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"Underpaid" and "fair" is a modern political myth, except in the instances when there is a concerted effort to undermine the semi-natural labor market. Pay will

"Underpaid" and "fair" is a modern political myth, except in the instances when there is a concerted effort to undermine the semi-natural labor market. Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact. It will always be "underpaid" and "unfair" in discussion. As this is an immortal pressure and negotiating tactic. It is incentivized, and therefore we will get more of it. That works both ways, but at some point there has to be a reckoning that accepts that it is better to have employed than unemployed unskilled workers. In the context of a massive and growing unskilled population base. Yet the same people who demand that everyone earn a living wage, sometimes punctuating their points with riots, tend to be the same crowd who wants to import unskilled workers by the millions. There is no effectively borderless world in which most are both employed and not "underpaid". It won't happen both ways. In fact, the pay trend is about to tip massively against fairness. In a manner that even will make economic rationalists uncomfortable. These "fair pay" efforts are a distraction before that storm.

FpUser 3y ago
With all the increased productivity and advances if we can't support decent living for every person then what's the point? Work yourself to death to make some motherfucker rich?
data_ders 3y ago
> Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact can you explain this a bit further please? also, what's the storm that's coming?
- tru3_power 3y ago
  Yeah you’re leaving us hanging here! To me it seems like people are learning their worth a little bit more lately and are demanding a little bit more/less financial stress.
  - ghufran_syed 3y ago
    I took it to mean that whatever amount of money people currently think would be needed to be "fair", say, an increase from $20/hour to $25/hour, would within a year or so become "unfair" again, even if inflation was zero. Employers will always want more work for less money, employees will always want more money for less work. Same as the seller of any product would like more money for that product, and the buyer would always like to pay less for the same product. So you can say the company is "greedy"...but that implies that the worker is also "greedy" - which is true for both IF you define it the way I described above. Or you could say that the company (owners) are trying to maximize their return on investment (time + money), and the the workers are trying to maximize their return on investment (of time).
    - Barrin92 3y ago
      >Employers will always want more work for less money, employees will always want more money for less work. Same as the seller of any product would like more money for that product, Is that true though? I come from a family that works in the crafts, small business mostly (which is like 70% of businesses). Most employees are employed for life, what's being made generally costs a decent amount but quality is high, people are content when they make what's perceived as fair and enough to maintain a middle class lifestyle, and so on. Nobody actually tries to rip each other off, cuts every penny and leaves for 5% higher salaries. People are around for decades. The MBA business logic isn't some universal truth, in fact it's not even how most people work.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Maybe that "storm" is consequences of unchecked ML, make the rich richer and the powerful more powerful, push the poor out of jobs. I disagree that fair pay is impossible though.
- hnbad 3y ago
  This isn't what they meant apparently but in a very literal sense, pay can never be enough because it is economically necessary to underpay workers relative to what they contribute because profit by definition can only exist from surplus value, i.e. making more money from selling the product of labor than you pay for that labor. If I pay a worker $20 per hour to make 20 doodads an hour in my doodad factory and then sell those doodads for $5 a piece, I make $5 for every $1 pay my worker. Of course that extra $4 per doodad has to account for the cost of the doodad factory itself (initial investment, maintenance, material) and the literal cost of doing business (taxes, permits, fees, paying an accountant) and of course market fluctuation (warehousing, building a financial buffer to remain solvent if sales lapse or production has to stop) but if the business is meant to be successful, that needs to add up to less than the extra $4 I'm making. And the bigger that difference is, the more profitable my company becomes and the more spare money I have to expand my business and get ahead of my competition up to the point where I can sell shares in my business to other people and pay dividends from my profits to them. So in other words not only can't you pay workers exactly "enough" (i.e. 100% of the value they contribute to the company) but you're actively incentivized to pay them as little as you can get away with (and perversely, paying them more by reducing your profit margin may actually be worse for them by making your company less competitive and less resilient). This is before we even get into the politics of what work is overvalued or undervalued (e.g. the idea that CEOs should receive massively disproportionate compensation for their labor, which again creates pressure to compensate for this by underpaying lowly workers). This, by the way, is why collective bargaining matters. No matter how cool and nice your employer is, the market actively incentivizes them to do the least for you they can get away with and punishes them for doing more. So by not taking advantage of collective bargaining (i.e. using the pressure of all employees to your advantage rather than just yours individually) you're leaving money on the table. Note that is still true if your role is proportionally overpaid relative to other workers in your company unless you literally co-own the company.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    > pay can never be enough because it is economically necessary to underpay workers relative to what they contribute because profit by definition can only exist from surplus value That's a silly definition of "enough" to label as a fact. I feel like the lifestyle you can buy with the pay matters too, but even if we ignore that aspect, I think most people will agree that the worker getting 90% of the surplus value is "enough". (just as an example percent) There's no reason the bar should be the absolute extreme.
- mrangle 3y ago
  It'll "never be enough" in the sense that there is a non-existent potential of higher wages to stop agitation for more money. Because there is no disincentive for labor to ever-advance the claim that their wages are enough. In addition, the incentive to ever-claim that wages are not enough is unable to be quneched due to the fact that there is no risk. That logic is what supports my point. The point can be proofed to economic mechanisms, as well. The exchange of money for goods naturally sets prices via an auction mechanism that, in turn, naturally creates an economic hierarchy in purchasing power. Which is a verbose way of saying that raising the wages of the working class, while periodically necessary, will always lead to rising prices to create relatively par pourchasing power over time. When speaking of wages, purchasing power is all that matters (assuming lack of debt). Artificially and dramatically forcing wages up only creates economic churn in job availability, housing equality, and asset ownership. All negative for the working class. If forces them into unemployment, out of urban centers, and creates firesale auctions for assets that wealthy people take advantage of. To make matters worse, the "forced equality" economics of communism are only feudalism in disguise (which is hidden on the balance sheet of the State and Feudal Lord). The closer that the working class gets to forced economic equality, the closer that they get to slavery. The storm that's coming is a cyclical return to various feudalists battling it out for workers who are paid the lowest possible wages and who have no labor protection. But on a wider scale than we are used to seeing. The problem with wage debates is that there is no solution aside from a delicate balance that is easily corruptable. In fact, its natural state is corrupt imbalance. This problem is unsolveable because it is inherent in the system of money.
  - mlrtime 3y ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted, this is all pretty clear. The storm may or may not come depending on how long your prediction time window is. In any of these discussions about wages and fairness, I wonder if the people with strong opinions have ever tried to hire unskilled labor.
6E696365 3y ago
Fascinating that you can see "underpaid" and "fair" wages as political myths but not "unskilled labor."
- tbrownaw 3y ago
  Are you saying that "unskilled labor" is like the other two in just being spin on "I don't approve of market forces"?
  - lnxg33k1 3y ago
    To me its funny that those who always talk about unskilled labour are the same who don’t have a driving licence, nor know how to make an omelette
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - hackernewds 3y ago
      What skills are required to drive, walk or bike a delivery to make $30+tips/hr in NYC? I don't think they literally mean "unskilled" vs "something that can be learned within a month".
      - lnxg33k1 3y ago
        Where are all these js devs on minimum wage going paycheck-to-paycheck? I think everything is easy, given the right approach and mindset, or everything is approachable given the right approach and mindset and will to put enough effort to get to a given outcome.
    - Almondsetat 3y ago
      Do you have any statistics on that?
- gruez 3y ago
  The concept of "underpaid" and "fair" wages is fundamentally subjective. Is a burger flipper underpaid because he cant raise a family a buy a house on that wage, "underpaid"? Or is his labor simply not that valuable? Is a techbro making $300k "underpaid" because his employer is making $500k off his work? On the other hand skilled vs unskilled labor, as well as the concept of human capital are well recognized concepts in economics.
tbrownaw 3y ago
Is Marx really that modern?
Spivak 3y ago
I mean it becomes a myth when you define it out of existence; I normally don't like semantic arguments but you're arguing against an idea of "underpaid" that means something different than what the people who say it are trying to convey. The notion of underpaid isn't weighed against the value of one's labor, it's weighed against cost of living and the value of one's time. We've generally decided it's unreasonable for someone to need to work more than 40 hours a week so the minimum pay for 160 hours of labor had better be enough to live on without being on welfare or other government assistance. It might not be a glamorous life but you at least have to be able to make rent, pay for heat, AC, food, clothes, water, toilet paper, health insurance, a cheap cell phone, transportation to and from work, and some basic possessions like a bed. And if it's not then you're being underpaid. I think that's a pretty fair measure, it roughly represents the cost of a person's undivided labor. And I think it's fair to say that for almost all Americans that cost has gone up and not insignificantly over the past 5 years. Folks that make good money by can take the hit but people on the bottom rung have nowhere to go. And people will given the opportunity begrudgingly sell their labor for unsustainable prices because it's better than nothing but that road leads to the record scratch in the economic game of musical chairs we're playing when money stops moving. And that's when Socialist-inspired policies we have kick in and gov't has to forcibly redistribute wealth through higher taxes and even greater government spending to start the motor again. We've done it before and I'm sure we'll do it again. But I'm of the opinion that a little regulation to keep us out of the death spiral and letting the market allocate resources is better than when the government has to step in and do it.
android521 3y ago
looking forward to a world where everyone anywhere can make a decent living wage. The technology and productivity have improved so much but the wealth inequalities have only grown wider. If AGI arrives and we have abundance, lets hope that it is not only the few elites that control all of that wealth and power.
phreeza 3y ago
A free market without political intervention is at least as much of a myth. If employees don't engage in politics with concepts like "fair wage" and "underpaid", employers certainly will with concepts such as "bottom quantile wages drive inflation". The Nash equilibrium is for both sides to engage in the market but also in the political context the market is embedded in. So complaining about workers demanding higher wages instead of letting the market sort it out is pointless, regardless of your political convictions.
- mrangle 3y ago
  I noted that there were two sides. Explaining it doesn't advance the conversation. "...in the political context the market is embedded in" is nonsense, especially when appealing to the "market sorting it out" in the next breath. Which argument are you recruting? Political intervention or the free market? Both? That's nice hand waving, no offense. Seemingly to make it as if your position is so elevated that it satisfies all political ideals. Instead, choose. Unless you mean to imply that the (free) market is also the political market. But your language should be a lot more precise if that's your point, so as to eliminate the look of vague line straddling as a rhetorical tactic. Your rebuttal over-simplifies my response and therefore seems like a word dump. Your view, absent your muddled (imo) rationale described above, is included in my response. The complicating factors were a). the common simultaneous advocacy for importing millions of unskilled workers and b.) the implied fact that increasing wages decreases available jobs. Those factors are included in my total "complaint" (observation). Which is not a "political conviction".
  - phreeza 3y ago
    Re-reading your comment I think we actually have the same understanding of the dynamic, I think I misread "immortal" as "immoral" before which gave the comment a quite different vibe. > "...in the political context the market is embedded in" is nonsense, especially when appealing to the "market sorting it out" in the next breath. I meant: complaining about (workers demanding higher wages instead of letting the market sort it out) is pointless Not: (complaining about workers demanding higher wages) instead of (letting the market sort it out) is pointless. Agreed my wording could have been more precise there.
tivert 3y ago
> "Underpaid" and "fair" is a modern political myth, except in the instances when there is a concerted effort to undermine the semi-natural labor market. No, and I'm guessing you're just under the spell of market fundamentalism. An unfair wage is something like when the worker either 1. can't achieve a socially-acceptable living standard with the job, 2. when there's too-great of a mismatch between the labor-theory-of-value price and the market-theory-of-value price for their labor, or 3. or when the wage is below the actual the market price. I made those up on the spot, so there may be some holes, bit it gets the gist. > Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact. Being underpaid is different than "wants more money." > It will always be "underpaid" and "unfair" in discussion. No. I'd never talk about a fortune 500 CEO or a FAANG engineer as being underpaid. > Yet the same people who demand that everyone earn a living wage, sometimes punctuating their points with riots, tend to be the same crowd who wants to import unskilled workers by the millions. I see what you're saying, but the real world is a lot more morally complicated that the single-axis world where your comment here makes sense.
- mrangle 3y ago
  Your "guess" before your arguments is a pointless jab and ploy to win a point without having yet said anything. If you think that accusing me of "being under the spell of market fundamentalism" is a succesful rhetorical strategy, then you neither understood my post nor are you worth arguing with. My comment was made in the context of mentioned complex factors that you are ommitting. Your 1 and 2 numbered responses are pure nonsense. Response 1 reveals to me who I am dealing with. This is going to go nowhere. Response 2 is ideological hand waving. 3 is true, but I included points that addressed it in my post. There is zero political (effective) difference in the labor market between being underpaid and wanting more money, if the ask is for more money. If they are truly underpaid, then they should ask for more money and get it. If they are not underpaid and ask for more money lest penalty x, then the market effect for employers is the same. A further problem, as illustrated by your definitions of underpayment with which I disagree, is who is to decide what being underpaid means? The answer to that question is that what constitutes underpayment will always be murky as far as the market is concerned and therefore, again, my point stands. Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact. >No. I'd never talk about a fortune 500 CEO or a FAANG engineer as being underpaid. "Never". That's a perfect example of the self-centered view of much of labor advocacy. Not only do they publicly only take the other side of the market into account when it opportunistically suits them (ie: when bucking for asset ownership or when owning assets themsevles), they have trouble comprehending how their own principles might scale to different skill levels in the labor pool. > I see what you're saying, but the real world is a lot more morally complicated that the single-axis world where your comment here makes sense. I disagree with your single-axis categorization. I disagree with the implication that this is largely a moral argument. I disagree with the assumption you would be able to make moral assertions that had any impact on the economic forces that determine pay and job availability, given the mentioned constraint (mass immigration). My original point is that the labor market will not be able to have it all. It has to choose, and clearly it has made its choice. But in its defense, the pro-labor market was co-opted generations ago by Business. That dissonance that you percieve and interpret as "moral complexity" is exactly their influence.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

FpUser 3y ago

With all the increased productivity and advances if we can't support decent living for every person then what's the point? Work yourself to death to make some motherfucker rich?

data_ders 3y ago

> Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact can you explain this a bit further please? also, what's the storm that's coming?

tru3_power 3y ago
Yeah you’re leaving us hanging here! To me it seems like people are learning their worth a little bit more lately and are demanding a little bit more/less financial stress.
- ghufran_syed 3y ago
  I took it to mean that whatever amount of money people currently think would be needed to be "fair", say, an increase from $20/hour to $25/hour, would within a year or so become "unfair" again, even if inflation was zero. Employers will always want more work for less money, employees will always want more money for less work. Same as the seller of any product would like more money for that product, and the buyer would always like to pay less for the same product. So you can say the company is "greedy"...but that implies that the worker is also "greedy" - which is true for both IF you define it the way I described above. Or you could say that the company (owners) are trying to maximize their return on investment (time + money), and the the workers are trying to maximize their return on investment (of time).
  - Barrin92 3y ago
    >Employers will always want more work for less money, employees will always want more money for less work. Same as the seller of any product would like more money for that product, Is that true though? I come from a family that works in the crafts, small business mostly (which is like 70% of businesses). Most employees are employed for life, what's being made generally costs a decent amount but quality is high, people are content when they make what's perceived as fair and enough to maintain a middle class lifestyle, and so on. Nobody actually tries to rip each other off, cuts every penny and leaves for 5% higher salaries. People are around for decades. The MBA business logic isn't some universal truth, in fact it's not even how most people work.
throwaway290 3y ago
Maybe that "storm" is consequences of unchecked ML, make the rich richer and the powerful more powerful, push the poor out of jobs. I disagree that fair pay is impossible though.
hnbad 3y ago
This isn't what they meant apparently but in a very literal sense, pay can never be enough because it is economically necessary to underpay workers relative to what they contribute because profit by definition can only exist from surplus value, i.e. making more money from selling the product of labor than you pay for that labor. If I pay a worker $20 per hour to make 20 doodads an hour in my doodad factory and then sell those doodads for $5 a piece, I make $5 for every $1 pay my worker. Of course that extra $4 per doodad has to account for the cost of the doodad factory itself (initial investment, maintenance, material) and the literal cost of doing business (taxes, permits, fees, paying an accountant) and of course market fluctuation (warehousing, building a financial buffer to remain solvent if sales lapse or production has to stop) but if the business is meant to be successful, that needs to add up to less than the extra $4 I'm making. And the bigger that difference is, the more profitable my company becomes and the more spare money I have to expand my business and get ahead of my competition up to the point where I can sell shares in my business to other people and pay dividends from my profits to them. So in other words not only can't you pay workers exactly "enough" (i.e. 100% of the value they contribute to the company) but you're actively incentivized to pay them as little as you can get away with (and perversely, paying them more by reducing your profit margin may actually be worse for them by making your company less competitive and less resilient). This is before we even get into the politics of what work is overvalued or undervalued (e.g. the idea that CEOs should receive massively disproportionate compensation for their labor, which again creates pressure to compensate for this by underpaying lowly workers). This, by the way, is why collective bargaining matters. No matter how cool and nice your employer is, the market actively incentivizes them to do the least for you they can get away with and punishes them for doing more. So by not taking advantage of collective bargaining (i.e. using the pressure of all employees to your advantage rather than just yours individually) you're leaving money on the table. Note that is still true if your role is proportionally overpaid relative to other workers in your company unless you literally co-own the company.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  > pay can never be enough because it is economically necessary to underpay workers relative to what they contribute because profit by definition can only exist from surplus value That's a silly definition of "enough" to label as a fact. I feel like the lifestyle you can buy with the pay matters too, but even if we ignore that aspect, I think most people will agree that the worker getting 90% of the surplus value is "enough". (just as an example percent) There's no reason the bar should be the absolute extreme.
mrangle 3y ago
It'll "never be enough" in the sense that there is a non-existent potential of higher wages to stop agitation for more money. Because there is no disincentive for labor to ever-advance the claim that their wages are enough. In addition, the incentive to ever-claim that wages are not enough is unable to be quneched due to the fact that there is no risk. That logic is what supports my point. The point can be proofed to economic mechanisms, as well. The exchange of money for goods naturally sets prices via an auction mechanism that, in turn, naturally creates an economic hierarchy in purchasing power. Which is a verbose way of saying that raising the wages of the working class, while periodically necessary, will always lead to rising prices to create relatively par pourchasing power over time. When speaking of wages, purchasing power is all that matters (assuming lack of debt). Artificially and dramatically forcing wages up only creates economic churn in job availability, housing equality, and asset ownership. All negative for the working class. If forces them into unemployment, out of urban centers, and creates firesale auctions for assets that wealthy people take advantage of. To make matters worse, the "forced equality" economics of communism are only feudalism in disguise (which is hidden on the balance sheet of the State and Feudal Lord). The closer that the working class gets to forced economic equality, the closer that they get to slavery. The storm that's coming is a cyclical return to various feudalists battling it out for workers who are paid the lowest possible wages and who have no labor protection. But on a wider scale than we are used to seeing. The problem with wage debates is that there is no solution aside from a delicate balance that is easily corruptable. In fact, its natural state is corrupt imbalance. This problem is unsolveable because it is inherent in the system of money.
- mlrtime 3y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted, this is all pretty clear. The storm may or may not come depending on how long your prediction time window is. In any of these discussions about wages and fairness, I wonder if the people with strong opinions have ever tried to hire unskilled labor.

6E696365 3y ago

Fascinating that you can see "underpaid" and "fair" wages as political myths but not "unskilled labor."

tbrownaw 3y ago
Are you saying that "unskilled labor" is like the other two in just being spin on "I don't approve of market forces"?
- lnxg33k1 3y ago
  To me its funny that those who always talk about unskilled labour are the same who don’t have a driving licence, nor know how to make an omelette
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - hackernewds 3y ago
    What skills are required to drive, walk or bike a delivery to make $30+tips/hr in NYC? I don't think they literally mean "unskilled" vs "something that can be learned within a month".
    - lnxg33k1 3y ago
      Where are all these js devs on minimum wage going paycheck-to-paycheck? I think everything is easy, given the right approach and mindset, or everything is approachable given the right approach and mindset and will to put enough effort to get to a given outcome.
  - Almondsetat 3y ago
    Do you have any statistics on that?
gruez 3y ago
The concept of "underpaid" and "fair" wages is fundamentally subjective. Is a burger flipper underpaid because he cant raise a family a buy a house on that wage, "underpaid"? Or is his labor simply not that valuable? Is a techbro making $300k "underpaid" because his employer is making $500k off his work? On the other hand skilled vs unskilled labor, as well as the concept of human capital are well recognized concepts in economics.

tbrownaw 3y ago

Is Marx really that modern?

Spivak 3y ago

I mean it becomes a myth when you define it out of existence; I normally don't like semantic arguments but you're arguing against an idea of "underpaid" that means something different than what the people who say it are trying to convey. The notion of underpaid isn't weighed against the value of one's labor, it's weighed against cost of living and the value of one's time. We've generally decided it's unreasonable for someone to need to work more than 40 hours a week so the minimum pay for 160 hours of labor had better be enough to live on without being on welfare or other government assistance. It might not be a glamorous life but you at least have to be able to make rent, pay for heat, AC, food, clothes, water, toilet paper, health insurance, a cheap cell phone, transportation to and from work, and some basic possessions like a bed. And if it's not then you're being underpaid. I think that's a pretty fair measure, it roughly represents the cost of a person's undivided labor. And I think it's fair to say that for almost all Americans that cost has gone up and not insignificantly over the past 5 years. Folks that make good money by can take the hit but people on the bottom rung have nowhere to go. And people will given the opportunity begrudgingly sell their labor for unsustainable prices because it's better than nothing but that road leads to the record scratch in the economic game of musical chairs we're playing when money stops moving. And that's when Socialist-inspired policies we have kick in and gov't has to forcibly redistribute wealth through higher taxes and even greater government spending to start the motor again. We've done it before and I'm sure we'll do it again. But I'm of the opinion that a little regulation to keep us out of the death spiral and letting the market allocate resources is better than when the government has to step in and do it.

android521 3y ago

looking forward to a world where everyone anywhere can make a decent living wage. The technology and productivity have improved so much but the wealth inequalities have only grown wider. If AGI arrives and we have abundance, lets hope that it is not only the few elites that control all of that wealth and power.

phreeza 3y ago

A free market without political intervention is at least as much of a myth. If employees don't engage in politics with concepts like "fair wage" and "underpaid", employers certainly will with concepts such as "bottom quantile wages drive inflation". The Nash equilibrium is for both sides to engage in the market but also in the political context the market is embedded in. So complaining about workers demanding higher wages instead of letting the market sort it out is pointless, regardless of your political convictions.

mrangle 3y ago
I noted that there were two sides. Explaining it doesn't advance the conversation. "...in the political context the market is embedded in" is nonsense, especially when appealing to the "market sorting it out" in the next breath. Which argument are you recruting? Political intervention or the free market? Both? That's nice hand waving, no offense. Seemingly to make it as if your position is so elevated that it satisfies all political ideals. Instead, choose. Unless you mean to imply that the (free) market is also the political market. But your language should be a lot more precise if that's your point, so as to eliminate the look of vague line straddling as a rhetorical tactic. Your rebuttal over-simplifies my response and therefore seems like a word dump. Your view, absent your muddled (imo) rationale described above, is included in my response. The complicating factors were a). the common simultaneous advocacy for importing millions of unskilled workers and b.) the implied fact that increasing wages decreases available jobs. Those factors are included in my total "complaint" (observation). Which is not a "political conviction".
- phreeza 3y ago
  Re-reading your comment I think we actually have the same understanding of the dynamic, I think I misread "immortal" as "immoral" before which gave the comment a quite different vibe. > "...in the political context the market is embedded in" is nonsense, especially when appealing to the "market sorting it out" in the next breath. I meant: complaining about (workers demanding higher wages instead of letting the market sort it out) is pointless Not: (complaining about workers demanding higher wages) instead of (letting the market sort it out) is pointless. Agreed my wording could have been more precise there.

tivert 3y ago

> "Underpaid" and "fair" is a modern political myth, except in the instances when there is a concerted effort to undermine the semi-natural labor market. No, and I'm guessing you're just under the spell of market fundamentalism. An unfair wage is something like when the worker either 1. can't achieve a socially-acceptable living standard with the job, 2. when there's too-great of a mismatch between the labor-theory-of-value price and the market-theory-of-value price for their labor, or 3. or when the wage is below the actual the market price. I made those up on the spot, so there may be some holes, bit it gets the gist. > Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact. Being underpaid is different than "wants more money." > It will always be "underpaid" and "unfair" in discussion. No. I'd never talk about a fortune 500 CEO or a FAANG engineer as being underpaid. > Yet the same people who demand that everyone earn a living wage, sometimes punctuating their points with riots, tend to be the same crowd who wants to import unskilled workers by the millions. I see what you're saying, but the real world is a lot more morally complicated that the single-axis world where your comment here makes sense.

mrangle 3y ago
Your "guess" before your arguments is a pointless jab and ploy to win a point without having yet said anything. If you think that accusing me of "being under the spell of market fundamentalism" is a succesful rhetorical strategy, then you neither understood my post nor are you worth arguing with. My comment was made in the context of mentioned complex factors that you are ommitting. Your 1 and 2 numbered responses are pure nonsense. Response 1 reveals to me who I am dealing with. This is going to go nowhere. Response 2 is ideological hand waving. 3 is true, but I included points that addressed it in my post. There is zero political (effective) difference in the labor market between being underpaid and wanting more money, if the ask is for more money. If they are truly underpaid, then they should ask for more money and get it. If they are not underpaid and ask for more money lest penalty x, then the market effect for employers is the same. A further problem, as illustrated by your definitions of underpayment with which I disagree, is who is to decide what being underpaid means? The answer to that question is that what constitutes underpayment will always be murky as far as the market is concerned and therefore, again, my point stands. Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact. >No. I'd never talk about a fortune 500 CEO or a FAANG engineer as being underpaid. "Never". That's a perfect example of the self-centered view of much of labor advocacy. Not only do they publicly only take the other side of the market into account when it opportunistically suits them (ie: when bucking for asset ownership or when owning assets themsevles), they have trouble comprehending how their own principles might scale to different skill levels in the labor pool. > I see what you're saying, but the real world is a lot more morally complicated that the single-axis world where your comment here makes sense. I disagree with your single-axis categorization. I disagree with the implication that this is largely a moral argument. I disagree with the assumption you would be able to make moral assertions that had any impact on the economic forces that determine pay and job availability, given the mentioned constraint (mass immigration). My original point is that the labor market will not be able to have it all. It has to choose, and clearly it has made its choice. But in its defense, the pro-labor market was co-opted generations ago by Business. That dissonance that you percieve and interpret as "moral complexity" is exactly their influence.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]