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Comment by supergeek133 | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a two way street. If you've never been involved at a management or ownership level of a business that has "low pay" labor (e.g., food service, warehouse, retail sales).

For every 2-3 decent workers there is one that just takes pure advantage of the environment (e.g., stealing product, stealing time, etc). Sometimes this occurs at great cost for a period of time before it is discovered. EDIT: This was meant to be illustrative, not an exact ratio.

This makes companies take extreme policy measures for the few instances of this that impact everyone, because the financial impact is so disproportionate.

Now, the argument can (and is) made that pay is a factor. "If you pay me more I won't act like this". But depending on the business (e.g., a local pizza place) there is no affording that.

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I have been involved in both working in services and in the management level of a restaurant business. It is still my opinion that the pay, disposability, lack of dignity, lack of future, lack of community, and disrespect are the primary drivers for bad workplace behavior. Treat people like animals, and they will act like animals. It's just exploitation, and I work my current job with fear of having to go back to that.

> But depending on the business (e.g., a local pizza place) there is no affording that.

This is maybe a radical argument, but I make it in good faith; if your business can only exist by paying workers at or below poverty wages, and/or enacting dehumanizing controls, it probably shouldn't exist. If the demand for the product or service is sufficient, price should follow accordingly to make that business viable and profitable. Saying a business can't afford to pay workers a living wage and treat them right is equivalent to unintentionally saying 'the business can't exist without worker exploitation'. I do not believe that is a defensible position if you don't axiomatically accept worker exploitation.

Maybe any given business model doesn't have a god-given moral right to exist. It does suck if we lose that local pizzeria, but clearly we didn't want the pizza enough to pay what it cost to ethically support such a business. If you're worried about the job loss or availability of services caused by such a position, there a whole sea of political and socioeconomic thought on how to solve that. It's probably beyond the current conversation.

Yeah, I agree, but I think another false general assumption people might make is "every retail or food service job is minimum wage" and that every owner is just shortchanging their workers to pay themselves more. That isn't the case across the board.

Best Buy doesn't pay minimum wage, heck even when I started there as a part time computer tech in 2002 I was paid $9.50/hr. That being said with the 1 year $80/share price they can damn well afford to pay more.

My friend who owns the pizza business pays more than his franchise based competitors, he has employees who have worked for him for years because of this. So he's not paying close to minimum wage but the "meta market" for a pizza keeps his prices in a certain range. As I mentioned in a below comment there are other market forces at work here (e.g., a national franchise has buying power for food price reductions, etc).

So knowing his very loyal customer base, if he had to increase prices to support extra cost, they'd probably stay to a certain extent, but maybe that results in less employees or hours. Who knows.

> If you're worried about the job loss or availability of services caused by such a position, there a whole sea of political and socioeconomic thought on how to solve that. It's probably beyond the current conversation.

Yeah, that's my whole point. Any legislation that increases wages has a disproportionate impact based on your business, and SBA says small business makes up 48% of jobs[0].

But like you said, the conversation is a level up from this.

[0]: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/advocacy/2018-Small-...

The problem is that once you close the business and fire the underpaid employees, they don't disappear. Now they're unemployed and make $0/hour.

This blind spot fascinates me. The best explanation I've seen is "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics". It says that "when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it".

So in this scenario, once you've fired your employees, you are no longer connected to them, and their further destiny is not your fault.

I suspect this is a deep part of our moral instincts, and we have to be aware of it to get to a more rational approach.

https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

Thanks that blog post was really opened my mind on the topic

Thanks for the link. I have some thoughts after reading it, mainly entangling with scale of the solutions, optics, and higher-order effects, but I think it's still an incomplete thought. It does drive people crazy to think about the things we can do for people who need help, the optics of how to help and how much can we help. Do you have any more books/articles related to this?

I don't have any more material I've vetted.

If you google "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics", lots of things come up though. Happy hunting!

The idea that they "shouldn't exist" doesn't make much sense to me.

As long as you treat your employees with respect and pay legal wages, who are we to say that the wages are "poverty wages".

Many of these low wage, entry level positions are/were meant to be filled by young people, still living with parents, or part time workers who may have a spouse that is the primary earner.

The problem is that due to lack of other options, many people are crowding out these type of workers and using these jobs as full time, primary income.

If the alternative is no job at all (i.e. "shouldn't exist") then poverty wages sound better than nothing.

Your second sentence asserts that poverty is some nebulous concept, and that if wages are "legal" then they must be "moral".

It is nebulous from the point of view of a single employer. If someone only wants to work 10 hours a week and you pay them $12 an hour and their spouse works full time and makes $100k a year, is the $12 an hour employee living in poverty?

> As long as you treat your employees with respect and pay legal wages, who are we to say that the wages are "poverty wages".

When working those wages leave you in poverty its poverty wages.

> Many of these low wage, entry level positions are/were meant to be filled by young people, still living with parents, or part time workers who may have a spouse that is the primary earner.

This is not the case, and has never been the case. The economy is not set up for the benefit of teens on summer vacation.

44% of all workers aged 18 to 64 made a median of $10.64/hr and an annual income less than $20,000. Its hard to overstate how many people across the country are living on poverty wages - the "young people" theory to me frequently only comes about from people who've grown up in affluent areas and had evening jobs at grocery stores. Most low wage workers in this economy are invisible.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/meet-the-low-wage-workfor...

> the "young people" theory to me frequently only comes about from people who've grown up in affluent areas and had evening jobs at grocery stores.

You've hit the nail on the head. This position is privilege exemplified, and indicates a lack of empathy for people who do not have the skills, opportunity, or desire to obtain higher-paying positions. Everyone in our society should be able to live with dignity, regardless of their vocation. No one needs to scrape by in the wealthiest country on earth, especially when minimum-wage jobs make so much of our society possible.

I don't think calling out people for having privilege is a good way to win someone to your side unless the person has had the opportunity to hear other perspectives and has chosen to ignore them. It turns an otherwise productive educational conversation (on both sides) into combat.

I don't blame anyone for having a (relatively) sheltered life, as there's plenty in our life that all of us being on this forum are sheltered from. I consider it a good thing to be sheltered from a lot of traumas growing up. Our children need not feel the same pains we did. But by using a combative tone you're lessening the change for empathy to win out.

Finally, thats not to say that combat (rhetorical, physical) isn't the solution in some cases.

Totally agree with your point, my comment was lacking the fact that I also have a very privileged upbringing compared to many Americans. I wasn't trying to speak down, but laterally. Tone is hard to convey online, but I can do better. :)

Then I'd say you don't know much about poverty.

I grew up in one of the poorest counties in America.

I now live in one of the wealthiest. And while the occasional affluent family has a teenager or two that works at the grocery store, in poor areas, lots more teenagers have jobs to supplement not only their own income, but that of their parents.

That's not to say that there are more teenagers working these low wage jobs, it's just to point out that "privlege" in this case is merely a straw man and sidesteps the main thrust of my point, which was, what is better, "poverty wages" or no wages at all?

> This is maybe a radical argument, but I make it in good faith; if your business can only exist by paying workers at or below poverty wages, and/or enacting dehumanizing controls, it probably shouldn't exist. If the demand for the product or service is sufficient, price should follow accordingly to make that business viable and profitable. Saying a business can't afford to pay workers a living wage and treat them right is equivalent to unintentionally saying 'the business can't exist without worker exploitation'. I do not believe that is a defensible position if you don't axiomatically accept worker exploitation.

I respect your sincere intentions here, but I do object to that proposal, and I hope that there can be a constructive dialog on the subject.

I think my primary objection is to the description of the small pizzeria as being exploitative. Sure, the workers are not payed very much, but the power differential is very small. It seems much more likely that the economic relationship is genuinely one of mutual benefit, and I have a hard time finding a moral objection to that.

My other objection is to the ramifications of such a policy on a broader society. It seems inevitable to me that in such a society, everyone would be forced to be clients of large, faceless entities, be they private corporations or governmental entities. That we could rely on either of these institutions to protect individuals from exploitation is highly dubious. To my mind, it is the very existence of intermediary institutions (like small businesses) which are the best safeguards of individual autonomy and well-being.

It's possible that the owner is being exploited too, but the franchise corporation, or financial interests. That doesn't make it ok for them to exploit others.

> It's possible that the owner is being exploited too, but the franchise corporation, or financial interests.

Irrelevant. I'm not talking about the owner being exploited. We could just be talking about a independent small business that's trying to get by on small margins.

> That doesn't make it ok for them to exploit others.

You're assuming that low pay is exploitation when that is the very notion I'm challenging. The exploitation comes from a power differential that is leveraged to the benefit of one party. If neither party has much power over the other, and neither is benefiting unduly from the relationship, then there is not exploitation.

It may very well be that neither the business nor the employee has much to offer each other. The point is that they're still willing to work together for mutual benefit, however small that mutual benefit may be.

This part of your your comment hits on the one thing I try to teach younger people, "It's just exploitation, and I work my current job with fear of having to go back to that."

The difference between a job and a career is portability. If you have a career, you can switch employers and they will value your experience. You will make the same or more. If you have a job, when you switch employers you start back at the bottom. Sometimes there is a small premium for experience, but it's nowhere near what you can make at a good employer for longevity.

I can confirm this, having first hand experience with it. We hired many low-skill workers at a big tech company that you've heard of about ten years ago. These workers received a couple of weeks of training, and then were set to do a rather simple, menial, repetitive job.

These workers didn't sell products, but did very low level tech work, but the entire operation was mired in drama. For example, we had a strict no drugs policy, and no weapons policy on campus, zero tolerance. So, say that one of your employees comes up crying that she is getting fired because she did heroin during work hours, and she needs to money for her unborn child (this happened!), or a guy gets angry at being fired because he was pulling out his new .45 from his waistband to show his cubicle neighbors. We had a LOT of this stuff, and as a result, many zero tolerance policies.

It's difficult to understand how many hard living, disadvantaged people there are in this country, even in wealthy areas like the Bay Area of CA, who bring their rough living to work with them. What do you do as an employer? Do you tolerate this to be friendlier to the employees, and someone gets killed, making you liable? Do you come down like a hardass and dehumanize them even more, but cover your butt? Neither choice is good, but it's the latter that usually happens.

I can see how dehumanization could be a common occurrence when "coming down hard" or "covering your butt", but I don't think it's intrinsic. Having and enforcing standards isn't intrinsically dehumanizing. Going too far in the other direction could also involve dehumanization, in the form of denying people's agency and capacity for personal responsibility.

Maybe you can work on your hiring practices? Even for low-skill jobs, you can hire for soft skills.

edit: I am being downvoted and don't know why. Can you please explain what's wrong with this idea? I think the parent paints a false dichotomy.

For example - another option is to deal with problematic individuals on an individual basis. You don't have to ruin the entire company culture.

>Can you please explain what's wrong with this idea?

This may have more to do with the phrasing of your first sentence, which could be interpreted as flippant, or presumptive, or maybe even victim blaming.

[After reading other comments, I think the behavior you noted is most likely to be the result of people engaged in ideological battle. If this is true, I would just keep engaging in good faith, there's little you can do.]

Separately, in the future, you might frame your follow-up inquiry as:

>edit: Can anyone please explain what's wrong with this idea? I think the parent paints a false dichotomy.

Or similar. That is, leaving off explicit mention of your motivation for asking as [discussion of this specific motivation] is frowned upon in the site guidelines.

For some really annoying grunt jobs, you're not going to hire the most disciplined, most educated people with a good work ethic. People willing to do tedious, crappy work have no other options usually, and you also can't be too picky, or you won't hire anyone. These jobs typically have low value as well, so if you tried to pay more, the whole project may not be cost effective and won't happen.

You definitely need to treat people with as much respect as possible, but in some jobs, you have to have all these rules in place knowing you'll get people who aren't model citizens. I was never in the HR org chart here, never saw finances, but I suspect the people that I mentioned were paid near minimum wage. Few stuck around more than six months, and those who did, moved onto better jobs. It was all very structured and regimented. I would never fire anyone for trying to make their workplace better, assuming they did it in a non-disruptive way.

<sarcasm>Those stories sound nothing like the stories you hear about highly compensated employees at tech companies. You never hear stories of them ignoring strict company policies, engaging in drug abuse on the job, or displaying behaviour that makes other employees fear for their own safety.</sarcasm>

<sarcasm> No you don't understand. Cocaine is totally different from crack. </sarcasm>

But I couldn't think of a 'danger' equivalent off the top of my head. What are some examples?

Well, for starters, you hear from a lot of women who feel like their safety may be at risk because of behaviour of certain individuals they work with...

Honestly just sounds like lower middle class in America and nothing to do with the job. We don't do a great job taking care of people. Drug user, violence, psychological issues and domestic problems are rampant.

Well, you can't behave in an uncivilized manner, and then expect someone to want to pay you for the privilege of having you around. Particularly if you are also low-skilled or only have skills which are extremely common and therefore low-valued. Menial or "low-skill" labor is not low paid because we don't need it. It is low-paid because the market is perpetually glutted. If you are unable to differentiate yourself to even the tiny extent of just behaving yourself while at work, then you are of course disposable, because literally thousands or millions wait to replace you. Why would any employer want to pay you to come do drugs at work, endangering everyone there and causing them liability? They are not your Mama.

It's amazing how this thread got derailed so quickly from "The power disparity between low skill workers generates worse working conditions" to "If we treat low skill workers well, don't we have to support them doing drugs and bringing guns?"

Of course not. Allowing needles and guns at your workplace isn't friendlier to employees in general.

The discussion went from "Maybe we shouldn't fire them for trying to organize so they don't die in a pandemic" to "Whats an employer to do with 33% time thieves and drug users?" embarrassingly quickly.

Why is it embarrassing? This is really a problem which employers must deal with.

I think what Tim Bray did is heroic, I think that Amazon exploited workers way too much, all in the name of thinner overheads and lowering prices, which is the only thing their customers care about.

Tim Bray's resignation won't change things, but if we decide that Amazon's unfair and refuse to patronize them because of their employee treatment, then perhaps there will be change. However, I think there are enough people living paycheck to paycheck where that is a secondary consideration after price, and Amazon does have good prices on many things.

I, for one, will be curtailing my use of Amazon. I only used them sporadically anyway, preferring to support others, but still liked the convenience of Prime for some products. For work, I spend six figures a month with AWS, but there's no employee mistreatment there that I'm aware of.

It's embarrassing that the flow of the conversation went from "The power disparity between low and high skill labor is causing terrible working conditions" to "But the employers have to deal with theft and time theft" to "And sometimes drug use and guns" in two comments.

It's a massive derailment from the point that makes it seem like employers are unduly burdened by their employees. It reads as 'Point', 'Counterpoint' but it really isn't -- nobody is going to argue that employees should be allowed to bring drugs and guns or steal from the company.

(Although I imagine "Time theft" mentioned above includes behavior that if high skilled labor did wouldn't raise any eyebrows.)

Come on, HN is about weaving a tapestry from tangents to tangents :)

> we had a strict no drugs policy

I have news that might surprise you about how widespread hard drug use in SV programming, finance, or any "startup" area.

Zero tolerance for the phone banks but not for Elon Musk, right?

Maybe its because scooping up 100s of people at random from the population all at once and putting them in a box is asking for trouble.

Tech companies don't understand culture. The same assumption that you give a bunch of kids laptops and they'll just automatically learn to program is the same that if you give people cubicles coffee and water they'll act like docile office workers. There are things that you needed that you didn't have a line item for.

Being compelled by poverty to continue working elbow to elbow with a peer who flashes deadly weapons strikes me as fairly dehumanizing.

I'm curious why you believe this type of behavior is only found in "disadvantaged" workers. In my brief career, I've encountered several white collar workers drinking alcohol and smoking cannabis on the job, and I even stumbled across a lawyer doing cocaine in a bathroom. I've seen desk workers get canned for bringing knives to work and leaving guns in their car. I've known office workers who have stolen both time and money from our employer and who have harassed and assaulted our coworkers. I even saw someone get escorted out of the building for downloading and printing off porn from the internet. I've seen all of these from white collar workers, and I've even perpetrated some of these acts myself! So, I'm having a really hard time swallowing the proposition that "hard living" people have some monopoly on being bad employees.

I never said it's found only in those workers, my experience happens to be with workers who come from the more disadvantaged strata of society. You find many, wonderful people with a strong work ethic among them, but the rough living part is much more rough and visible - like doing heroin at work or pulling out a gun. This happens in all echelons of society, but it's just much less subtle in certain groups of people. On the upside, the people with good work ethic were promoted, got raises, and better benefits.

Thankfully no "high pay" labor ever just takes pure advantage of the environment (e.g., stealing product, stealing time, etc) ;) And never at great cost for a period of time before it is discovered.

Pay might be a factor. I think people are people, and their behavior and beliefs vary.

I completely agree, but we, as a society tend to look down more on the low paid people who do this versus the high paid ones.

Exactly, and the high paid thieves are those who can wreck the lives of millions vs the low paid thieves take an infinitesimal bit away from the bottom line of a multi billion dollar company.

"We hang the petty thieves, and appoint the great ones to public office" -Aesop

Hanging the petty thieves satisfies the crowds that are unhappy because the great thieves are robbing them blind.

Death by a thousand cuts. It is just front of mind.

People "see" the low paid thieves and their impact on themselves and others on a semi regular basis. The once in awhile "white collar crime" you might see if you turn on the news isn't top of mind.

"That guy stole $5 from ME" versus "Wal Mart uses welfare as a way to get corporate welfare and pay their employees less"

One is in the moment, and a purely emotional and potentially traumatizing experience based on circumstance.

One I may not even experience (e.g., I don't work at Wal-Mart).

The higher paid thief and the lower paid thief both steal from their companies (both of which are owned by people). Yet the higher paid thief is afforded more privilege and trust and respect. Do you see the problem yet?

I'm agreeing with you, but I'm putting a reality spin on it. It's OK to have macro views, but you can't change anything without understanding psychology of the two scenarios for the average person.

yes, that's the whole point about privilege.

Anecdotally, my friends in finance say that their chats are monitored with extreme scrutiny. You'll be written up for anything that can be perceived as screwing over your clients, even if it's an obvious joke. If this happened in any other sector, society would be quick to call this draconian. However, few people are aware of this form of micromanaging, and if they do, they recognize that it must be done.

As for people stealing time, Amazon puts people on PIP all the time.

>If this happened in any other sector, society would be quick to call this draconian.

Believe it or not, finance is under extra scrutiny.

That company has to log all chat messages in order to keep their FINRA certification, but that also means a court can subpoena and display the messages in a public trial. If they're a serious shop they will monitor and keep comms clean to the point of being Orwellian.

I worked at a major pizza chain in high school. One of the assistant managers would use his access to update his time sheet so that his login time was 12 hours off from his real login time. So if he logged in at 4pm, he would update it to really be 4am. At first glance his clock in times would look correct, but he was stealing 12 hours of wages. This went on for months before he was caught and fired.

That was the biggest thing I saw. There was a TON of smaller theft in the form of drivers faking customer complaints so that the order was freed out, even though the driver had been paid cash for the order.

I've seen a lot of the same stuff.

A of my acquaintances from my hometown worked at a large retailer through highschool. They would hide merchandise under skids in the outdoor garden center during their shift, then come back at night to recover it. They would stuff small expensive items (ie: iPods), into the advertisement trays at the front of shopping carts, then recover them once the carts were pushed out into the parking lot. They built a "fort" between two aisles in the back warehouse to take naps during their shifts.

I could give stories like this for a long time. They never got caught (to my knowledge).

Not all low-level employees are thieves. But more of them are then most people realize.

You're claiming that 1/2 to 1/3 of employees are criminally stealing time or product from their workplace. I need some robust citations for that, because it's ridiculous on its face.

When I worked at Kmart, on more than one occasion they were forced to first to fire a large number of cashiers (10+) due to stealing. And the Kmart I worked in was definitely in the 'good' part of town.

Now Kmart also paid literally the minimum wage, but it still shocked me the number of people who would steal when they clearly had video, and regularly fired people for doing so. And some of the people who stole got caught for stealing bottles of soda to drink while at work...

As for stealing time, that was much more common, but I actually never saw anyone fired for that, no matter how often they took half hour long bathroom breaks, or spent an hour putting away 5 items. I guess Kmart understood they had to put up with something when paying literally as little as possible.

Maybe if Kmart paid their employees a little more they could afford to buy themselves something to drink at work.

I think the total amount of people who steal would go down if paid more, but I think there is just a "base amount" of the population who will always do this regardless what job/how much they get paid.

If thieves figure out that stealing incentivizes the employer to pay more (in an effort to reduce stealing), they now have a new motive to steal. That is, to increase the pressure on the employer to raise wages further. This new motive can even 'feel righteous', as it benefits the other low paid workers as well.

Why pay them more when you can offer some of what they're stealing as a benefit for working there. It's probably a lot cheaper and creates goof faith.

If Kmart paid their employees more, people would shop at Walmart.

And they did. Sears paid their employees very well, and consumers rewarded sears by shopping at their new competitors that offered lower prices.

I don't think that logically follows. Costco is well-known for generous compensation and are doing well.

Costco serves a limited range of items to middle and upper middle class areas only. As it already fulfills this segment of the population that can pay a little bit extra for quality, no competitor to Costco exists.

The same dynamics exist with Nordstrom/Apple/Trader Joes. There’s a few brands that can afford to offer more quality and better paid workers, but they don’t exist in poorer parts of any city, and there’s only one of each type of store.

Everyone else has to offer the lowest prices.

Not to be nitpicky, but wouldn't Sam's Club be considered a competitor to Costco?

It is, but last I heard Walmart was downsizing Sams Club operations. I also don’t think it’s known for quality and treating its employees well like Costco is. If you put a Sams Club next to a Costco, I would bet people choose to go to Costco.

Ironically enough Sears paid their employees well until they were bought by Kmart. When Lampert (Kmart CEO) took over he cut wages and jobs at Sears and then proceeded to run the company into the ground. Customers didn’t stop shopping at Sears because employees were paid too much. Sears had more customers at the time they were paying higher wages. Customers stopped shopping at Sears because extreme cost cutting efforts by a former hedge fund manager with no retail experience eroded the company’s customer-oriented quality brand.

I think it was inevitable that Sears would lose customers to cheaper merchants. Sears was offering employees expensive defined benefit pensions and healthcare. The 80s, 90s, and 00s saw the spending power of the bottom 4 quintiles drop. Even if people wanted to support a Sears type store, they can’t afford to.

Lambert didn’t help, but I think we’re still seeing the hollowing out of the middle class causing a loss of customers for places like Sears that could have paid middle class wages and sold decent quality goods.

What actually happened to Sears: https://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroy...

We had water fountains in the back, you can always bring your own drinks, etc. It's hard to make an excuse for someone stealing a bottle of soda, a luxury.

It's not like anyone was stealing TVs, and that's what blew my mind about the stealing. It tended to be drinks and candy bars, stuff that not only was low value, but just simply wasn't necessary. It was stealing for the sake of stealing, because they thought they could get away with it.

That's an employees way of saying just how much they care about the job. It's a two way street.

They can't afford to bring an empty bottle from home and fill it with the free water from the water fountains? You surely jest. Soda is not a life necessity owed to employees. Particularly if part of your business is selling soda. Every K-Mart I every saw had an employee lounge with fridge where you could bring your own drinks or lunch and store them as well.

I worked with a gas station chain and they had a similar approach. They cumulatively lost thousands of dollars from cashiers stealing from the registers, but I guess it was less than having to pay them more? They usually recouped the stolen money through store surveillance, but still, it was a surprisingly high amount of time and effort; I figure an easier solution would be just to pay people more.

Now working with grocery stores, they commonly tell me how difficult it is to find cashiers. Pre-COVID, I was at one, and they had 10+ cashier openings, and no applicants.

My comment was pure anecdote from years spent in retail (Best Buy) and co-owning a pizza restaurant. I'll update it if it helps.

A quick google finds a number of stats referencing what I'm talking about, but probably nothing scientific. Here is an example: https://losspreventionmedia.com/theft-by-employees-more-comm...

Reliable help in "low skill" jobs (although I don't believe they are low skill) can be notoriously hard to find.

And yet wage theft (by employers) seems to be the largest form of theft in the US by far. Is it really a wonder that people would steal / slack off when they are so consistently getting screwed at their workplace?

https://www.nelp.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BrokenLawsRe...

https://www.deseret.com/2014/6/24/20543670/wage-theft-how-em...

Yep, the most egregious daily example is Wal-Mart and basically showing their employees how to apply for welfare versus paying them a livable wage. Corporate welfare at its best.

But how does an individual combat that? I personally just don't shop at Wal-Mart...

Walmart advising employees to receive benefits they are lawfully eligible for is not theft.

Neither is downloading a car, and yet, we have a highly patronizing video prepended to a lot of home video releases that disingenuously equates copyright infringement to theft.

Intentionally paying an employee less than a living wage, with the expectation that someone else will be charitable enough to make up the shortfall, is indeed not theft, but it is unethical. There is a popular movement to make that behavior illegal, via reforms to employment law.

The obvious impediment here is that poor employees have little lobbying/campaign cash, as compared with the mega-corporations that underpay their laborers. So I feel confident that "Fight for $15" and similar movements will fail without more unionization.

What? Feel free to disagree with copywrite law, or whatever.

But at the end of the day, I don't see anything wrong with helping workers take advantage of benefits that they are legally entitled to.

There's also nothing wrong with a man who rides a horse to the point of injury calling in a large-animal veterinarian to treat it, a vet whose services are paid by someone else.

But there is some question as to whether the availability of treatment allows the man to ride the horses harder, with less regard for their welfare, than would otherwise be possible.

Metaphorically, the vet should refuse to treat injuries brought on by recklessness or cruelty, unless the person responsible pays.

Unwinding the metaphor, Wal-Mart should be forced to pay the cost of entitlement programs to the extent that its employment practices make administering those programs to its workers more necessary. There are many ways that goal may be approached.

It's not "theft" by any definition of the word, but when the situation is described to the modal individual, they are likely to say "they're stealing from the welfare system!"

If you think that minimum wage should increase, or whatever, then just do that, lol.

We have that for a reason. But it should apply across the board.

Also, doing the thing that you are suggesting is basically equivalent to saying that all poor should be fired. Because that is what would happen.

I don't think it is a good idea to give companies a huge incentive to never hire poor people. What you are suggesting would just ensure that poor people get screwed over, because they would never be hired.

Opposing political positions have complicated the issue of poverty wages far beyond what is necessary. What we have, in law, is the result of a century of unproductive struggle, that branches out into other parts of the economy.

We are still living the legacy of the Great Depression, then the New Deal, and then also the attempts to unravel the New Deal.

To address your comment more directly, companies can't fire all poor people. They are needed to run the businesses (until their automaton replacements are built). But one of the reasons poor people are poor is that they cannot afford to not work for long enough to make potential employers hurt enough to offer them higher wages.

One point of a minimum wage is to put a stop on the race to the bottom for wages. Raising the minimum wage will certainly put some people out of work, many of them permanently. All those who cannot generate enough labor value to pay for the cost of their employment will lose their job, if they had one, and be unable to find other work.

But companies that require wage laborers will have to pay them enough to live on, without the fear of being undercut by someone more desperate.

But then you still have the problem of all those people who are unemployable economically, because they're just not productive enough to work for an employer, and lack the capital, credit, or capability to support themselves with self-employment.

So you have to pair minimum wage with something, so that those people don't resort to crime, the career of last resort. Whatever that is would certainly be sustainable, if and only if the employers that are setting the prevailing wages were somehow made to pay the costs of the externalities they force upon the society in which they operate, mostly brought on by ruthlessly cutting their labor costs as closely as possible to the bone, and diverting a greater proportion of their revenues to owners and managers. For the most part, for non-luxury goods and services, labor cost funnels into customer disposable income. You can't sell mass-market consumer-grade goods and services unless someone pays their workers enough to afford them.

And that's what the minimum wage does. It forces all employers into a cartel, such that everyone must pay their workers enough to survive on, plus a little extra disposable income to spend on stuff that no one needs, but requires economies of scale to exist. If the rich owner of a business likes blockbuster movies with big production budgets, they can pay the hundreds of millions of dollars all by themselves, or they and all their rich buddies can pay their workers enough that they can all afford a $10 movie ticket once in a while. If the rich owner of a business likes fine dining, they can pay for a personal chef and the upkeep for kitchen and pantry, or they and all their buddies can pay their workers enough that they can all afford a $50 meal once in a while. When Wal-Mart pays poverty wages, they are reneging on the cartel agreement. Their lowest-paid employees can't even buy a Big Mac without budgeting for it in advance, much less go to the movies or eat a steak dinner. Those employees cannot support other types of business when all their pay goes to rent, utilities, public transportation, and food.

I think that you missed the point a bit.

There is no need to do some wierd complicated scheme regarding social benefits of people who are working.

Instead of that, if you think that people aren't getting paid enough money, then you should probably just advocate for increasing the minimum wage.

I think you even kind of admitted this when you said "And that's what the minimum wage does".

If this is the case, then that is the solution. Just advocate for increasing the minimum wage.

> When Wal-Mart pays poverty wages, they are reneging on the cartel agreement.

This agreement is called the minimum wage! They are not renaging on that.

If you think the minimum wage is to low... Then the proper response is to advocate for increasing it.

Sure, but for all the talk of socialism, Walmart is a state-subsidized entity. How is that a free market?

Call it whatever you like, they're using it as a crutch to pay their employees as little as possible.

Wal-mart already pays well above the minimum wage. By your logic, they're actually saving the government billions of dollars in welfare that the government would have to pay to take care of their own citizens.

Both can be true at the same time

I suspect that those of us who worked our ways through school at menial jobs can think of many examples right off the top of our heads.

In my experience, "1/2" is too much (depending on how you define stealing). But it was quite common for both employees to steal from their employer, and for employers to steal (wages) from the employees.

It was also quite common for employees to simply walk off when they felt they'd had enough.

If you consider employee and employer a resource exchange (time and abilities for money) then theft can also be tucked in as underemployment. If a task takes 10 minutes to complete an employee intentionally draws it out to 4 hours, is that theft? They were there, they were working, but didn't do it at maximum efficiency. If an employer can afford to pay an employee $20/hr and was even expecting to but was able to get labor at $10/he, is that theft?

Those in power define the rules and define things like 'theft.' Theft in the traditional sense is taking physical tangible resources that aren't yours. When we move to intangibles like time, businesses have defined all the rules around theft, not people.

There's a handy chart out there that plots change in worker productivity and change in purchasing power by income percentile over time that answers this in a single graphic.

If a task normally takes 10 minutes, and an employee completes it in five, is that a donation of effort?

Is it theft to titrate the productivity of your labor to fit the rate of pay you receive for it? Employees do not get paid more for effort that exceeds par.

If I get paid $7/hour, I can easily reduce my productivity until one hour of my labor produces $21 for the employer. Or maybe I work two hours to produce $160 and slack off for six.

Two consecutive generations of not being rewarded for contributing additional effort for the benefit of the company has taken its toll, culturally. Nobody is willing to uphold a string work ethic for an unethical employer.

The employers burned through all their credit with labor, and are trying to refinance by redefining all the rules. It won't work. It's time for them to pay up.

> Two consecutive generations of not being rewarded

Only two? Someone skipped history class. :-)

There is an inflection point around the late seventies and early eighties which marks a huge expansion in the depredation of the upper class upon the middle and lower classes.

Prior to that point, increases in worker productivity positively correlate (at least weakly) with improvements in the purchasing power of worker wages. Afterward, working class purchasing power went flat or dropped even as their productivity shot through the roof. The owner class acquired the ability to capture everything, and they chose not to let it trickle down, by the terminology of the time. They didn't spend it. They loaned it or invested it, such that it never fully left their control.

After the abolition of slavery and advent of industrialization, labor movements have occasionally been able to claw back more of the workers' share of trade in the specialist economy, and then keep more equitable sharing of revenues going for a while afterwards, but the working class hasn't caught any breaks for a solid 40 years now, and unions are now relatively weak, compared to their historic peaks.

Prior generations got peanuts for their extra efforts, but they did at least get something.

In the US at least, businesses do have more power to get things written into law, yes, but certainly not all of the power. Minimum wage laws, for example, certainly aren't the work of business interests.

In practice, the situation is rather gray. Employers will virtually never call the police in a case of theft (or "theft")--they'll simply fire the person involved. Likewise, most employees won't do much if they're stolen (or "stolen") from by employers, they'll just quit.

We're not even consistent in the ways that we think about the topic. There has been talk of a "rent strike" during the pandemic, which amounts to stealing resources from one's landlord (who might be "rich" or might be quite "poor"). Few people would go along with the idea of a "grocery strike", in which those who need food but cannot pay simply shoplift from their local store. Somehow the former sounds more okay than the latter, even though the former would typically involve theft on a much larger scale.

And of course, most of us posting here are "stealing" from our employers in some sense. The better employers typically realize that they're better off looking the other way.

> If you've never been involved at a management or ownership level of a business that has "low pay" labor (e.g., food service, warehouse, retail sales)...

You'd think Amazon treats its "high pay" engineers on-par with other FAANGs? It is not just the warehouse workers that they are paranoid about. They're paranoid about the human nature to slack, to rest, to err, to relax, to let their guard down for a moment, to not care enough at times, to deal with life's other problems, to fail... to live.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19751016

If you can't afford to pay employees a decent wage, you shouldn't be in business. Minimum wages should be raised and nonviable businesses should adapt or go under.

Amazon is not in this category

> Minimum wages should be raised and nonviable businesses should adapt or go under.

That's a recipe for significantly increased unemployment which would affect the most vulnerable workers the most.

For most people in a low-paying job, the alternative is no job. If they were able to get higher-paying jobs they would have already done so.

Then why have a minimum wage at all?

Because, unlike what you suggested, policymakers are able to calibrate the minimum wage so it doesn't cause companies to go out of business.

Large corporations are making bigger profits than ever and the minimum wage isn't being calibrated to actually ensure a decent standard of living.

Only about 2% of hourly paid workers earned federal minimum wage or less in 2018 in the US [1]. This percentage has been dropping over the past few decades. I think this implies that minimum wage has been calibrated to be low enough that it makes little difference overall.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2018/home.htm

That's misleading because the federal minimum wage is lower than more than half of state minimum wages.

Right, because the federal minimum wage is calibrated to be low enough that it doesn't make much difference.

In Texas, where the state minimum wage is the federal minimum wage, there are still only about 3% of hourly workers earning minimum wage or less.

Because, before minimum wage, we had people being paid the price of a loaf of bread for an entire day's labor. We had people being paid in "company scrip" only spendable in the company's own store at inflated prices, instead of real national currency.

Why, indeed.

In a society with a functioning safety net, minimum wage wouldn't be necessary. That wouldn't only be better for those who can't work at all. All employees would benefit, and eventually most businesses would as well. Here in USA I'm not sure if such a safety net is possible, but I hear good things about other societies.

Right. Everyone who lives in that world knows and understands this.

People who only read about the non college degree people can have some very clueless ideas.

Purely anecdotal, but my dad has a story around this--his company wasn't doing great, and they needed to increase factory output, so one of the best ideas was to create a factory profit share amongst all the factory employees. They called a random group of employees together to run the idea by them, and after they presented, they asked them what they thought. One guy then asked, "So does this mean I have to work harder?" My dad replied something like, "Well yes, but you'll get a share of the factory's profits if you work harder." Random guy, "Well I don't want to work harder..."

I think it just puts a voice to what a lot of people think, but never say.

[edit] Sorry, to add details, they were trying to increase throughput with the same number of workers. The factory already went 24/7 under EU guidelines, so more hours were out of the question.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say with this story. But the whole "work harder" is a business euphemism for "put in more hours". It probably wasn't the words that were used. Your dad was asking someone to put in more hours, maybe miss dinners with the family, maybe work some weekends, for an unknown "share of profits". But it seems like you're presenting a worker choosing better work/life balance over higher pay as proof of laziness.

Sure one way to read this story is "I don't want to work harder" and criticizing that attitude.

Here's another way. As the worker, already working full-time, maybe you have better things to do with your life than working harder. Furthermore, the worker is probably thinking:

"If they want me to work more hours, why not pay me for more hours, including time-and-a-half overtime, per the law? Why offer a profit-share? Answer, mostly likely because the profit-share costs them less, and therefore, pays me less".

In that light, unless the factory management can explain how the extra hours they want people to work is likely to work out better for them then just getting paid for more hours, why should they accept?

In the example you are replying to, the employees are literally being promised they will be paid more for increased work.

Profit sharing at a company that "wasn't doing great" is not a promise to be paid more.

That story describes random employees being asked to become investors, speculators, silent partners in the business. Here are the conditions:

* you do lots of work now, up front

* you have no say in the business

* you have no say in the investment returns, for example, if profits are made, management can just give themselves higher salaries that come straight out of your share of returns

* your investment isn't portable or recoupable, if you leave it's nothing

* if management is bad, it's also nothing

* you're skeptical of current management

Should you invest your time in this business?

I think we all need to re watch the Office Space meeting with the Bobs!

This is why cooperatives are so much better for food service. Set up the incentives to align the success of the business and the honesty of the employees.

> This makes companies take extreme policy measures...

Governing to the lowest denominator is just poor management.

> ...because the financial impact is so disproportionate...

For who? Bob "steals" an hour of overtime worth $25 but he's still in your facility at your disposal. God forbid...

> "If you pay me more I won't act like this"

This I agree with. You get what you pay for. Period.

> But depending on the business (e.g., a local pizza place) there is no affording that.

So why is it alright to allow a failing business who can't create value in the workforce is allowed (and enabled) to stay open so it can ruin more lives and create more misery? Surely there's a decent pizza place around the corner that's well managed, creates value for employees, and deserves the business. Instead we crutch along shitty businesses for no reason. Case in point, at a debate in 2016 a woman asked Bernie Sanders how she would continue to grow her business if she had to offer her employees health insurance. She would have to scrap plans to open a second location.

I'm sorry, but if your first location can't sustain itself and create a meaningful work environment maybe nobody needs that second location of yours. Get health coverage for your existing workforce before you go hiring more.

Have you owned a margin strained small business before? Or had any experience working in a margin strained retail environment where your only competitive lever is price?

> Governing to the lowest denominator is just poor management.

Nevertheless, this is what happens. If you're running a low margin store of 50 employees, as a store general manager you notice one bad employee more and complain upwards about it. Hiring/retraining costs money. Granted this is a long time ago but I recall our training/hiring cost per employee at a Best Buy store to be in the thousands of dollars.

If you're Best Buy you can afford to pay people more (they just are also being responsible to their Wall Street numbers), but an independent restaurant can't just turn the price lever without other impacts, and no, in the cases I'm familiar with, the owner is not making high wage. Some of them are lucky to make over $50-60k/yr and correctly re-invest in their business.

> For who? Bob "steals" an hour of overtime worth $25 but he's still in your facility at your disposal. God forbid...

Depending on the company, yes, one employee stealing anything can have more of an impact on your company than you realize. Especially if it goes on awhile without anyone noticing.

> I'm sorry, but if your first location can't sustain itself and create a meaningful work environment maybe nobody needs that second location of yours. Get health coverage for your existing workforce before you go hiring more.

First, health care is expensive. I work for a $4B company and my benefits are not great. My healthcare is expensive per-paycheck in my opinion.

Let's discuss your Bernie example/quote further. Let's say you enforced what you're talking about. Say an independent Pizza shop charges $20 for a large pizza, Pizza Hut/Dominos charges $18. But I can charge $2 more because of my quality, but I still have high food costs because I don't have franchise buying power. But I already have less sales because I don't have brand recognition and/or the marketing power that a national franchise does.

Also, at least in my friend's cases, they also pay their employees more than minimum wage out of the gate. IIRC they get paid fairly well for a pizza place, he also has employees that have been there for years and he pays them accordingly.

OK cool, I'll increase my wage, and I'll buy everyone health insurance. Now I have to charge $22 or $25 for the same pizza. Maybe my customers are loyal and just deal with it, maybe not. What happens if not? Then I close my business, now not only are my employees unemployed but so am I.

Say you make the same change to the big franchise, their costs only go up to $19-$20 for the pizza that cost $18 before. At the extreme still $5 less than I was charging.

Obviously the example gets more complex if everyone gets the same wage increase, right? Then you're just sort of raising the water line.

I think it's super complex, honestly. Especially having managed this on the "Big Business" and small business sides.

That being said:

> This I agree with. You get what you pay for. Period.

Not in all cases is my point, some people are just awful humans. He's had some of his employees (whom he pays well in comparison) steal food and money straight out of the register.

I agree with this. It's not about business owners needing to be more moral (although at the top of the economy maybe that would help a little). The problem is the economic system is based on competition, which means that in the workplace, anything that is good for ordinary people is ground down forever in the name of efficiency. If the boot is ever taken off when there are viable competitors present, the company will be destroyed and the competitor will buy its equipment and hire its staff at rock bottom prices.

This is why structuring the economy based on competition is brutal and inhumane.

My contemporary example since quarantine started is exactly Amazon. Have you tried the e-commerce experience ANYWHERE else? Haha.

I tried ordering things from Home Depot for instance (I have extra time on my hands, might as well fix up the house). If it's not available in store, they quoted week+ shipping time.

Amazon had it to me in 3-4 days.

Obviously Home Depot had little to no incentive to do better shipping until now.

> Instead we crutch along shitty businesses for no reason.

The cost of healthcare to employers has more than tripled over the last 17 years[1]. We're not "crutching them along," we are passively watching as opportunities to grow are eroded by rising costs.

[1] - https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BF-AU065A_INSUR_9...

If pizza costs more than a certain amount, I am eating at home, and so are a lot of other people, leaving a lot of restaurants, who exist on thing margins already, to close.

so basically the invisible hand will take action and adjust to this more sustainable conditions (and now don't tell me, that a system, where a lot of people are obese and opioid-dependent, is sustainable...)

Even worse is when you evaluate hiring. It isn't unusual for a high-turnover entry-level type employer to have 15% or less of candidates who agree to fill a position still employed with the company 6 months later.

The pure drag of having to deal with this, especially when it comes to all of the paperwork required, by law, to be completed with every single new hire makes this alone a huge expense.

The vast majority of those employees left of their own will, not because they were fired. Usually when the leave, there is no notice. They just don't show up leaving management short handed and wondering whether the employee will show up the next day. Consequently, the policy can be to over-staff so that whenever some percentage isn't showing up the employer can still meet production needs.

The employer cannot simply increase prices and pay people better. For the most part, employers already have prices at the highest their customers are willing to pay. Setting prices higher will result in loss of customers, less profit, then layoffs or business closure.

Employees at this level are astoundingly uninterested in performing well, or, in other words, there is a reason they are working entry-level positions. This makes management yet more difficult because managers may have to become near micro-managers of cat herds trying to get the company to produce whatever it is supposed to produce.

Wait, so the complaint is that not enough people are getting stuck in your low-paid dead-end job? They're finding a better job and leaving?

Is it less expensive constantly hiring and training new people than it would be to pay enough to retain employees you already have?

No, they are usually not finding a better job. They usually got too high, slept too long, had a family incident, or just "didn't feel like it". They usually go to another very similarly low-paid job. At this level of the employment market (Wal-Mart stockers, gas stations, big fast food chain kitchens), employers and employees both see each other as disposable and interchangeable. It is a two-way street.

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