Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevin_thibedeau | Hacker News Reader

Or you just raise the minimum wage. We arrived at this point because those with money use it to influence government to their exclusive benefit.

View on HN

Demand curves have negative slopes.

The esoteric reading of minimum wage is it is a accelerationist policy aimed at subsidizing automation.

The realistic reading is that it mainly just transfers money from profits to wages. Demand for minimum waged labor is very, very inelastic.

Is it? In countries with higher minimum wages, McDonald's uses kiosks for ordering. I'm guessing, but it feels like 1/3 of fast food staff mans the registers.

Do you have a citation for this? Tokyo has a high minimum wage (and low enough unemployment that most employers have to pay more than minimum wage), but I've yet to see an automated kiosk here.

Though in support of your point, when I went to Korea last year there was a large number of automated kiosks, and I know the minimum wage there is fairly high as well. So, Japan's lack of those kiosks may have to do with a preference towards cash/human interaction in the culture.

Isn’t Japan famous for manning a lot of jobs, culturally?

Around here (Central Europe, Austria, Germany, Italy too IIRC) I don’t see non-kiosk McDonalds anymore, as they went through the kiosk upgrade in the past few years. Noticeably fewer employees.

It takes a long time to develop and plan a rollout of those kinds of automated kiosks for large companies. They've clearly been planning such a rollout for many years. The fact it's coincided with a lot of discussion of minimum wage increases is either a complete coincidence or an example of correlation not implying causation -- mass layoffs usually result in discussions about labour laws.

I would argue that the job losses to automation would've happened anyway without any discussion of wage increases -- kiosks are cheaper than even below-living-wage workers.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/edrensi/2018/07/11/mcdonalds-sa...

Though I was specifically thinking Sweden.

I haven't been to Japan in many years, but they had plenty of kiosks for ordering food from restaurants. You put in money, hit the button next to the pic of the food you want, it gives you a ticket and you take it to the cook.

Automated kiosks for ordering aren't new - they date back about to the 1890s. They actually went out of fashion in the 1950s-60s when wages grew the fastest and died out entirely in 1991.

Amazon is paying above minimum wage already. What do you suggest they should be paid?

It sounds like conditions are more of a problem than pay. Maybe there should be less that enforce regular breaks for workers doing monotonous jobs, and maximum hours.

Good luck getting a that kind of law passed in America though. Far too socialist.

A different answer: Pay them when their labor is actually worth.

how do you determine that if not at what the market sets it at?

There is no other way. The market ALWAYS sets it, no matter how strong it’s regulated. The real minimum wage is zero.

But the regulation strongly influences what the market will pay. The trend of allowing companies to have employees sign non-competes for relatively low skilled jobs, for example, depresses wages by impeding competition for labor.

Not everyone else is. People may put up with the 'above average' amazon because everything else in the area is still paying closer to minimum wage. If min wage was raised, it might make it easier to say 'no' to the amazon warehouse gig.

Quite the opposite: minimum wage increase will eliminate many low-skilled jobs and will make it harder "to say 'no' to the amazon warehouse gig".

This is reminding me of a discussion about Facebook's content enforcement, where I still don't understand the argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20222594. Pressuring people to miss bathroom breaks is wrong, I'd agree - I'm all for that being legally punishable if it isn't already. But the argument gets to a point where people are simply saying that the job inherently sucks anyway, and the people who are voluntarily doing it in exchange for the money would be better off not even being given the option and being involuntarily unemployed, and if necessary, the company employing them shouldn't even exist if that job must be done. I don't understand it.

I hate saying this, but it comes from a place of privilege. If you've never not had a job, you think just banning bad jobs will mean everyone has a good job. If you've been unemployed, you know you'd rather have a job and have it reformed through continuous work than be unemployed.

The problem, though, is that there are people who have never not had jobs who nonetheless have opinions on what the baseline job should be. Since they've never had to choose between food and a shitty job, they assume that they can solve the problem by just mandating jobs not be shitty.

People who are better at finding and keeping jobs -- are, typically, against minimum wage increase (because they better understand the consequences of such restriction).

Ironically, people who struggle with keeping a job -- are more likely to shoot themselves in the foot by supporting minimum wage increase.

Sadly companies have found loop holes like forcing people into 1099 positions or just sub-contracting jobs to firms that then pay below minimum wage.

So you will find companies that claim they already pay way above minimum wage but it's just PR.

It is fortunate that companies found these 1099 loopholes. Without these loopholes, low-skilled candidates would have much harder time to find and keep their jobs.

It is amazing how many commenters on Hacker News do NOT understand basic economic model of supply and demand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com