through collusion. It wouldn't be by force if people did not need to pay for the basic necessities

andrei_says_ 5y ago

Literally everyone who is taking jobs paying less than a living wage is forced to - by the lack of better options. You know this and are making a bad faith argument. What is your goal?