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Great for those with support, safety nets, options & abilities. The young, the mentally challenged, the old, the handicapped, the convicted... they're supposed

Great for those with support, safety nets, options & abilities. The young, the mentally challenged, the old, the handicapped, the convicted... they're supposed eat cat food and go sleep under an overpass until they get motivated/healthy/unconvicted/a car/____?

mlyle 5y ago
> the mentally challenged, the old, the handicapped We have disability safety nets (that could be better). And FLSA and state regs all allow paying these groups under minimum wage (and this is a good thing). My wife's brother is severely mentally handicapped. He lives in a nice, well-run group home (I'm aware this is not universal). He also has the option of going to "dayhab" where there's educational content and the option of working making crafts for a couple of dollars per hour of spending money. I am not sure his labor output is worth the $2-3/hour he gets paid: a lot of this is probably charity, but it makes a difference to him to be able to earn something and work towards goals, and not just spend his entire day watching TV instead. You don't fix these things with a minimum wage and you possibly make them worse. They've got different solutions. > The young, ... the convicted These are harder problems. * How do we provide a good on-ramp to productive work and independent life for at-risk youth? * How do we allow those who have broken the norms of society in the past to rejoin in an orderly way, with hope and better prospects from compliance than reoffending? Note that I think we should have a minimum wage. I just think it's also a band-aid at best, and often causes a fair degree of problems as well. It's better than nothing, but one would be better off addressing the problems it's targeted at in any other available way.
- anonAndOn 5y ago
  The old - One's employment options often severely diminish as they approach retirement. With health insurance (and those costly prescriptions) tied to employment, how little do you think some are willing to work for? Would you work for free if your life depended on it?
  - mlyle 5y ago
    I feel like you avoided engaging at all with my comment. I explicitly commented that the safety nets and retirement system are not perfect and could be better, but that I believed minimum wage was not a solution. Increasing the minimum wage isn't going to get more people just short of retirement health insurance.
    - anonAndOn 5y ago
      Why would I pay you more than I have to if I know you're desperate and have few (or none) other options? Mind if I pay you in scrip?
      - mlyle 5y ago
        I don't believe in your good faith desire to discuss. I've said above I believe there should be a minimum wage, but that it's a crappy lever for the groups that you describe and that there are better ones for different subgroups (social safety nets, reducing the supply of labor by shortening work week). Instead, I get a bunch of strawmen that have nothing to do with what I said.
        anonAndOn 5y ago
        You've presented a group home as a possible solution for the severely mentally handicapped. Presumably great for the few who can get it. What you have not addressed is the extreme imbalance in power for many employers at the expense of employees. If there is no floor on what someone can get away with paying, then it is reasonable to expect the marginalized or powerless to be fully taken advantage of. Even today, some employers try to get away with not paying by having employees work "off the clock". At least with the minimum wage, litigious employees can eventually expect something for their lost time.
        mlyle 5y ago
        > What you have not addressed is the extreme imbalance in power for many employers at the expense of employees. If there is no floor on what someone can get away with paying, then it is reasonable to expect the marginalized or powerless to be fully taken advantage of. ???? I have stated throughout this entire conversation that I believe there should be a minimum wage. I do not know why you continue to argue with me as if I have not. Your messages have nothing to do with what I am saying. I have pointed this out to you now three times. You haven't confused me with trcarney who said far above that there shouldn't be one, have you? I just don't think the minimum wage is a solution to many of the problems you cite. It will not generate more employment income for the severely disabled, etc.
- medvezhenok 5y ago
  As I noted above, if we had UBI to cover bare essentials, we wouldn't need a minimum wage. That's basically what Walmart abuses anyways via the welfare system; it's almost a subsidy to make their model kind of glue-together in the end. Let's just make it explicit. Pass UBI, repeal minimum wage laws.
  - EricE 5y ago
    Just look at the chaos being cause by COVID bucks right now - fast food joints offering $15 an hour and $500 signing bonuses and still having no takers. That anyone has the guts to still be pushing UBI when we can see how a limited UBI with the current government handouts are utterly destroying the current labor market is beyond reprehensible.
    - medvezhenok 5y ago
      First, COVID bucks stopped quite a while ago (September at the latest) It's not destroying anything, it's giving labor bargaining power back versus capital. Yes, it's harder to hire workers at $X/hour when they have alternatives. That's the whole point of UBI. Also note that pre-handouts, the companies were hiring workers for $10/hour, now they're willing to pay $15/hour with bonus (and can't find anyone). What that means is that companies actually had room to pay much higher than they were actually paying (and still make sufficient profit) - so the previous wage was not a fair market wage, but was rather exploitation; which the article goes into below: "Labor markets in capitalist economies are fundamentally tilted against individual workers’ ability to bargain effectively with employers. Policy does not have to be rigged for employers to give them particular clout in labor markets; instead, the very nature of these labor markets gives them clout. In the past, when economic growth was broadly shared across the population, it was because policymakers understood this basic asymmetry and used policy levers to bolster the leverage and bargaining power of workers. Conversely, recent decades’ rise of inequality and anemic wage growth has resulted from a stripping away of these policy bulwarks to workers’ labor market power." https://www.epi.org/publication/what-labor-market-changes-have-generated-inequality-and-wage-suppression-employer-power-is-significant-but-largely-constant-whereas-workers-power-has-been-eroded-by-policy-actions/ https://www.epi.org/publication/what-labor-market-changes-ha...
beerandt 5y ago
The way to get young/unskilled people to build skills earlier in life is to lower the minimum wage, not increase it. No one is going to hire a 12 year old for a part time job if the minimum wage is $15. It just increases the minimum skill level to be hireable. But hire them for $7.50 and they might have skills worth $15 by the time they're 18.
- medvezhenok 5y ago
  I think you overestimate how wage-sensitive most industries are. Most companies today have consolidated enough to have a lot of pricing power - if they raise prices, consumers will just have to buckle up and take it. We've already had history in the U.S. where the inflation-adjusted minimum wage was way higher than it is today and yet the labor participation rate was also higher than it is today. But my personal preference is for UBI coupled with a repeal of the minimum wage.

mlyle 5y ago

> the mentally challenged, the old, the handicapped We have disability safety nets (that could be better). And FLSA and state regs all allow paying these groups under minimum wage (and this is a good thing). My wife's brother is severely mentally handicapped. He lives in a nice, well-run group home (I'm aware this is not universal). He also has the option of going to "dayhab" where there's educational content and the option of working making crafts for a couple of dollars per hour of spending money. I am not sure his labor output is worth the $2-3/hour he gets paid: a lot of this is probably charity, but it makes a difference to him to be able to earn something and work towards goals, and not just spend his entire day watching TV instead. You don't fix these things with a minimum wage and you possibly make them worse. They've got different solutions. > The young, ... the convicted These are harder problems. * How do we provide a good on-ramp to productive work and independent life for at-risk youth? * How do we allow those who have broken the norms of society in the past to rejoin in an orderly way, with hope and better prospects from compliance than reoffending? Note that I think we should have a minimum wage. I just think it's also a band-aid at best, and often causes a fair degree of problems as well. It's better than nothing, but one would be better off addressing the problems it's targeted at in any other available way.

anonAndOn 5y ago
The old - One's employment options often severely diminish as they approach retirement. With health insurance (and those costly prescriptions) tied to employment, how little do you think some are willing to work for? Would you work for free if your life depended on it?
- mlyle 5y ago
  I feel like you avoided engaging at all with my comment. I explicitly commented that the safety nets and retirement system are not perfect and could be better, but that I believed minimum wage was not a solution. Increasing the minimum wage isn't going to get more people just short of retirement health insurance.
  - anonAndOn 5y ago
    Why would I pay you more than I have to if I know you're desperate and have few (or none) other options? Mind if I pay you in scrip?
    - mlyle 5y ago
      I don't believe in your good faith desire to discuss. I've said above I believe there should be a minimum wage, but that it's a crappy lever for the groups that you describe and that there are better ones for different subgroups (social safety nets, reducing the supply of labor by shortening work week). Instead, I get a bunch of strawmen that have nothing to do with what I said.
      - anonAndOn 5y ago
        You've presented a group home as a possible solution for the severely mentally handicapped. Presumably great for the few who can get it. What you have not addressed is the extreme imbalance in power for many employers at the expense of employees. If there is no floor on what someone can get away with paying, then it is reasonable to expect the marginalized or powerless to be fully taken advantage of. Even today, some employers try to get away with not paying by having employees work "off the clock". At least with the minimum wage, litigious employees can eventually expect something for their lost time.
        mlyle 5y ago
        > What you have not addressed is the extreme imbalance in power for many employers at the expense of employees. If there is no floor on what someone can get away with paying, then it is reasonable to expect the marginalized or powerless to be fully taken advantage of. ???? I have stated throughout this entire conversation that I believe there should be a minimum wage. I do not know why you continue to argue with me as if I have not. Your messages have nothing to do with what I am saying. I have pointed this out to you now three times. You haven't confused me with trcarney who said far above that there shouldn't be one, have you? I just don't think the minimum wage is a solution to many of the problems you cite. It will not generate more employment income for the severely disabled, etc.
medvezhenok 5y ago
As I noted above, if we had UBI to cover bare essentials, we wouldn't need a minimum wage. That's basically what Walmart abuses anyways via the welfare system; it's almost a subsidy to make their model kind of glue-together in the end. Let's just make it explicit. Pass UBI, repeal minimum wage laws.
- EricE 5y ago
  Just look at the chaos being cause by COVID bucks right now - fast food joints offering $15 an hour and $500 signing bonuses and still having no takers. That anyone has the guts to still be pushing UBI when we can see how a limited UBI with the current government handouts are utterly destroying the current labor market is beyond reprehensible.
  - medvezhenok 5y ago
    First, COVID bucks stopped quite a while ago (September at the latest) It's not destroying anything, it's giving labor bargaining power back versus capital. Yes, it's harder to hire workers at $X/hour when they have alternatives. That's the whole point of UBI. Also note that pre-handouts, the companies were hiring workers for $10/hour, now they're willing to pay $15/hour with bonus (and can't find anyone). What that means is that companies actually had room to pay much higher than they were actually paying (and still make sufficient profit) - so the previous wage was not a fair market wage, but was rather exploitation; which the article goes into below: "Labor markets in capitalist economies are fundamentally tilted against individual workers’ ability to bargain effectively with employers. Policy does not have to be rigged for employers to give them particular clout in labor markets; instead, the very nature of these labor markets gives them clout. In the past, when economic growth was broadly shared across the population, it was because policymakers understood this basic asymmetry and used policy levers to bolster the leverage and bargaining power of workers. Conversely, recent decades’ rise of inequality and anemic wage growth has resulted from a stripping away of these policy bulwarks to workers’ labor market power." https://www.epi.org/publication/what-labor-market-changes-have-generated-inequality-and-wage-suppression-employer-power-is-significant-but-largely-constant-whereas-workers-power-has-been-eroded-by-policy-actions/ https://www.epi.org/publication/what-labor-market-changes-ha...

beerandt 5y ago

The way to get young/unskilled people to build skills earlier in life is to lower the minimum wage, not increase it. No one is going to hire a 12 year old for a part time job if the minimum wage is $15. It just increases the minimum skill level to be hireable. But hire them for $7.50 and they might have skills worth $15 by the time they're 18.

medvezhenok 5y ago
I think you overestimate how wage-sensitive most industries are. Most companies today have consolidated enough to have a lot of pricing power - if they raise prices, consumers will just have to buckle up and take it. We've already had history in the U.S. where the inflation-adjusted minimum wage was way higher than it is today and yet the labor participation rate was also higher than it is today. But my personal preference is for UBI coupled with a repeal of the minimum wage.