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The counter-argument is this: you're outlawing willing market participants who wish to sell their labor for less than $25 per hour. What if someone doesn't hav

The counter-argument is this: you're outlawing willing market participants who wish to sell their labor for less than $25 per hour. What if someone doesn't have a skill set or live in a prosperous enough market that supports that wage? Quite a bit of business will simply disappear if the labor is too expensive. That hole-in-the-wall diner in the Ozarks will simply close if they have to pay $25 an hour, and the waitress working there will simply be unemployed without another alternative.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
If your business cannot pay a living wage, it should not exist (what a living wage in the Ozarks is is another discussion [1]). Fill the gaps with unemployment and other social safety nets. I am not unsympathetic to business owners (having been one myself many years ago), but I am also not sympathetic for having the worker class suffer for the benefit of business and consumers, and living in poverty is abject suffering. Trillions of dollars of capital class/shareholder profits shows there is productivity to distribute more evenly. [1] https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/29153 https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/29153
- _-david-_ 4y ago
  Should a 17 year old who is still in high school while living with his parents be paid $25/hour for working at McDonald's? There is no reason he needs a "living wage" since his parents are already providing what he needs.
  - Inityx 4y ago
    >Should a 17 year old who is still in high school while living with his parents be paid $25/hour for working at McDonald's? Yes. >his parents are already providing what he needs And what about people who aren't in this particular situation? What is the policy solution to filter out people who you feel don't deserve this level of compensation for their labor?
    - credit_guy 4y ago
      One potential solution: the government pays the workers a part of difference between what their wage and $25/h based on various criteria. If you live with your millionaire parents, the fraction is zero. If you are the only wage earner in a family of four, the fraction is 1. The guiding principle should be that if the government/society thinks some people need assistance, then they should just provide it directly, rather than just force others to provide it for them.
    - hutzlibu 4y ago
      "And what about people who aren't in this particular situation? What is the policy solution to filter out people who you feel don't deserve this level of compensation for their labor?" They simply should try to get the skills for a higher paying job. And if they cannot (for whatever reasons, there are actually plenty of very legitimate reasons) - you can help them out with social welfare/charity money, especially if they have a family to feed. And then you can further help them, by providing free education with low barriers (that you can even do, while having little kids) etc. so one day they can stand on their own. There are many things that can be done, before you have to negate the right of 2 free parties to make a contract under their own terms. So my ideal policy would be the economy should be simply as policyfree as possible to sort itself out. That doesn't mean, society cannot help those, who need help. It can and it should. But this is called charity and not economy, so why mix both up?
    - _-david-_ 4y ago
      >Yes Why? The point of a living wage is to ensure a person can live on their wage. In this situation the person can live of their wage. >And what about people who aren't in this particular situation? If the best a person can do in life is a cashier at a fast food restaurant than they either have a problem (substance abuse or mental) and should get help or lack any motivation to grow. I don't think we need to make rules out of exceptions like that. The point of jobs like that aren't to stay at it for the rest of your life. >What is the policy solution to filter out people who you feel don't deserve this level of compensation for their labor? I don't believe somebody who can't get a simple order correct should get $25. Maybe if they got it right 99% of the time that would be one thing, but they aren't even close. I don't know what you mean by policy solution? Somebody should get a better job if they want more pay.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    If that kid doesn't have a future beyond living with his parents, sure. But it's a pretty flimsy argument when you consider the future and his parents' living conditions. Personally, I'd like kids like that to be able to save up for college and retirement. But in the alarmingly common situation where that 17 year-old is helping a single parent get by, that $25/hour salary starts to make a lot of sense.
    - _-david-_ 4y ago
      You are making a flimsy argument. If you want kids to be able to save up why not make it $100 an hour? That would make it more likely they could afford college and a good retirement. The point of a teenager having a job is not to support his family, but to have some extra spending money and to gain experience. I don't think a person should make a career out of minimum wage jobs. They have them to gain experience or to fall back on in hard times.
      - klyrs 4y ago
        > The point of a teenager having a job is not to support his family, but to have some extra spending money and to gain experience. That was my privilege growing up in a middle class family, too. But a whole lot of my friends had jobs to support their families as soon as they were old enough to legally work.
        _-david-_ 4y ago
        I am talking about what teenage jobs should be, not what they are for many people. I think raising the minimum wage to $25 is going to make it harder for teenagers with no experience to get a job. Right now they can get $10 an hour, if the minimum wage is $25 they won't get the job and will get $0. Which is better for the poor family?
        klyrs 4y ago
        > I am talking about what teenage jobs should be, not what they are for many people. Wilful ignorance is not a good-faith approach to conversation. Have a nice day.
- legitster 4y ago
  > If your business cannot pay a living wage, it should not exist Says who? There are countless people on this site who run businesses that don't even pay themselves. Are they under moral obligation to shut down their own business? The majority of minimum wage work is done as supplemental income to a household (teenagers or spouses or partner). There would be a large subset of people who would not qualify for social safety programs but who would not be better off without these positions.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    > Says who? Voters and dollars spent on political speech. > The majority of minimum wage work is done as supplemental income to a household (teenagers or spouses or partner). The characteristics of lowest wage earners does not justify underpaying labor. It is an excuse by business to underpay.
    - legitster 4y ago
      I worked for 4 years as a merchandiser (to this day one of my favorite jobs). I made $14.25 an hour for driving around to stores and "facing" chips. I would basically clean up the chip aisle for the chip company so it looked nice and people would buy more chips. It's hard to imagine that job makes any sense at $25 an hour. This wasn't a case where I was being underpaid for my labor. There is only so much value a job like that is ever going to create, and at a certain point it doesn't make sense to employee people doing it anymore.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > at a certain point it doesn't make sense to employee people doing it anymore I’m honestly convinced a growing slice of America sees employment as inherently oppressive and undignified, and so yes, believes you would have preferred unemployment to working.
        throwaway0a5e 4y ago
        >I’m honestly convinced a growing slice of America sees employment as inherently oppressive and undignified The problem is that this slice mostly isn't the unemployed but people far from it. This is yet another societal problem where people are telling other people what's good for them and would probably be solved if people put their money where their mouth is.
- exabrial 4y ago
  > If your business cannot pay a living wage, it should not exist Prove that all jobs are supposed to supply a living wage first.
  - effingwewt 4y ago
    Then why have the job at all? This right here is why we need to remove existence from how much you bleed for a company.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - _-david-_ 4y ago
      >Then why have the job at all? To get extra money? A teenager could be living with his parents and not need a living wage.
      - effingwewt 4y ago
        This fallacy is how we get where we are. We all already legally agree every person working deserves a minimum wage. Even now they pretend it's just 'entry level jobs for schoolchildren without bills'. In reality it allows them to pay the bare minimum as now people who need to support themselves now directly compete with those who do not, artificially depressing the wages such that they almost never go over the bare minimum. I'd also like to add they use this to their advantage ad nauseum. They use this to- while paying the bare minimum- demand workers do demeaning jobs, in demeaning uniforms, are generally disrespected by customers, can't get time off when they need it, supplying the bare minimum insurance, placing all the monetary onus on the employee. What we have does not work, we need to try something else.
        _-david-_ 4y ago
        How is somebody with no experience or education supposed to get a job when they cannot generate that much money for a company? Perhaps they can get lucky and find a company who will hire them, but many poor, young, and people with criminal records will be priced out of the market which will lead to generational poverty. There is also an increasing number of lower paying jobs that are going away due to automation. Raising the minimum wage will speed up the adoption. This will make it even harder to get a job. I fully agree that some companies and customers do not treat employees with dignity. This is not really relevant to the minimum wage. I also fully agree what we have doesn't work. We need good paying jobs for people with minimal / no experience and education. I don't think just raising the minimum wage will fix things. At best raising the minimum wage is stop gap that will cause damage in the long term and create even more poverty.
- tannhauser23 4y ago
  This is ridiculous. Businesses should pay what the wages are worth. If that's not enough for some ideal standard of living, government can use social programs and tax rebates to make up the difference. That's what taxation is for.
- jlawson 4y ago
  Alternatively, you're saying that if your labor isn't valuable enough to be worth a living wage, you shouldn't be allowed to work at all.
- culopatin 4y ago
  “Having the worker class suffer for benefits of business and consumers”. But have you considered that the worker IS the consumer and without the business the worker wouldn’t have any income at all or anything to consume?
fallingfrog 4y ago
Nobody wishes to sell their labor at a price that means they are stuck in a cycle of poverty; they do it because they have no choice.
- BayAreaEscapee 4y ago
  Right, but outlawing the ability of the laborer to sell his services at a market-clearing price doesn't fix that problem. If the minimum wage becomes $25, for some workers, the result will be them making $25 per hour. For some other workers, the result will be structural unemployment. If you suspend market reasoning and just virtual signal, you can just assign blame to the business owner. But virtue signaling itself and assigning blame doesn't actually fix the problem that in the alternate $25-an-hour-universe some subset of workers become structurally unemployed by the invisible hand of the market.
scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago
Problem is, every time anything is proposed towards increasing pressure on the giant corps that employ the vast majority of people, someone pulls this kind of what-about-sympathetic-small-business-owner argument. It’s an evocative image which effectively vetoes progress. “Sell your labor at any price you want” perspective works great as an abstract concept. But we’ve already been here many times over and over and all sorts of labor/union movements had to push forward. Somehow waitresses and diners never stopped existing.
tenacious_tuna 4y ago
I think this is a reasonable concern, so long as the base needs of our citizens are provided for. Everyone should have food, shelter, and healthcare. I believe we have the societal resources to achieve this within the US, but even if we didn't that should still be the goal. Much of the debate around minimum wage centers on the idea that a person working full time should be able to have basic necessities. There's some nuance around what "full time" means or if it's even reasonable to expect people to have to exchange their limited lifetime for resources if we have alternatives, but the base of it comes down to "if people are already exchanging the accepted-normal-maximum of their free time a week for money, that money should be sufficient to provide base necessities." Yes, there are businesses that can't afford to pay $25 to waiters and waitresses, but that doesn't invalidate the fact that those people deserve to be able to live. Right now in the absence of UBI or state healthcare about the only other 'lever' we have to pull on this problem is minimum wage.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I find it insane that someone is okay with decent population working what is considered normal time be it for example 40 hours a week and then not being able to afford basic reasonable needs. I suppose they would be fine if they didn't freeze or starve to death most of the time. Or die from treatable diseases.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
Well so that happened after WWII, tons of businesses went under, and their owners had to just get a job like everyone else. But the jobs were good, and he might get promoted a little quicker. The second thing is pulling immigration. Like US is no longer impeding immigration across the border, it is pulling it in. Like DHS fills an airplane with Wahhabi Muslims masquerading as Mexicans to send them out of the...the Homeland, and the executive says no turn that plane around. So they can compete with that waitress for her job, and play with fireworks on the 4th of July. And suprise, immigrants can learn to wait tables pretty quickly, but don't exactly own any land for a diner already and have much capital (like $30 in their pocket), so their benefit to the economy will be higher for the diner owner who enjoys their competition than the diner waitress you competes.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

toomuchtodo 4y ago

If your business cannot pay a living wage, it should not exist (what a living wage in the Ozarks is is another discussion [1]). Fill the gaps with unemployment and other social safety nets. I am not unsympathetic to business owners (having been one myself many years ago), but I am also not sympathetic for having the worker class suffer for the benefit of business and consumers, and living in poverty is abject suffering. Trillions of dollars of capital class/shareholder profits shows there is productivity to distribute more evenly. [1] https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/29153 https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/29153

_-david-_ 4y ago
Should a 17 year old who is still in high school while living with his parents be paid $25/hour for working at McDonald's? There is no reason he needs a "living wage" since his parents are already providing what he needs.
- Inityx 4y ago
  >Should a 17 year old who is still in high school while living with his parents be paid $25/hour for working at McDonald's? Yes. >his parents are already providing what he needs And what about people who aren't in this particular situation? What is the policy solution to filter out people who you feel don't deserve this level of compensation for their labor?
  - credit_guy 4y ago
    One potential solution: the government pays the workers a part of difference between what their wage and $25/h based on various criteria. If you live with your millionaire parents, the fraction is zero. If you are the only wage earner in a family of four, the fraction is 1. The guiding principle should be that if the government/society thinks some people need assistance, then they should just provide it directly, rather than just force others to provide it for them.
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    "And what about people who aren't in this particular situation? What is the policy solution to filter out people who you feel don't deserve this level of compensation for their labor?" They simply should try to get the skills for a higher paying job. And if they cannot (for whatever reasons, there are actually plenty of very legitimate reasons) - you can help them out with social welfare/charity money, especially if they have a family to feed. And then you can further help them, by providing free education with low barriers (that you can even do, while having little kids) etc. so one day they can stand on their own. There are many things that can be done, before you have to negate the right of 2 free parties to make a contract under their own terms. So my ideal policy would be the economy should be simply as policyfree as possible to sort itself out. That doesn't mean, society cannot help those, who need help. It can and it should. But this is called charity and not economy, so why mix both up?
  - _-david-_ 4y ago
    >Yes Why? The point of a living wage is to ensure a person can live on their wage. In this situation the person can live of their wage. >And what about people who aren't in this particular situation? If the best a person can do in life is a cashier at a fast food restaurant than they either have a problem (substance abuse or mental) and should get help or lack any motivation to grow. I don't think we need to make rules out of exceptions like that. The point of jobs like that aren't to stay at it for the rest of your life. >What is the policy solution to filter out people who you feel don't deserve this level of compensation for their labor? I don't believe somebody who can't get a simple order correct should get $25. Maybe if they got it right 99% of the time that would be one thing, but they aren't even close. I don't know what you mean by policy solution? Somebody should get a better job if they want more pay.
- klyrs 4y ago
  If that kid doesn't have a future beyond living with his parents, sure. But it's a pretty flimsy argument when you consider the future and his parents' living conditions. Personally, I'd like kids like that to be able to save up for college and retirement. But in the alarmingly common situation where that 17 year-old is helping a single parent get by, that $25/hour salary starts to make a lot of sense.
  - _-david-_ 4y ago
    You are making a flimsy argument. If you want kids to be able to save up why not make it $100 an hour? That would make it more likely they could afford college and a good retirement. The point of a teenager having a job is not to support his family, but to have some extra spending money and to gain experience. I don't think a person should make a career out of minimum wage jobs. They have them to gain experience or to fall back on in hard times.
    - klyrs 4y ago
      > The point of a teenager having a job is not to support his family, but to have some extra spending money and to gain experience. That was my privilege growing up in a middle class family, too. But a whole lot of my friends had jobs to support their families as soon as they were old enough to legally work.
      - _-david-_ 4y ago
        I am talking about what teenage jobs should be, not what they are for many people. I think raising the minimum wage to $25 is going to make it harder for teenagers with no experience to get a job. Right now they can get $10 an hour, if the minimum wage is $25 they won't get the job and will get $0. Which is better for the poor family?
        klyrs 4y ago
        > I am talking about what teenage jobs should be, not what they are for many people. Wilful ignorance is not a good-faith approach to conversation. Have a nice day.
legitster 4y ago
> If your business cannot pay a living wage, it should not exist Says who? There are countless people on this site who run businesses that don't even pay themselves. Are they under moral obligation to shut down their own business? The majority of minimum wage work is done as supplemental income to a household (teenagers or spouses or partner). There would be a large subset of people who would not qualify for social safety programs but who would not be better off without these positions.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  > Says who? Voters and dollars spent on political speech. > The majority of minimum wage work is done as supplemental income to a household (teenagers or spouses or partner). The characteristics of lowest wage earners does not justify underpaying labor. It is an excuse by business to underpay.
  - legitster 4y ago
    I worked for 4 years as a merchandiser (to this day one of my favorite jobs). I made $14.25 an hour for driving around to stores and "facing" chips. I would basically clean up the chip aisle for the chip company so it looked nice and people would buy more chips. It's hard to imagine that job makes any sense at $25 an hour. This wasn't a case where I was being underpaid for my labor. There is only so much value a job like that is ever going to create, and at a certain point it doesn't make sense to employee people doing it anymore.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > at a certain point it doesn't make sense to employee people doing it anymore I’m honestly convinced a growing slice of America sees employment as inherently oppressive and undignified, and so yes, believes you would have preferred unemployment to working.
      - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
        >I’m honestly convinced a growing slice of America sees employment as inherently oppressive and undignified The problem is that this slice mostly isn't the unemployed but people far from it. This is yet another societal problem where people are telling other people what's good for them and would probably be solved if people put their money where their mouth is.
exabrial 4y ago
> If your business cannot pay a living wage, it should not exist Prove that all jobs are supposed to supply a living wage first.
- effingwewt 4y ago
  Then why have the job at all? This right here is why we need to remove existence from how much you bleed for a company.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - _-david-_ 4y ago
    >Then why have the job at all? To get extra money? A teenager could be living with his parents and not need a living wage.
    - effingwewt 4y ago
      This fallacy is how we get where we are. We all already legally agree every person working deserves a minimum wage. Even now they pretend it's just 'entry level jobs for schoolchildren without bills'. In reality it allows them to pay the bare minimum as now people who need to support themselves now directly compete with those who do not, artificially depressing the wages such that they almost never go over the bare minimum. I'd also like to add they use this to their advantage ad nauseum. They use this to- while paying the bare minimum- demand workers do demeaning jobs, in demeaning uniforms, are generally disrespected by customers, can't get time off when they need it, supplying the bare minimum insurance, placing all the monetary onus on the employee. What we have does not work, we need to try something else.
      - _-david-_ 4y ago
        How is somebody with no experience or education supposed to get a job when they cannot generate that much money for a company? Perhaps they can get lucky and find a company who will hire them, but many poor, young, and people with criminal records will be priced out of the market which will lead to generational poverty. There is also an increasing number of lower paying jobs that are going away due to automation. Raising the minimum wage will speed up the adoption. This will make it even harder to get a job. I fully agree that some companies and customers do not treat employees with dignity. This is not really relevant to the minimum wage. I also fully agree what we have doesn't work. We need good paying jobs for people with minimal / no experience and education. I don't think just raising the minimum wage will fix things. At best raising the minimum wage is stop gap that will cause damage in the long term and create even more poverty.
tannhauser23 4y ago
This is ridiculous. Businesses should pay what the wages are worth. If that's not enough for some ideal standard of living, government can use social programs and tax rebates to make up the difference. That's what taxation is for.
jlawson 4y ago
Alternatively, you're saying that if your labor isn't valuable enough to be worth a living wage, you shouldn't be allowed to work at all.
culopatin 4y ago
“Having the worker class suffer for benefits of business and consumers”. But have you considered that the worker IS the consumer and without the business the worker wouldn’t have any income at all or anything to consume?

fallingfrog 4y ago

Nobody wishes to sell their labor at a price that means they are stuck in a cycle of poverty; they do it because they have no choice.

BayAreaEscapee 4y ago
Right, but outlawing the ability of the laborer to sell his services at a market-clearing price doesn't fix that problem. If the minimum wage becomes $25, for some workers, the result will be them making $25 per hour. For some other workers, the result will be structural unemployment. If you suspend market reasoning and just virtual signal, you can just assign blame to the business owner. But virtue signaling itself and assigning blame doesn't actually fix the problem that in the alternate $25-an-hour-universe some subset of workers become structurally unemployed by the invisible hand of the market.

scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago

Problem is, every time anything is proposed towards increasing pressure on the giant corps that employ the vast majority of people, someone pulls this kind of what-about-sympathetic-small-business-owner argument. It’s an evocative image which effectively vetoes progress. “Sell your labor at any price you want” perspective works great as an abstract concept. But we’ve already been here many times over and over and all sorts of labor/union movements had to push forward. Somehow waitresses and diners never stopped existing.

tenacious_tuna 4y ago

I think this is a reasonable concern, so long as the base needs of our citizens are provided for. Everyone should have food, shelter, and healthcare. I believe we have the societal resources to achieve this within the US, but even if we didn't that should still be the goal. Much of the debate around minimum wage centers on the idea that a person working full time should be able to have basic necessities. There's some nuance around what "full time" means or if it's even reasonable to expect people to have to exchange their limited lifetime for resources if we have alternatives, but the base of it comes down to "if people are already exchanging the accepted-normal-maximum of their free time a week for money, that money should be sufficient to provide base necessities." Yes, there are businesses that can't afford to pay $25 to waiters and waitresses, but that doesn't invalidate the fact that those people deserve to be able to live. Right now in the absence of UBI or state healthcare about the only other 'lever' we have to pull on this problem is minimum wage.

Ekaros 4y ago
I find it insane that someone is okay with decent population working what is considered normal time be it for example 40 hours a week and then not being able to afford basic reasonable needs. I suppose they would be fine if they didn't freeze or starve to death most of the time. Or die from treatable diseases.

daniel-cussen 4y ago

Well so that happened after WWII, tons of businesses went under, and their owners had to just get a job like everyone else. But the jobs were good, and he might get promoted a little quicker. The second thing is pulling immigration. Like US is no longer impeding immigration across the border, it is pulling it in. Like DHS fills an airplane with Wahhabi Muslims masquerading as Mexicans to send them out of the...the Homeland, and the executive says no turn that plane around. So they can compete with that waitress for her job, and play with fireworks on the 4th of July. And suprise, immigrants can learn to wait tables pretty quickly, but don't exactly own any land for a diner already and have much capital (like $30 in their pocket), so their benefit to the economy will be higher for the diner owner who enjoys their competition than the diner waitress you competes.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]