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Comment by potatofarmer45 | Hacker News Reader

It's an extension what already happens in industries such as construction. If you want to remodel your home in Florida, you'd hire a local contractor who then subcontracts people who are almost certainly illegal immigrants from Mexico to do the actual work at a much lower rate than if they hired Americans.

The reality though is that it's not really exploitation because these often illegal workers don't really have any other options. Anyone who has been to Paris will tell how expensive it is. Ideally the arbitrage between the legal contractor and the illegal sub-contractor is as small as possible but until they have better options, to them this is better than nothing.

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Using someone else's limitations (e.g. inability to work legally) as leverage for your own gain (e.g. paying them an extremely low wage) might as well be the textbook definition of exploitation.

The dynamic you've described is no different than a licensed professional hiring unlicensed worker to work under them. The employer has some legal status that is required by the government to do that business and to make the most money off of it they have more people doing under their license. Sure they technically bear responsibility for the work but 99.9999% of the jobs won't require the full skills of a license holder so sending an apprentice to wire a ceiling fan or un-clog a drain is no big deal.

Sure, I guess the plumber's apprentice could just get a job bagging groceries but the illegal immigrant could panhandle or collect cans. At some point it just becomes an exercise drawing arbitrary lines with regard to how much money one needs to survive.

Personally I think the government should get out of the business of saying who can work or who can do what work since that's what's creating the opportunity for this labor arbitrage/exploitation.

> The dynamic you've described is no different than a licensed professional hiring unlicensed worker to work under them.

The key here is the second part, where that limitation is being used to coerce them into accepting disadvantageous terms.

> Sure, I guess the plumber's apprentice could just not work but so could the illegal immigrant at some point it just becomes an exercise drawing arbitrary lines with regard to how much money one needs to survive.

Perhaps we could implement some sort of "minimum wage" to ensure employers pay enough for their employees to survive.

Minimum wages are great for people already in the legal labor market. For people outside it, it creates incentives to find a way in (honestly or otherwise). For businesses, it can create incentives to find a way to get access to the less than entirely legal labor pool with a wink and a nudge for deniability.

To be absolutely clear, a minimum wage is in no way a bad thing! It's just worth bearing in mind that incentives are complex things.

In some cases this is also slavery - for example some recent cases in the UK with gamemasters effectively holding homeless people in captivity.

Isn’t that just the definition of negotiation? Do you routinely expect fairness in business negotiation when the reality between the parties are anything but that?

They're two sides of the same coin, aren't they? "Exploitation" is just a very one-sided negotiation.

I found this EconTalk episode [0] quite interesting.

The takeway was the idea that all scalper-like transaction had something in common. Most of the time, the law would forbid it, but the underlying "moral" part was that the transaction in that case is not really volontary. So he coined the term of eu-volontary transaction (ie truly volontary).

One of the rule of such a transaction is "Neither party is coerced into exchange by dire necessity, and neither party has enough bargaining power to impose an abusive price." I believe this is the issue here.

[0]:https://www.econtalk.org/munger-on-exchange-exploitation-and...

> The reality though is that it's not really exploitation because these often illegal workers don't really have any other options.

I'm sorry, but do you not realize how crazy that sounds? It's the equivalent of saying:

> "I’m not exploiting dehydrated hikers in the desert by selling water at $20/liter. It’s their only option"

Your example is a clear-cut case of exploitation.

The thing is they shouldn't be allowed to enter the desert in the first place, people that are legally allowed into the desert can buy water at a fair price.

Literally can't tell if this is parody or not. But people are now being prosecuted for supplying water to people in the desert.

If illegal people can't access water in the desert, they won't go to the desert.

I might be wrong but I think that is what the government wants.

No, they'll go through the desert and some of them and their children will die. And this will be on the heads of those preventing them from having water.

That's certainly exploitation, agreed. I'm not sure why anyone would use "no other options" to argue something isn't when that's almost a requirement for exploitation.

That said, the desert metaphor also gets us to the usual issue: arresting the water-seller without doing anything else still makes life much worse for the hikers. I don't accept the libertarian argument that exploitation can't be immoral if it's mutually beneficial, but it seems accurate to say that the exploitation is usually not the most immoral thing happening. It's a more active harm, but having one unpleasant option is still better than having zero options.

Coming back to the article: earning four Euro per hour to live in Paris is obviously unsustainable. Taking half of someone's already-low wages to (indirectly) provide them with work papers is a callous thing to do, and knowingly designing a company to provide plausible deniability for that practice is alarming. And yet... if someone is living in an abandoned car with no support and no right to work legally, earning 17 Euro a day is still better than earning nothing at all. Any reaction that claims to be about protecting the worker needs to start with those problems before it cuts off their job.

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