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>If they honestly can't afford to pay a living wage It's not logical to kill businesses by arbitrarily raising the minimum wage. Do you think the people they e

by deburo 5y ago

>If they honestly can't afford to pay a living wage It's not logical to kill businesses by arbitrarily raising the minimum wage. Do you think the people they employ are better off not working at all? These people may not have a decent enough salary, but they get to work as opposed to staying at home and degenerate (mentally and physically). I always thought the better solution is to help them financially in other ways (greater tax credits, negative taxes?).

itake 5y ago
> Do you think the people they employ are better off not working at all? Maybe you didn't read the article. but in summary, because the businesses are not paying enough, the businesses have less employees. Its not that the employees wont have jobs, but they will just have a higher paying job somewhere else.
davemp 5y ago
The government giving more to minimum wage workers instead of raising minimum wage feels like a roundabout way to subsidize businesses that don’t way living wages.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  That's exactly how it works in many european countries, especially the ones without a legal minimum wage (Austria for example), so people working "slave" gig jobs (cleaners, delivery, construction and hospitality workers, etc.) where if they earn below a certain "livable' threshold, get various tax credits, subsidies and benefits from the government to reach that "livable" threshold, which, while it sounds good, it creates a perverse incentive where employees arrange with the employer to be paid as little on paper as possible to still qualify for the government subsidies and then get paid the rest under the table (tipping is expected here for this reason) which just moves the burden from the employers of paying a livable wage to the customers and to the taxpayers which are basically subsidizing their business.
  - varispeed 5y ago
    What strikes me as weird is that parties that call themselves left-wing opt for this kind of hand outs without realising they are in fact subsidising the rich with workers' money. How this can fly?
    - tnzm 5y ago
      Left and right wings belong to the same vulture.
    - Jcowell 5y ago
      Well not helping people in order to stick it to the rich is neither productive nor effective. There’s a reason for these handouts and it’s not as if left-wing parties don’t advocate for higher minimum wage. A problem can always be attacked from multiple sides.
  - brigandish 5y ago
    This is what's happened with housing benefit in the UK[1], it's basically a subsidy to businesses in high rent areas. It was £500M a week, I shudder to think what it is now. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06bnbpx https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06bnbpx
- taurath 5y ago
  The government already does that in terms of food stamps. A job in the richest country in the world should not pay starvation wages.
blihp 5y ago
If raising the minimum wage will do them in, they're already halfway there if things are really[1] that dire and will end up there soon enough. So yes, people are better off not working for those types of businesses. If a business can only remain solvent by paying unreasonably low wages, it puts downward wage pressure on competing businesses and traps unskilled workers in a labor pool of dead-end jobs with little hope of escaping it/them and no time to do so since they're always scrambling to make enough money pay the most urgent bill. There are plenty of things society needs done to keep displaced workers productive (with better pay and a sense of actual accomplishment) while giving them breathing room to figure out 'what next?' I don't believe for a second that we're doing workers in the sub-basement of the economy any favors by keeping them locked down there. It isn't a binary (either they work in these crap jobs or they sit at home and deteriorate) decision... there are a variety of options between the extremes. [1] I'm suspicious of the majority of cases where this claim is made. A rational business person would see that such a business is already marginal and that they would likely be better off shutting it down and redeploying the capital elsewhere for a better return. This happens all the time. If the owner can't see this, keeping the business on life support isn't doing anyone any favors.
- leesalminen 5y ago
  > [1] I'm suspicious of the majority of cases where this claim is made. A rational business person would see that such a business is already marginal and that they would likely be better off shutting it down and redeploying the capital elsewhere for a better return. This happens all the time. If the owner can't see this, keeping the business on life support isn't doing anyone any favors. I agree with you, I would never own a restaurant or bar personally. But profits are really ~10% for the average mom n pop restaurant. It's just how it is. So $1mm in annual sales makes you $100k, more or less. People like owning restaurants, despite their best financial interests.
  - meowkit 5y ago
    > People like owning restaurants, despite their best financial interests. And part of the problem is cultural. There is social capital that exists alongside human and financial capital, and because its hard to quantify we end up with this sort of hidden value that isn't accounted for.
ehnto 5y ago
Please think about the holistic nature of your argument. The sum of it's parts essentially suggests that taxpayers should subsidize the employment costs of businesses, which is ridiculous.
- caymanjim 5y ago
  Taxpayers already subsidize the employment costs, by supplementing low salaries and lack of benefits via welfare programs, tax rebates, lower tax rates, subsidized healthcare, and countless other benefits. Walmart et al have externalized almost all of the true cost of labor to taxpayers.
  - ehnto 5y ago
    Right, and raising the minimum wage is an attempt to control that by putting the costs back on the employer.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      Who will simply either pass the costs along to the consumer, or shut down.
      - KSteffensen 5y ago
        Again, internalizing the true cost of things. How is this bad?
      - ehnto 5y ago
        Which is a healthy cleanse of an exploitive economy, and America definitely has an exploitive economy, make no mistake. A minimum wage is a decision a society makes, that says "this is the minimum market rate for a human that we consider non-exploitive", it's not an economic decision made to maximize GDP or profit. If a company can't afford to operate in a way that's non-exploitive then it needs to reconfigure or die out, because it doesn't belong in your society.
      - didibus 5y ago
wonnage 5y ago
Same argument is used by Americans to justify sweatshops in SE Asia. TBF, not much you can do about working conditions in other countries, so you might as well rationalize it and wear cheap clothes. It says a lot about an individual who chooses the same strategy for their own countrymen too.
pyuser583 5y ago
If have a hard time believing people are going to just sit at home staring at the wall because they loose their jobs. If you want to argue that the minimum wage increases unemployment, and that the unemployment tends to be long term, go ahead and argue. But don’t ask us to take it as an article of faith.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>but they get to work as opposed to staying at home and degenerate (mentally and physically) If I don't have a job I go workout during the day, learn new skills, and read. Without kids that is, with kids I take care of the kids.
onion2k 5y ago
The cost of some businesses closing because they can't afford a higher minimum wage has to be considered in the context of every business that can afford the higher wage improving the lives of their minimum wage staff. Maybe it is worthwhile killing some businesses, and pushing some people to get new jobs or to live on benefits, if the wage increase for others is a greater benefit to society. Its also worth noting that practically no businesses close when minimum wages have been increased in the past. People suggest its a problem,and logically it makes sense, but it doesn't seem to actually happen in practise.
- ItsMonkk 5y ago
  This is something that is quite nuanced that isn't apparent until you really look into the numbers. When something happens that universally makes the labor costs go up, and you expect for many businesses to go into the black, what you will instead see is that the very worst company goes out business and all of the others will put pressure on their land owner for lower rents pointing out that they are next. The landowner wants their land to be used and not be earning nothing for years, so they will lower rents. For a restaurant, if everyone is in the same boat, is agnostic to labor costs. Higher labor costs makes real estate prices go down. Automation makes real estate prices go up. With interest rates going down bringing real estate up, we have plenty of space to rise minimum wage to balance.
  - bayesian_horse 5y ago
    No, higher minimum wage shouldn't increase the labor cost "universally". Most of the cost increase would be felt by those employers who actually paid wages below the new limit. Which isn't even that great a portion of the economy. There might be some effect diffusing upwards, but I doubt it.
    - ItsMonkk 5y ago
      Right, which is why I clarified each time I said that. Software costs don't go up as they don't rely on minimum wage labor. For restaurants, that almost universally rely on the cheapest labor, this is the case. If Burger King and McDonalds both have higher labor costs, both put pressure on their land owner, and both don't end up caring.
plankers 5y ago
>they get to work as opposed to staying at home and degenerate (mentally and physically) I almost spit out my drink. You must have a pretty small imagination if you think that working for somebody else is the only way to stimulate yourself mentally and physically.
- poloopolo 5y ago
  For the lower classes it usually is the case
watwut 5y ago
Unprofitable business paying below mininum wage distorts the market. They are in direct competition with businesses who do pay minimum wage and have advantage. Otherwise said, these not ending is bad thing. And none of that is for benefit of worker.
sqrt17 5y ago
Most likely they wouldn't stay at home but either would start their own small business (which would be more competitive now since people with employees have to pay them a livable wage) or, if they can be supported by their partner and not work, do something that's important for society but doesn't pay well (e.g. caring for your family, or for people in your community, writing, creating art). I'd call it a wrong conclusion to assume that the thing that people do to unwind after a busy workday or what people do who are unable to work due to depression is the same as what people undertake when they can sustain themselves without spending the majority of their waking hours commuting and working.
tnzm 5y ago
>but they get to work as opposed to staying at home and degenerate (mentally and physically) That's a disgusting thing to say.
wizzard 5y ago
There's nothing arbitrary about paying a living wage. I could rephrase your argument as "Shouldn't businesses be able to pay poverty wages, and taxpayers can make up the difference?" If you can't stay in business without the government supporting your workers, then your business doesn't work. These businesses are effectively being subsidized by the government without giving the government a stake. Also, I feel like this isn't even worth addressing, but no, work is not a government-sponsored day care for workers.
banannaise 5y ago
It's also not logical to kill businesses by arbitrarily raising rent, but that happens anyway, and wouldn't you know, that squeezes the businesses on their ability to pay higher wages.
brutusborn 5y ago
I think negative taxes are a great solution. Provide people with enough for the basics and incentivize them to entering the labour pool. I think even ($1/hr + training + negative taxes) is much better than people being unemployed and 100% reliant on the government.

by deburo 5y ago

itake 5y ago

> Do you think the people they employ are better off not working at all? Maybe you didn't read the article. but in summary, because the businesses are not paying enough, the businesses have less employees. Its not that the employees wont have jobs, but they will just have a higher paying job somewhere else.

davemp 5y ago

The government giving more to minimum wage workers instead of raising minimum wage feels like a roundabout way to subsidize businesses that don’t way living wages.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
That's exactly how it works in many european countries, especially the ones without a legal minimum wage (Austria for example), so people working "slave" gig jobs (cleaners, delivery, construction and hospitality workers, etc.) where if they earn below a certain "livable' threshold, get various tax credits, subsidies and benefits from the government to reach that "livable" threshold, which, while it sounds good, it creates a perverse incentive where employees arrange with the employer to be paid as little on paper as possible to still qualify for the government subsidies and then get paid the rest under the table (tipping is expected here for this reason) which just moves the burden from the employers of paying a livable wage to the customers and to the taxpayers which are basically subsidizing their business.
- varispeed 5y ago
  What strikes me as weird is that parties that call themselves left-wing opt for this kind of hand outs without realising they are in fact subsidising the rich with workers' money. How this can fly?
  - tnzm 5y ago
    Left and right wings belong to the same vulture.
  - Jcowell 5y ago
    Well not helping people in order to stick it to the rich is neither productive nor effective. There’s a reason for these handouts and it’s not as if left-wing parties don’t advocate for higher minimum wage. A problem can always be attacked from multiple sides.
- brigandish 5y ago
  This is what's happened with housing benefit in the UK[1], it's basically a subsidy to businesses in high rent areas. It was £500M a week, I shudder to think what it is now. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06bnbpx https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06bnbpx
taurath 5y ago
The government already does that in terms of food stamps. A job in the richest country in the world should not pay starvation wages.

blihp 5y ago

If raising the minimum wage will do them in, they're already halfway there if things are really[1] that dire and will end up there soon enough. So yes, people are better off not working for those types of businesses. If a business can only remain solvent by paying unreasonably low wages, it puts downward wage pressure on competing businesses and traps unskilled workers in a labor pool of dead-end jobs with little hope of escaping it/them and no time to do so since they're always scrambling to make enough money pay the most urgent bill. There are plenty of things society needs done to keep displaced workers productive (with better pay and a sense of actual accomplishment) while giving them breathing room to figure out 'what next?' I don't believe for a second that we're doing workers in the sub-basement of the economy any favors by keeping them locked down there. It isn't a binary (either they work in these crap jobs or they sit at home and deteriorate) decision... there are a variety of options between the extremes. [1] I'm suspicious of the majority of cases where this claim is made. A rational business person would see that such a business is already marginal and that they would likely be better off shutting it down and redeploying the capital elsewhere for a better return. This happens all the time. If the owner can't see this, keeping the business on life support isn't doing anyone any favors.

leesalminen 5y ago
> [1] I'm suspicious of the majority of cases where this claim is made. A rational business person would see that such a business is already marginal and that they would likely be better off shutting it down and redeploying the capital elsewhere for a better return. This happens all the time. If the owner can't see this, keeping the business on life support isn't doing anyone any favors. I agree with you, I would never own a restaurant or bar personally. But profits are really ~10% for the average mom n pop restaurant. It's just how it is. So $1mm in annual sales makes you $100k, more or less. People like owning restaurants, despite their best financial interests.
- meowkit 5y ago
  > People like owning restaurants, despite their best financial interests. And part of the problem is cultural. There is social capital that exists alongside human and financial capital, and because its hard to quantify we end up with this sort of hidden value that isn't accounted for.

ehnto 5y ago

Please think about the holistic nature of your argument. The sum of it's parts essentially suggests that taxpayers should subsidize the employment costs of businesses, which is ridiculous.

caymanjim 5y ago
Taxpayers already subsidize the employment costs, by supplementing low salaries and lack of benefits via welfare programs, tax rebates, lower tax rates, subsidized healthcare, and countless other benefits. Walmart et al have externalized almost all of the true cost of labor to taxpayers.
- ehnto 5y ago
  Right, and raising the minimum wage is an attempt to control that by putting the costs back on the employer.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Who will simply either pass the costs along to the consumer, or shut down.
    - KSteffensen 5y ago
      Again, internalizing the true cost of things. How is this bad?
    - ehnto 5y ago
      Which is a healthy cleanse of an exploitive economy, and America definitely has an exploitive economy, make no mistake. A minimum wage is a decision a society makes, that says "this is the minimum market rate for a human that we consider non-exploitive", it's not an economic decision made to maximize GDP or profit. If a company can't afford to operate in a way that's non-exploitive then it needs to reconfigure or die out, because it doesn't belong in your society.
    - didibus 5y ago

wonnage 5y ago

Same argument is used by Americans to justify sweatshops in SE Asia. TBF, not much you can do about working conditions in other countries, so you might as well rationalize it and wear cheap clothes. It says a lot about an individual who chooses the same strategy for their own countrymen too.

pyuser583 5y ago

If have a hard time believing people are going to just sit at home staring at the wall because they loose their jobs. If you want to argue that the minimum wage increases unemployment, and that the unemployment tends to be long term, go ahead and argue. But don’t ask us to take it as an article of faith.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

>but they get to work as opposed to staying at home and degenerate (mentally and physically) If I don't have a job I go workout during the day, learn new skills, and read. Without kids that is, with kids I take care of the kids.

onion2k 5y ago

The cost of some businesses closing because they can't afford a higher minimum wage has to be considered in the context of every business that can afford the higher wage improving the lives of their minimum wage staff. Maybe it is worthwhile killing some businesses, and pushing some people to get new jobs or to live on benefits, if the wage increase for others is a greater benefit to society. Its also worth noting that practically no businesses close when minimum wages have been increased in the past. People suggest its a problem,and logically it makes sense, but it doesn't seem to actually happen in practise.

ItsMonkk 5y ago
This is something that is quite nuanced that isn't apparent until you really look into the numbers. When something happens that universally makes the labor costs go up, and you expect for many businesses to go into the black, what you will instead see is that the very worst company goes out business and all of the others will put pressure on their land owner for lower rents pointing out that they are next. The landowner wants their land to be used and not be earning nothing for years, so they will lower rents. For a restaurant, if everyone is in the same boat, is agnostic to labor costs. Higher labor costs makes real estate prices go down. Automation makes real estate prices go up. With interest rates going down bringing real estate up, we have plenty of space to rise minimum wage to balance.
- bayesian_horse 5y ago
  No, higher minimum wage shouldn't increase the labor cost "universally". Most of the cost increase would be felt by those employers who actually paid wages below the new limit. Which isn't even that great a portion of the economy. There might be some effect diffusing upwards, but I doubt it.
  - ItsMonkk 5y ago
    Right, which is why I clarified each time I said that. Software costs don't go up as they don't rely on minimum wage labor. For restaurants, that almost universally rely on the cheapest labor, this is the case. If Burger King and McDonalds both have higher labor costs, both put pressure on their land owner, and both don't end up caring.

plankers 5y ago

>they get to work as opposed to staying at home and degenerate (mentally and physically) I almost spit out my drink. You must have a pretty small imagination if you think that working for somebody else is the only way to stimulate yourself mentally and physically.

poloopolo 5y ago
For the lower classes it usually is the case

watwut 5y ago

Unprofitable business paying below mininum wage distorts the market. They are in direct competition with businesses who do pay minimum wage and have advantage. Otherwise said, these not ending is bad thing. And none of that is for benefit of worker.

sqrt17 5y ago

Most likely they wouldn't stay at home but either would start their own small business (which would be more competitive now since people with employees have to pay them a livable wage) or, if they can be supported by their partner and not work, do something that's important for society but doesn't pay well (e.g. caring for your family, or for people in your community, writing, creating art). I'd call it a wrong conclusion to assume that the thing that people do to unwind after a busy workday or what people do who are unable to work due to depression is the same as what people undertake when they can sustain themselves without spending the majority of their waking hours commuting and working.

tnzm 5y ago

>but they get to work as opposed to staying at home and degenerate (mentally and physically) That's a disgusting thing to say.

wizzard 5y ago

There's nothing arbitrary about paying a living wage. I could rephrase your argument as "Shouldn't businesses be able to pay poverty wages, and taxpayers can make up the difference?" If you can't stay in business without the government supporting your workers, then your business doesn't work. These businesses are effectively being subsidized by the government without giving the government a stake. Also, I feel like this isn't even worth addressing, but no, work is not a government-sponsored day care for workers.

banannaise 5y ago

It's also not logical to kill businesses by arbitrarily raising rent, but that happens anyway, and wouldn't you know, that squeezes the businesses on their ability to pay higher wages.

brutusborn 5y ago

I think negative taxes are a great solution. Provide people with enough for the basics and incentivize them to entering the labour pool. I think even ($1/hr + training + negative taxes) is much better than people being unemployed and 100% reliant on the government.