If a company is paying so little that the government has to step in and give them extra money just so they can pay the rent and eat, then that effectively means my tax dollars are subsidizing their wage.
This attitude allows Amazon to pay less than a living wage. The winner of SNAP isn't the person receiving SNAP, it's the person's employer which is allowed to pay their employees less. My tax dollars aren't subsidizing the employee, they're subsidizing Amazon.
If the market value of labor has fallen below the threshold needed to live an acceptable (as judged by society) lifestyle, the burden of making up the difference should fall on society -- not arbitrarily on the companies which happen to do business in industries whose jobs require essentially no skills to perform.
Hypothetically speaking, if Google automated away 50M tedious and repetitive "white collar" jobs and those 50M workers are now competing for warehouse jobs, why must warehouse operators' pay a living wage while Google pays nothing for putting 50M workers out on the street?
The burden of caring for society's poor must fall on society. As it was society's technological innovation and policy decisions (i.e. globalization of labor markets) that has led to the destruction of unskilled labor's market value.
> why must warehouse operators' pay a living wage
because if they don't then their warehouses get shutdown and anyone they try to bring in faces large men with bats.
and if you don't like that future, then start protecting unions before it turns into riots again.
https://www.thenation.com/article/lessons-death-seattles-ama...
> Hypothetically speaking, if Google automated away 50M tedious and repetitive "white collar" jobs and those 50M workers are now competing for warehouse jobs, why must warehouse operators' pay a living wage while Google pays nothing for putting 50M workers out on the street? [...] The burden of caring for society's poor must fall on society.
Society should assist the unemployed. I am in favor of UBI.
But if a job pays so little that you still need assistance to pay rent and eat, then why work?
In other words, if I had no skills, and "society" was giving me $25k/year to live off of, and some company is only willing to pay me $20k/year to do a job, I'd have zero incentive to take that job.
Another counter-point I thought of is that if the assistance does go away, and so people wouldn't have incentive to work for less than what UBI provides, it would incentivize companies to pay more.
This seems to be a common fallacy, because people call it the 'labor market'. However I would claim that there is no labor market in the classical econ 101 sense.
A market needs to be transparent, have low transaction costs, be voluntary and have a sufficient number of buyers and sellers.
Otherwise you might still call it a market but it will not have any magical properties that the government shouldn't mess with.
For the most part, having a job is a requirement to have a place to live and eat.