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The teenage girls behind a $25 minimum wage fight in rural Alaska
- tt24 2mo agoWhat do minimum wage supporters expect to happen with people whose labor does not produce >= $minimum_wage worth of value?
- expedition32 2mo agoI remember when Uber was cheap. Then they weren't and people went back to walking and cycling. Americans wouldn't get it.
- harvey9 2mo agoIf you read the article you would know it is literally about Americans who walk to work in the snow because they can't afford gas.
- yeah879846 2mo ago[dead]
- TheSamFischer 2mo ago> whose labor does not produce >= $minimum_wage worth of value Same thing we’ve been doing for other fields like software engineers - just pay them more.
- AnimalMuppet 2mo agoI presume that was sarcasm, given how much trouble people are having finding software engineering jobs at the moment...
- TheSamFischer 2mo agoIt’s not the ability to find jobs. It’s the ratio of pay to value delivered. Nearly every app or website I use today is broken, slow or hostile to the user. Show me the value for the pay.
- harvey9 2mo agoIf bad software still generates revenue, that's the value. I'm speaking as someone who has used awful software that some ignorant boss bought for our organisation.
- dwroberts 2mo agoWhat about people receiving astronomically high wages that vastly outstrip their labour value?
- hnfong 2mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- downrightmike 2mo agoSmall minds think alike
- astr0n0m3r 2mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
- dwroberts 2mo agoThe thing is, what I’m asking about is not unrelated. It is the inverse situation - which curiously nobody seems to care about. And I say ‘curiously’ with some sarcasm, because it is very obvious why the focus is always disproportionately on needing to justify minimum wages for the poor, normally with ridiculous economic value arguments, but not extreme wages for anyone else - which is apparently fine and has zero negative consequences
- tt24 2mo agoIt's pretty simple - it doesn't bother me if a company decides to pay a worker a lot of money. They could decide to pay their CEO a trillion dollars and it would have zero effect on me. However, the government mandating a certain wage has a tremendous effect on me.
- hn_acker 2mo ago> They could decide to pay their CEO a trillion dollars and it would have zero effect on me. > However, the government mandating a certain wage has a tremendous effect on me. "the government mandating a certain wage" is the definition of minimum wage in this thread. If you are not a minimum wage worker and would not become a minimum wage worker after an increase in the minimum wage, why and how does that have an effect on you, and why would an increase in an executive's salary (multiple orders of magnitude more than minimum wage, and annually increasing in orders-of-magnitude higher dollar amounts than minimum wages do) not have a similar or greater effect on you?
- sapphicsnail 2mo agoIf a business can't pay it's employees enough to live on it shouldn't survive.
- mbmbn 2mo ago[dead]
- astr0n0m3r 2mo agoThis suggests that a person below this threshold would be entirely dependent on a social safety net (family, government, charity), instead of having a job with a partial dependency.
- tt24 2mo agoHow does this statement relate to my comment?
- joquarky 2mo agoYou've now posted this same comment multiple times within this same thread. It's becoming apparent that comprehension is a you problem.
- tt24 2mo agoThen it should be pretty easy to explain right? I’ve seen the same reply to my comment multiple times. Each time it has nothing to do with what I said. I made no claim regarding businesses surviving or not surviving. Why do people keep replying the same thing?
- defrost 2mo agoMaybe look to the economic hell hole of Australia that's had a minimum wage linked to living standards for 120 year now. If a business isn't structured to pay external staff the minimum hourly wage in exchange for what they are expected to do in an hour, that's tough. If people are unable to genuinely find a job in exchange for what they can do by their best efforts in an hour then they can apply for assistance.
- Blazara 2mo agoLabour theory of value should first be applied to management staff who produce nothing of value before employees that at least contribute something.
- tt24 2mo ago> management staff who produce nothing of value Interesting, first I'm hearing of this idea. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - do you have evidence to support this?
- BugsJustFindMe 2mo agotl;dr: Every minimum-wage supporter would actually be fine with the extremely reasonable position of paying everyone in proportion to the replaceability of their actual work and then letting businesses that don't know how to provide value just go out of business. Raising the wage floor is just an imperfect-but-actionable proxy for that because nobody is willing to honestly explore curbing the excesses of the executive and investor classes. > "What do minimum wage supporters expect to happen with people whose labor does not produce >= $minimum_wage worth of value?" Can I assume that you're referring to the executives? Just kidding. Of course you aren't. You can either mandate that people get paid commensurately with the difficulty of replacing their actual labor (as opposed to merely of their position[0]) or you can raise the floor and hope that it approximately achieves something close enough, but you must pick one. [0]: The position of CEO of a company has great value, someone needs to make those decisions. But the actual labor of a CEO can often be trivially done by even the least intelligent and least motivated employee. They are eminently replaceable. And yet the CEO gets paid in proportion to the position rather than their labor. Right now executive pay is artificially high relative to their actual labor as "the cost of doing business" and laborer pay is artificially low relative to their actual labor as "the way to stay in business". Why does that seem ok?
- tt24 2mo ago> Can I assume that you're referring to the executives? Of course not, why would I be? I don't mind if a company decides to pay their employees a lot. In fact, I'd prefer companies pay their employees a lot!
- GarnetFloride 2mo ago"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." -A Christmas Carol (1843) The whole point of civilization is to help people. If a business cannot support civilization, then why should it continue to exist?
- tt24 2mo ago> If a business cannot support civilization, then why should it continue to exist? Sorry, how does this relate to my comment?
- GarnetFloride 2mo agoCivilization occurs when one person helps another who cannot help themselves. That's a simple definition, but it should suffice for this discussion. Your original comment was what to do about those people whose labour does not equal or exceed the minimum wage value. In everything I have read and all the people I have talked to about this, after sufficient questioning, the answer always seems to end up being murdering the poor. Oh, it's never going out and killing them personally. Oh no, that would be terrible, it's always destroy support systems and flooding the market with cheap but eventually deadly substances of varying sorts, so it's always at second hand. Yet on the other hand I have seen so many companies damaged and even destroyed by someone whose economic value is extremely negative, but somehow spins it as a good thing and so walks away with big paychecks and fat bonuses and go on to another company to do it again. I saw a PM so thoroughly mess up that they made it impossible for the company to provide software licenses to their customers. Managements response was not to fix the broken spreadsheet, oh no, that would be the smart thing to do. No, it was to lay people off because revenue was down. It was like selling cars but never giving the customer the keys to drive off. Who would actually finish the transaction? But hey, he's are an executive, so it's fine when he destroys tens or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of customer revenue. Now, that teenage girl trying to feed, house and transport herself, now she deserves to have her every action, interaction and off-duty thought scrutinized at the nano level because how dare she want to live a life worth living when her parents aren't already rich? I remember when a fast-food place was staffed with a dozen people and the food was good and was actually delivered quickly. Now it's just a couple and it takes forever to get through the drive-thru to get food that poisons you. At least corporate is posting record profits again. It's not that the girl at the drive-thru isn't generating huge profits, she and all of them very much are. It's that someone else has decided that she doesn't deserve to participate in the rewards of those profits. I always get the feel that they are so disappointed that slavery is mostly illegal. So many systems have been put in place to suck all the money off the table so it becomes more and more expensive to survive, minimum wage was an attempt to protect people, that is what a functional civilization does. So back to civilization, people come together to share resources, so people can support each other. Some people think they are special. They treat people as things and that is the problem. When people are things, they become disposable, and that is wrong.
- conception 2mo agoI haven’t seen an actual answer to your comment and it seems simple to me - if they cannot provide that value then society provides it to them so they do not have to live in slavery or abject poverty. UBI, minimum wage, earned income credit or what have you. Greed is the only reason humanity accepts poverty - we were well on our way to solving it in fact.
- eudamoniac 2mo agoThank you for having the conviction and presence of mind to actually answer the question. I don't know if I agree with your solution being a net good, but juxtaposed against the other replies here I am glad you gave a reasoned response.
- EdwardDiego 2mo agoI expect their employers to go out of business because their business model is predicated on paying workers as little as possible and not investing in things that improve productivity per worker. If you think this will lead to large scale unemployment, you're wrong. It might, however, lead to exploitative employers going out of business, but alternatively, and hopefully, seeing the light and investing in productivity improvements. Let me put it this way - the USA's (Land Of The Free, and the Criminally Underpaid) unemployment rate is near identical to the Norwegian unemployment rate, so obviously the American should-be-criminal low (well, it would be criminal in a sane society not captured by the owners) minimum wage isn't exactly the magic "everyone gets a job" juice you obviously think it is. And to prëempt you, yeah yeah, you're "just asking questions" even though you have an incredibly obvious pre-existing belief that you never explicitly identify upfront because it makes you feel clever or whatever the hell wee kick you get out of this attempt at sophistry.
- eudamoniac 2mo agoWow, the responses to your comment are maybe the worst set of responses I've ever seen on this website. Only one person answered you. I don't understand how the rest can hold their positions and not have an immediate answer to your question, which is obvious and fundamental to the situation. I'm actually disturbed.
- tt24 2mo agoWeird right? People’s brains seem to just turn off when this topic comes up. I’m used to it and even find it enjoyable at this point
- hn_acker 2mo agoWould you mind telling us what you expect to happen and why? What assumptions/definitions are you making with the words "does not produce" >= $minimum_wage "worth of value"? Do you assume that most businesses keep a significant number of such people around, and if so why? Otherwise, why would raising the minimum wage have a significant effect on the business's financial survivability? In a country with a default of "at-will' employment, if business executives truly from the bottom of their hearts do not believe that a worker is worth the cost of keeping, then (1) the business should let go of the worker, (2) the business has otherwise unprofitable aspects (why should the minimum wage, as opposed to e.g. the highest discretionary wages, bear the burden of compensating for those otherwise unprofitable aspects?), or (3) the business does not deserve to stay in business.
- bell-cot 2mo agoNot to cast a shadow over this effort, but it sounds like rural Alaska could use some well-planned gov't programs to reduce the basic cost of living for everyone. Is anyone here familiar, to comment?
- klardotsh 2mo agoThe problem with doing that in Alaska is that there is not really a funding source for… anything. No income tax, typically little to no sales tax, low property taxes… the state’s other income source is a tax on the oil companies that drill and export from Alaska, which gets turned into the quasi-mini-UBI Public Fund Dividend.
- walrus01 2mo agoAlaska has generally two categories of places. Nome, mentioned in the URL, is a fly-in community that can receive barge shipments on the ocean during a short summer season. There is literally no road that goes there. Not that cost of living is cheap in the rest of Alaska but the fly-in dependent communities are a whole other thing than the places that have a road ultimately connected to the Yukon, BC and the rest of continental north america by road. The transport costs to get just about anything to the fly in communities is similar to Nunavut. Plenty of examples in Canadian media of $29 bottles of orange juice and similar.
- rahimnathwani 2mo agoOr the people who don't like living in a remote area with high prices could choose to move somewhere else? The US is huge.
- downrightmike 2mo agoBut there are people there
- walrus01 2mo agoNome, Alaska is a majority indigenous community as are many fly-in towns in Alaska, so you're basically saying something as tone-deaf as "why don't the indigenous people just abandon the place they've lived for thousands of years just because "modern" settled life showed up in the form of the United States of America". Yeah, it's costly and difficult to live there, but that's their home.
- Neywiny 2mo agoNeeds to be dynamic. Maybe it's too hard for politicians to understand, but it needs to be tied to something. We can't keep raising it every few years to an absolute amount. This is a good start and I wish them the best but it's short term thinking like every other one of these bills. I also think it's weird to use the living wage as a basis since they'll only make it up to that number in 6 years?
- gamblor956 2mo ago$25 is difficult to manage even in California, with millions of customers. I can't see how its economically feasible in Alaska.