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But then any company willing to pay a decent price would instantly have their pick of anyone in the workforce. It's called supply and demand. If there's no dem
by benaiah 14y ago
But then any company willing to pay a decent price would instantly have their pick of anyone in the workforce.
It's called supply and demand. If there's no demand for cheap laborers, the answer is not to make them more expensive to hire, or to force companies to pay them a minimum. That just exacerbates the problem - now they can't even work for wages they might be able to be worth. It's very difficult to get better at a job unless you're either working at it or have the resources to do it in your free time. Someone who can't get a minimum wage job probably doesn't have the resources to learn the skills to move up.
I can personally attest that it's not just teenagers trying to find minimum wage jobs. I am a teenager, and I while I was looking for a summer job (I'm now employed as a software consultant) I was regularly (i.e., every single time) competing with people in their 20s or even, in some cases, older than that, who were simply unable to find work elsewhere.
- EricDeb 14y agoA minimum wage affords unskilled workers some amount of time to learn new skills or improve their lot in life. An unskilled worker who has to work 18 hours a day at $2 an hour to make ends meet will never be able to learn new skills and claw their way out of that hole. It's the same with unemployment benefits - it affords citizens time to learn new skills without worrying about what they will eat that night.
- chii 14y agoperhaps unemployment benefits should give food and other basic necessities in the form of vouchers, and force the benefit taker to take (gov't provided) classes that will reskill them. This way, they can either look for a real job to earn cash, instead of living on "vouchers/food tickets", or have to take classes to reskill/up-skill. They won't be battling for their next meal, but they also can't have leasure time.