The bottom of the ladder is the unemployed, who make $0/h.
The good faith argument for no minimum wage is that those people would have a much bigger chance to find jobs and build job skills.
Most companies hiring for minimum wage positions want a respectful employee who will show up on time. I don't think they'd bend on those requirements for cheaper labor as the management overhead would quickly eat into any cost savings.
So, while I understand it's a "good faith argument", I don't think it holds much water. Companies will just use a no-minimum wage environment to negotiate cheaper deals with employees they would have hired anyway.
Also, one's salary is in large part due to one's ability to negotiate. A manager who hires dozens of workers a year is probably pretty good at negotiating while a low-income worker might not be experienced in that area. The minimum wage also helps correct that imbalance in negotiating power.
This might be different if companies were interested in training employees but they aren't. So what happens with no minimum wage is that you have a class of workers who work over 40 hours a week yet have to survive off of government assistance.
The government is literally subsidizing the profits of that company at that point. So why should companies get away with being a drain on society?
- Getting to work on time and every day.
- Functioning in a workplace without getting in fights.
- Sobriety.
- A basic knowledge of English.
Once you've mastered those, McDonalds will be happy to hire you.
So again, what actual skills do you learn on the job? If your argument is that we should remove the minimum wage to help people who can't make it through the educational system, I think the actual argument is that our educational system is fucked and needs to be fixed. Even then, most of the unemployed have those skills you've mentioned but aren't hired for any number of reasons unrelated to their competency or wages.
Regardless, people without those skills exist. Us HN people never meet them, and have a hard time imagining their lives, but they're still out there.
I completely agree that our educational system is fucked and needs to be fixed. I don't see how that would help the people who already went through the fucked up version, even if it ever got fixed, which I think we can agree isn't likely the next decade at least?
To learn about how the "permanent underclass" lives, You could do worse than reading "Dignity": https://www.amazon.com/Dignity-Seeking-Respect-Back-America/...
Which is precisely why I find framing arguments around removing minimum wage as some benefit to the poor to be rather disgusting, because it does absolutely nothing to solve the problem.
A job which can't pay shit isn't going to help you survive when the rent is due and you're earning $5 or less an hour. Even moreso if you're disabled and companies further take advantage of your desperation to work you into the ground until you break.
This isn't about helping the poor, it's about allowing companies to fleece them harder.
I'm not being sarcastic. It's such a bizarre mental contortion.
Many low wage jobs are physically demanding, have terrible (or no dependable) schedules, and offer limited hours so as to avoid having to offer benefits. It's not uncommon for low wage workers to juggle two or three jobs in order to get enough hours of paid work to survive. The problem then is that it is very hard to manage schedule conflicts between the jobs when they occur. Too many conflicts can cost you your job. I've seen this happen many times.
Check out this article in Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/life-af...
Also highly recommend On The Media's multipart investigation into poverty in America: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/projects/busted-ame...
Yeah, the marginal tax for the underclass is a huge problem!
If you lose $12/h in benefits by taking a $10/h job, most people won't take the job. Not because they're lazy, but because they're sensible rational people.
That's a big poverty trap we've built.
If government programs are included, the unemployed definitely don't "make" $0/hour. As is often pointed out, taxpayers are effectively funding the underpayment of workers Walmart, McDonalds, etc because of government subsidies.
I don't have a dog in this hunt but the issue is much too complicated by government action to say unequivocally that the unemployed "make" $0. I'm not sure if it's good or bad but I definitely lean toward "we've made it too complicated".
[Now I'll go back to sorting through baffling health insurance complexity...]
I'm thankful that I will never be in that situation again. It was awful.
But that's exactly my point: it's very difficult to discuss this when policy is such a swirl.
What stuck with me was that everything required that I already had a job. Maybe it was the economy at the time, but nobody wanted to hire someone without work experience. When I discovered that even unemployment required I have work experience, it felt like I was living in Catch-22.
For that reason, I support the government acting as an employer of last resort. Everyone should be guaranteed a job if they're willing to work.
I like that concept as well. But there are problems. Quality of work is one. Another is the complication of getting something useful out of that manpower. Would probably be done by lending that workforce to companies... subsidized if necessary, but with significant bargaining power. Still this could end up becoming a nightmare with incompetent / corrupt governments. It would be a great natural minimum wage, though, since you'd be stupid to work for less than you could get at you gov job.
Somebody or something was providing you liquidity.
That isn't a good faith argument at all. That the "nice job you have there, stop asking for a living wage; it would be a shame if anything happened to it" argument.