Yep. Every time people say "Americans don't want to do these jobs" or anything else suggesting that there is a labor shortage in some sector I always mentally append the phrase "at the price you want to pay".
Around the city I live in, the past 6 months wages have started to increase a bit, some chain restaurants now have banners out front "starting at $12/hour". Many places are short staffed and lose business because of it.
Problem is, the living wage here has increased to around $23 / hour.
I'm sure you could live in one of the slums for less, and you could be on the section 8 waiting list for 2 years hoping to live for less if you can couch surf and bridge sleep while waiting...
mit's living wage calc says an adult can living wage here for $11.24 / hour - I've tried to help people find cheap housing options in town several times the past two years and I just don't see how those numbers work out.
The calculator says 1 adult 1 child, $22.77 per hour - that seems more doable, although I think most people living here would be spending much more than $11,508 on housing, so at that rate they would be sacrificing healthcare and probably transportation or whatever to make it work.
People don't want to work full time and not be able to afford basic necessities.
Another problem is so many jobs say they drug test, but there is (at least not that I have found yet) not a job listing site or category for "Smiling faces" aka 'we don't test for weed in your system as long as you toke at home and don't show up with red eyes / moving slow with a bag of chips in hand.'
So yeah, try paying more for sure. Get more realistic with labeling jobs.
In some cases making transportation free would get you some excellent workers who can't afford $20 per day for ubers but want to work further from their apartment where you job is.
I've watched many here struggle to find rides to work and jobs that are $5 or under for uber to get there.
There is more that can be done for sure. As so many places try to not pay well, I see more and more that are closed when they should be open, or running slow and losing business because they are short staffed.
Certainly steak and shake could pay $20 an hour for third shift workers if it meant they could stay open and make many times that.
Things I've been noticing in this growing city are not indicative of the whole country / world - so whatever bias yeah I know.
Slums in the US can be fine. If it's just surface level disrepair that's fine. The real issue is cultural, especially if you have kids.
You haven't said which city you're in, but I think the number of cities in the US where it wouldn't be possible to live alone on $25,000 a year is actually quite low.
Living for years by skipping oil changes, hair cuts, dental health, bald tires, all those things - not good for the family or the community really, but it can be done.
Not sure how long ago it was for you and where, but I know that things are harder today money wise than they were when I was growing up, in several ways. Aside from gas being under $1 / gallon and food prices and such being different, there was not the need for broadband internet and some other modern day "staples" -
without getting into a debate about the need for $200/mth cable not being a need, and other things, the divide has greater effects socially / in schools etc I believe. You did mention the issue is cultural and these things are part of that I guess.
The city I describe is my experience in Nashville TN - before out last full term mayor, perhaps around the time you were growing up? - apartments near the airport area could be found around $600 /mth - they weren't the best, but they did not have gangs blocking the corners either.
A decade of hastened gentrification and it's hard to find decent apartments for double the old price. Gas, food, and other things have gone up - yet for many going from $8 /hr to $12 an hour is not going to get you far around here these days.
I think it's easier for me to think that guys would have an easier time living on $25k per year, and that many women would find the living conditions with that kind of money with today's prices around here to be tough to live with.
The few cheap places to live around the city, and even the next county or two over, are likely to be less safe than one of the gated communities down the road from Miley's or Taylor's places.
I've been expanding my searches to the middle of the state and looking at other states to find affordable places to suggest people consider looking. There are some trailers about 2 hours from here for about $400/mth - but the utilities will be high, especially this time of the year.
Of course people living two hours away are not likely going to come to the city to fill these jobs at $12 /hr.
So I guess those businesses who want to keep paying less than a living wage around here need to consider that the pool of people willing to work those jobs are people who can't get a better gig, so probably male, willing to live in sketchy places, likely can't pass a drug test or they would get a home depot gig or similar.
With such a small pool to draw from, some kind of perks will need to be advertised, like comped transportation, no drug tests, etc.
There are plenty of places around town that I walk out of or choose not to go to, knowing that the labor making the food, or cleaning, or watching kids, or all kinds of important things, is probably not the best choice for important things like food safety, etc.
I also get that this can be a cultural thing, and different strokes for different folks and all that. I'd really love to see the monthly spending budgets of lots of the people around here that work for under $22, it just doesn't seem possible in most parts around here, and certainly not sustainable long term.
Why's this called 'smiling faces'?
No experience required, not discriminating on your criminal history or ability to pass a drug test..
at least that's the way I've been seeing it. As opposed so other jobs; home depot advertises drug testing on the front door. Plumbing places have "all employees drug screened / background checked" - some places have "bachelors degree or equiv"..
Some places have no paper application, requiring you to have internet access to apply - and then computer "personality tests" to be considered for interview.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, many of these things are saying they are trying to discriminate in one way or another, but "now hiring smiling faces" is kind of the bat signal for the X in 10 people who don't fair well with drug tests and criminal background tests, etc.
If you are aware of a similar moniker or whatever, I'd like to know. I've been trying to help people get jobs around town for years and have seriously been considering crowd sourcing a green friendly job board - there are lots of decent people out there that want to work but have been repeatedly beaten down by so many time wasters out there.
If minimum wage was $35/hr I bet quite a few things would happen.
Entrenched, successful businesses would support the change. Their competition struggle to afford competing. Businesses will close down, further entrenching the competition.
Jobs will disappear. Just like how the wage hike for New York car washers displaced workers though automation, many businesses will have an even higher economic incentive to replace workers with automation solutions.
Some jobs just won't pull in enough to make it worth it. Why pay someone $74,000/yr to take orders at a restaurant when you can pay for a $50,000 and ~$20,000/yr in maintenance.
Young workers will be out competed by older workers. If you're paying $35/hr, you want the best bang for your buck. Why take a risk on some 16 year old when you have retired 56 year olds who would be willing to pay for their medication working fast food. Or heck, why go into engineering when a basic job gets you above average pay? Where will the younger generation get a chance to develop the soft skillset that allows for future success in their careers?
Naturally, I'm failing to consider the long term economic effects. For example; harder earned skillsets will be paid much more than low skillsets. If the supply chain is paying massively for a work force, then the price of goods & services will go up dramatically. It's harder to puzzle this sort of stuff out!
https://www.google.com/search?q=Elizabeth+warren+35+minimum+...
???
I'm kind of shocked this doesn't exist yet, but then again, I can understand why a company might not want to openly advertise that they don't drug test.
In my (very) limited experience, employers will usually say they drug test but never really follow up on it. It usually took me a bit more effort to find out if I was going to get tested or not, and even then it's a bit of an awkward conversation to have because it implies there's a reason you want to dodge the test.
Mainly it would be good for society - saving people lots of time, and getting more people working, and more jobs filled.
I've noticed some employers do tests on application, then don't again for years. I've witnessed people losing jobs when they ran afoul of office politics, then suddenly a test was 'randomly' given.
I think some places around here use some kind of percentages thinking to say, 'if we drug test applicants, make them use an internet portal to apply, and give one of those personality quizzes before an interview' - we can be sure that 99% of our applicants will be white.
I can't say for sure that is what is going on at some places around here, I don't have any inside info saying exactly that - but, when you have a place that needs help doing oil changes and they put up all those hoops to jump through, you have wonder what their target worker market is and why. Maybe they just don't want 'white trash' people under cars getting greasy.
Anyhow, a "smile and work" portal would be beneficial to society imho. Maybe more so in busy cities.
recently... girl lives near the airport, has job at X big box store, 12 minute drive from here. Bus routes from here take you down to 'antioch' then back into the city, where you need to junction with another bus to get back a few miles south of city.
Depending on time of day, the scheduling puts it at 2 hours 20 minutes to get to work. When big box store needs you to be there at open, you need to leave for work at 3am... but no buses run at 3, so you have to leave at 11pm to get to work at 6am.
Getting home via bus is easier though.
admittedly the bus service does take care of certain 'economically challenged" areas better - if you live in Antioch you can jump on a bus to get downtown in much less time. If you needed to connect to go south again, it's still silly, but shaves about 30 minutes off (one hour fifty minutes).
I long for the day of smart voltron like buses, guess I should post about it since our city just cant get transport right.
They are always looking to do some complex maneuver to get foreign labor doing work cheaply for them. This is why they are complaining.
What kinds of maneuvers? The only way you can get foreign workers to work for you is to convince them to leave whatever it is they're currently doing.
Even thinking about more practical things like food harvesting, these jobs can pay ~$15/hour but they are REALLY hard work as that rate isn't guaranteed but rather performance based. If we had to pay even $25/hour to attract unemployed US workers to do these jobs instead of migrants, this would cause a likely doubling of the cost of all the produce you buy. We all have to ask, "Are we willing to pay double for fruits and vegetables to create decent paying jobs for other citizens?" I think the answer is that we are clearly not. The same question goes for services we use constantly like Amazon and Uber. The people doing the work are vastly underpaid and that is exactly where our savings come from!
For tech, I think the training path is the right thing. Employers do have to be careful to not spend tons training people just to have them leave. I firmly believe the right answer is apprenticeships. People do work as they learn and their wage rises slowly with the experience and ability to create value. The risk of them leaving is minimized as they have already created corporate value.
"...at the price he wants to pay".
There is also no denying that people are less willing to do hard labor than they used to be.
That really depends on the elasticity of demand for that thing. Usually when a thing costs more to produce than you can sell it for, we say that the market shouldn't produce that thing then, so there's nothing to complain about.
> There is also no denying that people are less willing to do hard labor than they used to be.
By which you mean "less willing to do hard labor as cheaply", presumably.
That isn't a thing, unless you're saying that there is no price whatsoever at which people would be willing to do hard labor.
You are dealing in a hypothetical where there aren't market forces at work.
Exactly! Which means the good or service shouldn't be produced.
> You are dealing in a hypothetical where there aren't market forces at work.
Erm, no. This is what market forces are. Market forces decide what is and what is not produced, via exactly this mechanism. This is the very essence of what a market is.
If a company's business model doesn't work, then it shouldn't really stay open/continue to exist.
Job creation comes after the business has become self-sustaining.
I always think that you should account a startup as though you are going to be paying everyone properly even when you cannot, and then start to pay out based on a combination of need and who has the oldest outstanding credit, when money starts to appear.
If you do this, then your company accounts are actually useful documents that you can project costs off going forward and actually attract investment, rather than living in some optimistic dreamland where the numbers you have do not represent anything like the actual costs of running the business properly.
So they are saying you should do slave-labor? I hope they expected to give you plenty of equity (which is cheap as the company is worthless as there is no money being made yet), otherwise it would be idiotic to expect people to work without compensation.
The only way this payment structure can be morally sound is by treating every unpaid employee as a founder and giving them an equal share of the company.
Historically, there were slaves.
Many types of business can't be bootstrapped. That is not unusual. Bootstrapping is primarily a popular approach now due to easy computer automation that makes a small subset of companies viable with the very small staff and no expensive hardware. It certainly isn't a default across all industries.
The labour pool is a market. You are not entitled to cheap labour just because you want it. If you can't find someone willing to do your work at the rate you want to pay it's because someone else is paying more for the same work, so you need to pay more to attract the labour.
Importing people from abroad is something that only exists as a solution because of the imbalance of development levels around the world right now. I expect that this is an anomaly that we are going to see correct itself in time once all countries reach a similer level of development. Where will you import your cheap labour from then?
In the UK we used to employ children to work in the mines and the mills. This was eventually realised to be exploitative and made illegal. I'd bet that all the business owners at the time complained how would they ever be profitable without the cheap child labour. But they either adjust or die, and I'm happy with that tradeoff. If a business is only viable with child labour I would prefer it didn't exist at all.
This has never been the case in the past; there is no reason to expect it in the future.
It’s all a matter of degree. Degree of progress, degree of wage difference, etc.
Not in terms of travel distance or the speed of human movement (remember when "around the world in 80 days" was an actual accomplishment, worthy of fantasizing about?)
That said some African countries are actually doing rather well. Botswana has seen real economic growth ranking in the top in terms of GDP PPP, just ahead of China, and that's without oil.
PS: Africa's population density is also much lower due to war and corruption. Overall, it's 1.216 billion over 11.73 million mi² vs say 1.339 billion in India in 1.269 million mi² so about 10x the population density. China at 1.386 billion over 3.705 million mi² is again 5x Africa
Also the improvement of economic conditions in some parts of the world will mean competition for labour globally.
Every week I see job ads with "${INDUSTRY_CERTIFICATION} essential". Companies are lazy and spendthrift and have some illusion of a vast labour market just itching to retrain themselves in MIG welding or whatever.
The last ad I remember that said "full training will be given " was for a bakery!
To be fair, it's corporate America that burned that bridge in the 80s with layoff culture, citing "economic efficiency".
* We train you for six months and pay you full salary.
* You have to work for us for two years past the end of your training period.
* If you leave before that, you owe us 50% of salary from the training period. (or whatever)
In a competitive market, you might even see other companies willing to buy employees out of their contracts.
In California, for example, you can't even dock someone's final paycheck if they fail to return a uniform - if someone worked the time to earn a wage and you don't pay them in full, you're going to find yourself in court.
Then it's not "clawing back" pay, it's just a fine for breach of contract.
I do think laws should prevent low-wage employers from screwing over their employees for piddling stuff like uniforms, but I think that's different than something like a professional apprenticeship.
It's kind of mental accounting for the employee, though. The law firm is basically giving you an extra $100 or whatever per paycheck. However, this $100 is earmarked to pay off your law school debt, so in effect the company is helping to pay for your training.
The nice part for the company is that they do not take on any risk paying for the training: the employee already shouldered all the risk for paying for law school. The company buys a little bit of loyalty by helping the employee pay off the debt over time. It probably makes the employee think twice before quitting or looking for other employment; it is similar to the health insurance benefit in that respect.
Allow me to learn on the job and I will be reluctant to leave for company that don't.
I'd recommend you read the Power of Habit. The author talks about the training program Starbucks puts its employees through to build willpower.
Companies do close down all the time because expenses are higher than revenues. Restaurants are a very well-known industry where that is super common (and it's not because restaurants tend to pay exhorbitant wages). It's literally a meme to accountants that having a restaurant as a client is a good way to never get paid (they may close down in the 30 days after delivery they are typically given to pay you).
Also, in a way, we already "shut down" companies that pay too little: you just can't even offer to pay someone 2$/hour. The question I'd ask is "who would take that job if it were allowed?"
In essence, having low wage jobs should never be an issue: if you're of the opinion that these companies shouldn't exist in the first place, you're essentially saying that those workers have better options already available. Do we really need to fire them to get them to go for those?
If you're following the fable of capitalism, those people should start their own, more efficient businesses if none are available.
It's no fable. Some of us don't have what it takes to start their own company, that's true.
Probably there is no hope for some. I don't know how you'd show that there is a system that doesn't suffer from this problem. I mean, you'd have to show that even with less incentive to produce and more demand for products (since everyone is owed "decent living" or whatever it's called nowadays), there is no possibility for demand to exceed production.
The solution is of course something like a basic income to liberate people and break the power of companies.
Do you think the employees would prefer being unemployed or being underpaid? The business closing doesn't magically create new, better-paying jobs for them. If better-paying jobs existed that they were capable of doing, they'd already be doing those instead.
Depends on how underpaid doesn't it? There's a line for everyone where all that work just isn't worth still not being able to afford a decent standard of living.
Then shouldn't this be up to the workers in question to decide? Closing their low-paying workplaces just cuts down their options, it doesn't create new jobs for them.
That's a much weaker form of decide. A vote only means at least 50% of voters wanted it, so you can only say with certainty that there's a 50%+ chance that any given voter wants it. Whereas if a worker has chosen to work for a particular salary, there's a 100% chance he's chosen that as nobody else can make that decision for him.
The real question is if a worker and an employer agree to a pay rate, why do you get to call it "underpaying"? Are they not adults, ostensibly free to live their lives how they see fit?
If your business model relies entirely on not paying your employees reasonable wages, maybe your business model is a failure.
For instance, you could make a version of AirBnB that was supported by ads alone, if instead of paying homeowners for the use of their homes, you simply compelled them to let you rent them out for nothing.
Companies will try to only pay staff more when they can justify that to the shareholders as being a way to make more money for the shareholders. A public company exists solely for the benefit of the shareholders and all actions stem from that.
Not sure about this.
First off, there's the principal/agent problem that causes many public companies to be run for the benefit of their upper management.
Second, this idea of the shareholder above all other stakeholders is a new phenomenon (since the 1980s). It's also primarily an Anglo Saxon idea (USA, Britain). Other countries include other stakeholders more explicitly. And the USA could as well, of the political will was there.
I agree with you that this is how American capitalism is structured now, but it didn't spring from the mind of God, it's a human institution that can be changed.
Upper Management, The employees, the board members, the shareholders, the customers.
Business decisions are almost always made looking at the perspective of perhaps 2 or three of these stakeholders. The employees are basically never considered in the US, often only the biggest one or two customer's desires are considered if any consideration is given at all, etc.
And way too much attention is payed to certain Wall Street types who get all upset when earnings exceed the company's own projections, but fall short of wildly optimistic estimates by third parties.
And it's a beneficial process, as it moves these people from business where their labor is less valuable (as evidenced by the fact that it's not profitable to employ them at a slightly higher wage) to businesses where their labor is more useful. The least efficient businesses being forced to close is a good thing that allows the labor, facilities, land, materials, capital, etc to stop being used poorly so that they can be used better in the economy.
The other balancing loop is that higher wages in some field is motivation for people to get the skills needed for that field, either through choice of education for younger people or by transferring from another type of job. This balances the supply side in a beneficial way, but as it's much slower than the balancing loop above, the largest immediate impact comes from the demand-side balance.
Here in Denmark we don't have greeters, we bag our own stuff and most of the time we have to put a coin in to get the shopping cart out, which will be returned when we return it.
Of course there will be businesses that can't adapt. These will die out and those employees will then, slightly, decrease salaries.
E.g. if you have to pay people a lot to wash cars then those jobs will simply disappear.
What do you mean by that?
> E.g. if you have to pay people a lot to wash cars then those will simply disappear.
What will disappear? The cars? Cleanliness? What I think you mean is that people will demand fewer car washes, which is true. But so what?
They're more likely to just do it themselves.
1) In some sectors and job roles pay is what it is because there are other hard costs involved, the quantity of labor required is prohibitively high, and/or customers are not willing to pay $75 for <insert name of item or service>. Customers are willing to pay $25 for <insert name of item or service>, so you take 25 and subtract all the other costs involved as well as a profit margin to make it worth your while, do some multiplication (or division, as appropriate) to figure out how many of <insert name of item or service> each person can complete in a given hour, and end up being able to pay each person working on <insert name of item or service> $10 per hour. Whether or not someone is willing to toil away 8 hours a day on <insert name of item or service> for $10 per hour... well, that's what we're talking about.
2) What will disappear? The manual carwashes, obviously. Whether they get replaced by automatic ones (which eliminates the prohibitively high labor cost at a marginal increase in hard costs that decreases over time) or simply by people washing their cars themselves (which eliminates all of the above) doesn't really matter, as we're talking about labor issues and in either scenario the guy washing the car is out of his job. So what? So nothing, except the whole topic we're discussing.
The clear trend since the 90s has been for productivity to increase while compensation has remained more or less static.
Larger corporations absolutely can afford to pay more - much more. They choose not to, because the institutional narcissism of business culture in the US is set up to gouge employees to the maximum possible extent, not to consider employees as contributors/partners who deserve decent compensation for their contribution.
Wages are therefore constrained so that a profit is left after the worker has been paid. Ignoring other costs, profit is equal value produced minus wage paid.
I understand how they create most value for themselves, they earn more than the other employees and are more likely to own stock options.
Yep. Even back when I was growing (70s), a car wash in Germany was this big machine you drove into and your car came out clean the other end. You didn't leave the car.
When coming to California early 2000s, a car wash was this place that had someone take your keys, then some people did some prep, then the person who took your keys drove it through a similar but much smaller machine. To my great surprise, this machine didn't actually wash the car but really just made it wet. Then a bunch of people cleaned and dried the car by hand and called you when they were done.
I was...astonished.
I also remember American car companies struggling for profitability, and blaming wages. Except that German car companies at the very same time were paying their workers several times the amount (strong unions) and still raking in the cash.
Because, otherwise, they probably would do just that.
How much people are willing to pay for a service is connected to the value labour generates. If the minimum wage for cleaning was raised to $50/hour, many cleaning companies would close because few people were willing to pay at least $50/hour for a cleaner; the work done by the cleaner does not generate $50/hour of value. For any given individual at any point on time there is a ceiling on how much value they can generate, based on their knowledge and abilities. If somebody is capable of generating $10 of value, and the minimum wage is raised to $20 of value, anybody employing them would be losing $10/hour (paying $20 for $10 worth of labour). In which case it becomes much harder for that individual to find a job, and also to get a foothold for them to gain skills and experience that allow them to generate more value in future.
You might argue that such a worker is better off on welfare or some kind of basic income, but shouldn't that be their choice to make, not yours?
It's how much the market will bear. Business owners (shareholders) play a game of arbitrage between what people will pay for the service and the cost of producing the service (e.g. labor costs). I think folks are upset not so much at the cleaning services of the world, but the oligopolies, where you soak up the surplus value of the labor. Sometimes it's done illegally like in the wage collusion case in silicon valley, other times it's done legally through M&A. The wealthy have learned how to leverage their position for maximum profit, and many folks see it for what it is.
These aren't the companies that minimum wage laws hurt. According to https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/5314-entrepreneur-salaries..., the average salary of small business owners in America is $68,000, which is much less than most software developers on this site seem to make. They're not exactly filthly-rich businesses gobbling up profit. Even a small increase in costs can be enough to put them out of business, leaving their employees jobless.
The industries or professions where "living wages" is an issue are usually not the ones desperate for labor.
Killing such such companies doesn't magically create new companies able to pay more, it just converts their low-paid workers to unemployed workers. The minimum wage is always zero (no job).
At the bottom of the wage spectrum that's mostly not true. Profits would allow for higher wages, but the negotiating power of the employers is such that they can hold wages down. In these cases minimum wages do make sense and don't result in higher unemployment. And implementing minimum wage laws has shown that it does not affect unemployment in a big manner.
And honestly, if you are competing with a 16 year old for a job, there are larger issues than the minimum wage.
Maybe the real answer is to make it easier for adults to get training for jobs that can’t be done by a 16 year old.
Something tells me you would be perfectly happy if wages were kept super low, and the other things you said did not happen.
That is not a solution.
If you don’t think that businesses don’t “deserve” to exist if there business model can’t be profitable at “livable wages” that seems hypocritical to me since a lot of techies work for companies that only exist because of VC funding and if their company had to exist based solely on profitability they wouldn’t be working either.
In an economy with high unemployment, a minimum wage should be lower. With low unemployment, it can be higher in order to put a lower limit on the employers' negotiating power.
If the numbers don’t make sense, either the employer is going to automate or capital os going to move up market and to jobs that are out of reach for the unskilled.
If Apple bought iPhone manufacturing to the US for instance where it would be more expensive, they would invest in ways to automate more before they would hire the same number of people as FoxConn does.
It looks like wage increases are less of a factor in automation than labor shortages. Which is why Foxconn in China is automating like crazy.
Most of the time the teenager is either getting a hand me down car from the parents and the parents buy a new car or they buy their kid a cheap car.
My son won’t be going to an expensive college. He will be going to a two year state school close to home, living at home and then transferring. We will be paying cash.
And, maybe unfortunately, given some due diligence, that decision is still most likely the correct one. And yes, there are fraudulent schools and diminishing returns etc.
But the popular refrain on HN - which I don’t agree with - is that the purpose of college is not to get a job.
So minimum wage is an entirely different topic. Increasing minimum wage will not solve any hiring problems, it only bolsters negotiation power for those at the bottom. Which is a good thing, but no solution to the stated problem.
"well yeah but the workers consented "
People do a lot of things when desperate, that shouldn't inform how we design our society
Jeeeeeesus christ, how am I designing how they spend their time?
How can you detect lack of freedom in saying "you can't work for unlivable salaries" but not in "I only pay unlivable salaries because if you dont want these crubs there's other more desperate people".
> Ultimately the worker is payed by the company's customers,
No, no, they are paid by the owners who decide what slice of the income to allocate to salaries. The customers pay the product and walk away, they don't know anything about the internal workings of a company
>and if the law asks consumers to pay more than they're willing to pay for the workers' service,
The law asks the boss to pay livable salary, the end price has nothing to do with the law. If the service cannot be offered at competitive prices while offering livable wages, it's not a sustainable business
They want to do some job for money and you're telling them "no, it pays too little, you're not allowed to do that job, you should be on welfare or find another job instead!".
>No, no, they are paid by the owners who decide what slice of the income to allocate to salaries. The customers pay the product and walk away, they don't know anything about the internal workings of a company
The income of the company is connected to the value generated by the workers it employs. An owner of a law firm can pays its employees much better than an owner of a fast food restaurant, because people are willing to pay more for lawyers than they are for fast food service. If the law forced restaurant owners to pay their workers as much as a law firm has to pay its workers, most restaurants would go out of business because people simply aren't willing to pay as much for restaurant service as they are for lawyers.
>The law asks the boss to pay livable salary, the end price has nothing to do with the law. If the service cannot be offered at competitive prices while offering livable wages, it's not a sustainable business
The maximum salary someone can expect is proportional to how much value they can generate for people. If the law requires someone to be paid much more than the maximuim amount of value they can generate given their skills/abilities at the time, then people will simply choose to forgo that service. If you had to pay someone $200/hour to clean your windows, would you do that, or would you clean them yourselves / let them remain uncleaned?
Minimum wage laws don't create jobs; the minimum wage is always zero (if nobody thinks someone can produce enough value to justify paying them the minimum wage, nobody will pay/hire them). Feel free to declare low-paying jobs "unsustainable", but note that the alternative to such jobs in many cases isn't livable wages, it's no wages, or welfare.
The idea that they need to be on some form of welfare ANYWAY doesn't bother you ?
> If the law forced restaurant owners to pay their workers as much as a law firm has to pay its workers, most restaurants would go out of business because people simply aren't willing to pay as much for restaurant service as they are for lawyers.
And if the southern states couldn't have slaves the economy would collapse and if people could strike, no business can survive and if you have to pay immigrants the same salary as locals, no business can survive and if they pass anti-sweatshop laws , no business can survive and if you can't fire them for unionizing , no business can survive and if you can't hire children , no business can survive and if you pay them for ONLY 40h per week , no business can survive and if you pay women equally , no business can survive
it has been the same excuse forever, if we give rights the market will crash, and yet every time instead of crushing it just keeps blooming... weird.
Unless they want to live on subsistence, they need things produced by other people. They can either do something for other people (employment) in exchange for other people's things (usually in the form of money, which is more efficient than barter), or they can receive some form of charity/welfare from other people. What's wrong with it? Why should it bother me that the universe doesn't have an infinite source of everything such that anybody can fill all their wants without anybody having to work?
>it has been the same excuse forever, if we give rights the market will crash, and yet every time instead of crushing it just keeps blooming... weird.
Just because everything hasn't completely collapsed that doesn't mean things couldn't be better. That's like arguing polluting the environment is fine because the planet's still alive now. You can see this by comparing for instance Eastern Europe to Western Europe; Eastern Europe didn't collapse, but due to bad economic management it grew a lot more slowly and produced much lower living standards for its inhabitants than Western Europe.
And you are right, higher prices lead to less consumption.
Basically any employee contract is a cooperation between two parties leading to a shared benefit of that cooperation. How that benefit is partitioned between the two parties is a matter of negotiation and negotiation power.
Wages below a certain standard of poverty are a different issue, and those aren't the jobs with hiring problems anyway.