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Comment by mm321 | Hacker News Reader

>"The right to turn down a job is essential for a well functioning labor market, and for a civilized society. And to have that right, a genuine right, to turn down a job, you must have an alternative: An outside option. Because desperate people will accept to do desperate things..."

i think it will bring downs the salary for a number of professions - why bother to pay when you can get volunteers on basic income for free?

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It also increases the salary for other professions. Who wants to clean toilets for minimum wage if basic income is an alternative.

Isn't it part of the point with basic income in that it doesn't disappear if you have a job?

The choices would be "basic income" vs "minimum wage + basic income".

There is also the fact that there is no inherent reason why toilet washers should have minimum wage. It's exactly because of economic uncertainty among the lower class that they can be coerced into accepting such sub-par situations such as doing an undesired job at low wage, when it's more logical that an undesired job should offer more pay than a desirable job.

Well, from one point of view, cleaning toilet can be a very desirable job because of one fundamental property: you need no prior training!

Yes, cleaning toilet is awful, but investing years of your life into a degree before being able to apply is a considerable price, too.

You want to have your cake and eat it too.

Either the required training is enough of a disincentive to make the Job Undesirable... and pay high. Or it's not.

Required training is not likely to be so scarce when people can chose to train without risking starvation or surviving on 4 hours of sleep a night.

Which is the real problem most of those with "training" fear. It's devaluation when even poor people can get it without Herculean efforts.

I was just giving my two cents about why "undesirable" jobs usually offer low wages. By the way, I see your point with devaluation. Personally, I'm in favor of offering everybody the possibility to study, without depending on the wealth of their parent.

Great, so we will see highly trained people cleaning toilets, because they happen to need some money and cleaning toilets pays better than the jobs that they were trained to do.

And? What's the problem?

I see it as a net positive for society. If someone wants to clean toilets, they can do so. Right now, the people who clean our toilets might not want to do it. They are forced.

The "non-highly-trained" people can spend their time to get "highly trained", since they're not locked in to cleaning toilets anymore.

How is this a worse scenario than the one we have now?

The highly trained of today fear the devaluation of their training. They would like to keep their relatively advantaged position, they are the ones with something to lose.

> The highly trained of today fear the devaluation of their training.

Also the devaluation of training would create another disincentive that would keep some people from acquiring training in the first place. Don't know if society would benefit from this result, I think it wouldn't.

>Also the devaluation of training would create another disincentive that would keep some people from acquiring training in the first place.

Then having that training, if anyone actually needed it, would be a highly valuable trait.

I don't see how this is different from the rest of society. "Cleaning toilets" sounds like it lacks dignity, but to an art history major "social media marketing" or "event planning" might feel like cleaning toilets.

We all make compromises.

Dignity is stupid anyways (https://newrepublic.com/article/64674/the-stupidity-dignity ).

We all want clean toilets and most of us want to respect the health and dignity of others. Therefore we'll continue to see technological advancement in cleaning supplies, dirt resistant materails, and eventually automation. That's the whole basis of BI, at least for the techno optimists. Most janitors will just retire early, but some might discover new applications for their know-how, and we'll all benefit.

What job is currently well paid that you would do for free?

and that includes the shitty parts of the job: commuting, paperwork, emails, on call rotations?, dealing with vendors, dealing with customer complaints, etc etc.

well yeah, but why is that a problem?

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