reagan-was-a-horrible-president:
I honestly don’t understand why there aren’t more people who, when given the platform to discuss minimum wage, don’t simply distill it to the simplest of facts:
- A forty hour work week is considered full time.
- It’s considered as such because it takes up the amount of time we as a society have agreed should be considered the maximum work schedule required of an employee. (this, of course, does not always bear out practically, but just follow me here)
- A person working the maximum amount of time required should earn enough for that labor to be able to survive. Phrased this way, I doubt even most conservatives could effectively argue against it, and out of the mouth of someone verbally deft enough to dance around the pathos-based jabs conservative pundits like to use to avoid actually debating, it could actually get opps thinking.
- Therefore, if an employee is being paid less than [number of dollars needed for the post-tax total to pay for the basic necessities in a given area divided by forty] per hour, they are being ripped off and essentially having their labor, productivity, and profit generation value stolen by their employer.
- Wages are a business expense, and if a company cannot afford to pay for its labor, it is by definition a failing business. A company stealing labor to stay afloat (without even touching those that do so simply to increase profit margins and/or management/executive pay/bonuses) is no more ethical than a failing construction company breaking into a lumber yard and stealing wood.
- Our goal as a society should be to protect each other, especially those that most need protection, not to subsidize failing businesses whose owners could quite well subsidize them on their own.
- Wages are a business expense, and if a company cannot afford to pay for its labor, it is by definition a failing business. A company stealing labor to stay afloat (without even touching those that do so simply to increase profit margins and/or management/executive pay/bonuses) is no more ethical than a failing construction company breaking into a lumber yard and stealing wood.
… Wouldn’t the metaphor be “company finds a cheaper lumber supplier”? And if a lumber company thinks they aren’t being paid enough for their lumber, they raise the price. What you probably don’t want to do it pass a law declaring a minimum lumber price.
My true objection is that minimum wage does not appear to do the thing that it is supposed to do, namely improve the well being of poor people - studies usually show extremely marginal positive effects at best, and often show no effect or slightly negative effect. We’ll have better data on this when Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has been going for a few years, but I’m willing to bet at generous odds that it shows no significant effect on poverty, and slightly less confident that it will have damaging effects on economic opportunities for the working poor. Would be awesome to be wrong.
To OP: “facts”. You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Like, number 3 isn’t even an “is”. It’s an ought - an unsubstantiated one at that. I mean, you can turn an ought into an instrumental value of mine by linking it to a terminal value I have, but just bluntly asserting it? Uh, noooo.
And 4 doesn’t actually follow logically from 1-3, even if we assume 1-3 are sound. It’s skipping steps. You need some premise somewhere if you want to define theft as “purchasing a service at a rate I disapprove of”. Like, what even is this?
5) This business would be failing to pay its labour if the price of its labour increased, the same way Starbucks might fail if the price of coffee beans skyrocketed. However, even if you think coffee beans must ethically cost 5x as much as they currently do, that doesn’t mean you can declare Starbucks a failure based on your hypothetical costs that the market is not, in fact, imposing. The appropriate comparison isn’t a company breaking into a warehouse to steal lumber or coffee, but them finding a new, cheaper supplier. Claiming theft and trade are equivalent is disgusting.
6) You don’t give someone a gift by refraining from stealing from them. Likewise, you don’t subsidise a business by failing to increase the costs it has to deal with.
I don’t think I’d describe myself as anti-minimum wage, but I hate shitty arguments.
Here’s the missing steps:
- The government has also prohibited homeseading, or otherwise reverting to peasentry or a hunter-gatherer lifestyle(which you might prefer to working for minimum wage)
- Absent money, in the USA, you will eventually starve, steal and be imprisoned, or poach and be imprisoned.
- Those who are not supported by others, and do not wish to starve or be imprisoned must therefore work for some kind of wage.
- The government has explictly prohibited most forms of collective labor action and mutual aid. (compare restrictions on employeers in the FLSA vs restrictions on Union in Taft-Hartly)
- Therefore: unskilled unsupported individuals who do not wish to starve negotate their wages under this metaphorical ‘gun to the head’ and are unlikely to be able to secure the actual fair market value of their labor.
Since we do not hold contracts made under coercion to be valid, it is fair to say that such employment arrangements are likely invalid, or only partly valid.
It’s like they are “stealing” the difference in the employees freely negotiated wage and the minimum that they actually get because of the above.
Note: IMO the solution is a UBI, or partial repeal of Taft-Hartly particularly permitting sympathy strikes again. McDonalds would get thier shit together quite quick if enough teamsters refused to handle their cargo until they were paying a living wage, or providing stable schedules.
I had no idea about the provisions of Taft-Hartly. Wow.
Wow indeed, but in both directions. Labor relations as a whole is just an obscene mess of could we just get all this headhurty thing over with asap and into a nigh-post-scarcity society of free necessities for everyone pretty please. Take away union powers, you get employers kicking workers in the head systematically. Give unions power, you get redwashed rentiers holding the economy by the metaphorical testicles and abusing that power for all they’ve got and kicking the precariat and everyone else in the head.
In 2010 roughly a thousand stevedores, making an average of twice the median wage, caused a measurable dent in the GDP of Finland because they wanted their employers to pay one year’s wages (two years of median wage, mind you, and that would’ve been on top of the already existing 500 days of relatively generous unemployment benefits only people in middle-class jobs get) in severance benefits to laid-off workers. The damages to the economy were estimated to have been in excess of a hundred million euros a day, or in other words every striking stevedore hurt others in a day more than they themselves earned in two years. On the other hand, nurses typically earn only a bit above median in a job that’s arguably just as rough and demanding and important to get right. What do stevedores do that justifies their position, other than hold the capital of an immense extortion power, safeguarded by the regulatory capture of labor laws?
A living wage should not be the responsibility of employers. The responsibility of employers should be to pay what they’ve promised in exchange for workers doing the work they’ve promised, with reasonable occupational safety etc., and nothing more. If we want people to not starve to death we give them money instead of trying to make someone else give them money. This is the original sin of social democracy: trying to turn employment from an exchange of labor for money into comprehensive cradle-to-grave caretaking for those privileged enough to have it, subsequently creating an ever expanding underclass of lumpenproletariat which has fallen through the widening cracks of the system.
I actually have some idea what I’m talking about. If I wanted to work in Finland inside the regular system I’d easily lose 60% of my wages or more, a substantial fraction of it into various unfair schemes I never consented to. Pensions? Born after 1980, never going to see a single cent of them anyway; the singularity has to be my retirement plan because there isn’t any alternative. Unemployment insurance? Why the hell would I deserve to get more than someone else today just because I got some yesterday too, and why the hell should I pay it for anyone else? If I got sick or pregnant my employer would have to pay for it. With exactly the effects on women’s and chronically ill people’s employability and the survival of unlucky small businesses one would predict. Then I’d also be subject to various regulations “for my own good” just because someone else doing kind of similar work somewhere else some time ago thought it was a brilliant idea. Clock cards and regimented working hours for startup programmers? Yes, they actually do think it’s a brilliant idea. That’s why I’m getting the hell out of there.
Nobody should have a metaphorical gun to their head. Not even employers. With the burden of socialdemocratic welfare systems placed squarely, unpredictably and arbitarily upon them, no wonder they respond to incentives by weaseling their way out of everything they can by exploiting temporary workers, discriminating on a demographic basis, etc.; I for one definitely wouldn’t want to be an employer in such a system. There are so much better ways of achieving the desired goals and I very much support many of those goals and I could do so much better if I was just allowed to opt out of the social bureaucracy to implement it without the obscene side effects. (If one suspects capitalism of being cynically rigged to benefit privileged classes so that oppression is an intended result instead of an unfortunate side-effect I see only one reason to not extend that exact suspicion to social democracy as well and that is identifying oneself as a beneficiary of the latter’s oppressiveness; a group that I’d like to remind everyone has been constantly shrinking for at least the last 25 years!)
Socialize the robots instead of strangling their makers in red tape. Social democracy directly favors big corporations, established capital and politically connected labor tyrants while throwing underclasses, both domestic and global, and innovative and disruptive makers alike under the bus. And that’s possibly one of the greatest mistakes a present-day system can make. Makers tend to be a distinctly different breed from the people who thrive in climbing established hierarchies. Much more prosocial and vulnerable to compromising their class interests with altruistic idealism and more interested in genuinely creating value than just cynically capturing as much of it as possible; that’s the exact type of people ardent anticapitalists should try to populate the ranks of the global elite with, and they’d very much be doing it themselves if they were just given the opportunity! The ADHD (I’m diagnosed) inventors who couldn’t care less about class warfare because there’s so much cool shit to tinker with and where did all this money suddenly come from and whoops did we accidentally just destroy several established giants full of cynical climbers and zero-sum exploiters nah whatever let’s just throw this money at doing cool and altruistic shit that’s never going to make a profit because we’re already set up for several posthuman lifetimes and it’s not like we could safeguard our position against the next disruption when someone comes up with better shit anyway.
Protect the little people (this is the part where I insert the mandatory UBI mention; minimum wages and other social bureaucracies just lumpen the proletariat) and stop fucking propping up the old titans and just let the whiz kids take them out while their (our) built-in vulnerabilities and a constantly changing landscape give you openings for your revolution if you want one because that’s the only way you’ll ever get one. Or alternatively someone invents an open source replicator and disrupts scarcity and makes money mostly obsolete and nobody at the top cares because they’re too busy slingshotting asteroids into mars to impress their buddies and it’s not like they could reliably suppress it if they tried anyway. People and systems respond to incentives, seize control of the incentive landscape to manipulate them where you want. And if you don’t think the left could succeed at something novel and unexpected that has never been tried, how the hell could they instead succeed at something everyone knows to brace against and which has a proven track record of never having succeeded sustainably despite repeated attempts? If someone came up with a startup idea that could be summarized as “pets.com, except it’s going to be different this time I swear” any VC worth their salt would laugh them out of the room.
4 months ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower #future precariat billionaire #i am worst capitalist #boxes don't work · 82,147 notes · source: steviemcfly · .permalink
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