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Cut the salary of everyone by 5% and you can have one cleaner for every 20 developers. My point is simply that work should not be cheap, if someone works 40 hou

Cut the salary of everyone by 5% and you can have one cleaner for every 20 developers. My point is simply that work should not be cheap, if someone works 40 hours a week for you, you owe that person a wage that allows a decent life, otherwise it is just a mild form of slavery.

wruza 5y ago
if someone works 40 hours a week for you, you owe that person a wage that allows a decent life I agree, humanely. But our entire competitive all-eating-optimizing nature works against this. Raising min.wages would likely lead to the situation where they have no job at all, because if low-paid jobs were enforced as decently paid by law, companies would simply automate them. They didn’t do that yet, only because it’s cheap to use human labor. Taxi, delivery, cleaning, you name it. If low skill job workers could get $$$$$$ jobs, they would. But they can’t, for various reasons. This is not fixable at the level we discussing. https://www.google.ru/search?q=raising+minimum+wage+increases+unemployment https://www.google.ru/search?q=raising+minimum+wage+increase...
- danbruc 5y ago
  I essentially agree with you but I think this not an argument against raising the minimum wage. They will not lose their jobs, they already do not have a job. Ignoring the facet of work as self-fulfillment or being part of society or whatever, the relevant part of a job for a worker is that it earns them a living wage, not that they do some work. In that sense someone with a job not earning them a living wage is already jobless. And if we actually run out of jobs valued at least a living wage for some part of society - and I have no illusion that everyone can become a developer if they just tried hard enough - then this is a problem that needs addressing. Just pretending that there are still jobs because there is work that is valued less than a living wage but still more expensive then automation, is not a solution. But I am not in a position to really judge objectively where we are, whether we are already out of jobs or whether some jobs are just underpaid because it is possible in the current market situation, or what mix of the former.

wruza 5y ago

if someone works 40 hours a week for you, you owe that person a wage that allows a decent life I agree, humanely. But our entire competitive all-eating-optimizing nature works against this. Raising min.wages would likely lead to the situation where they have no job at all, because if low-paid jobs were enforced as decently paid by law, companies would simply automate them. They didn’t do that yet, only because it’s cheap to use human labor. Taxi, delivery, cleaning, you name it. If low skill job workers could get $$$$$$ jobs, they would. But they can’t, for various reasons. This is not fixable at the level we discussing. https://www.google.ru/search?q=raising+minimum+wage+increases+unemployment https://www.google.ru/search?q=raising+minimum+wage+increase...

danbruc 5y ago
I essentially agree with you but I think this not an argument against raising the minimum wage. They will not lose their jobs, they already do not have a job. Ignoring the facet of work as self-fulfillment or being part of society or whatever, the relevant part of a job for a worker is that it earns them a living wage, not that they do some work. In that sense someone with a job not earning them a living wage is already jobless. And if we actually run out of jobs valued at least a living wage for some part of society - and I have no illusion that everyone can become a developer if they just tried hard enough - then this is a problem that needs addressing. Just pretending that there are still jobs because there is work that is valued less than a living wage but still more expensive then automation, is not a solution. But I am not in a position to really judge objectively where we are, whether we are already out of jobs or whether some jobs are just underpaid because it is possible in the current market situation, or what mix of the former.