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Comment by aminozuur | Hacker News Reader

I agree it's a luxury to live well without needing an alarm. But "killing" low wage jobs (how?), might put people in even worse situations.

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We could "kill" low wage jobs by making sure that 35h a week pay enough for yourself and a child or two.

You can start a company and pay your otherwise underpaid employees whatever you want. Be the change you want to see in the world.

If you see companies using child labour, the solution obviously isn't to start your own company that doesn't exploit children just to prove a point. This stuff is regulated for a reason. You could argue that an employer should be able to offer any wage they want, but the argument against it is that people on poverty wages then have to use public assistance to survive. So essentially private companies use public money to have cheap labour which they wouldn't be able to access otherwise - that's obviously not ok either.

Why do you assume I have not done this? (I have)

My main point about this article is that it's not considering why we are roped into an alarm clock culture - it's not because we want to be woken up this way, it's because sometimes it's an economic necessity.

You don't fix races to the bottom by individual action.

This is exactly how you do it! If everyone is encouraged to take responsibility and make a good life for them and their family, a society will improve massively.

If you run a company that produces something, but your competitor undercuts your prices by half because they don't pay taxes, dump their waste in a river and hire children, you doing all things right will have absolutely zero impact on fixing the situation. You will be priced out of the market because you can't possibly compete with someone who has lower costs through illegal actions. Again, the answer is regulation, not hoping that people will behave morally and decently out of the goodness of their hearts.

The answer can sometimes be -good- regulation. But another solution would be to employ a skin in the game approach. If a company behaves in this way, they will be sued to the heavens, therefore discouraging this kind of behavior.

Besides, the way the regulatory system works now, new regulations only seem to benefit large corporations who can afford to lobby and get around the regulations. They actively hurt small businesses.

Companies have no family and making a good life for themselves means externalizing as many costs as possible on society. You might enjoy skimming this very long essay https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...

How do you propose doing that?

Minimum wage increases?

Why not increase the minimum wage to $10,000 an hour?

Yeah why not? I mean you're doing an argumentum ad absurdum but you have the right idea.

Minimum wage and employee protection laws are the way forward. Everybody should be able to live comfortably, working at most 40 hours / week.

Minimum wage is bad in its own way, because it sets a "what is the least we can get away with" boundary for employers, but in the current employment climate, employers can and do get away with paying less (see the service industry where employees are expected to collect tips to stipend their wages, see the gig industry where the employer doesn't give a shit that the employee has to struggle full days to get enough work to get paid).

> Everybody should be able to live comfortably, working at most 40 hours / week.

What if they aren’t productive enough to earn that amount of money? Where does the money come from?

Other people of course. Just like for people who can't work at all, for example because their health doesn't allow it.

How is this any different to a welfare state, then?

It's not any different. If by "welfare state" you mean "a decent social safety net". Which the USA should definitely have.

Why does it need to be different from a welfare state?

I don't think you have a picture of what a welfare state is. Sometimes it helps to take it to the extreme:

You have millions of people sitting in their government provided housing, waiting for their government provided payouts, so they can avoid having to get out and work. This sound familiar yet? Then what you have to do, after production grounds to a halt, is to start to force people to work which is exactly how you get labor camps.

Ah yes, the well known labour camps of Scandinavia.

I'm pretty sure you may be trolling but if you're not, reading up on the western european welfare states would probably be a good idea.

I was taking it to the extreme as I said above. Obviously it is possible to have a country that has welfare without labor camps. I was merely trying to point out that by having unemployment benefits, you actively discourage people to get jobs and essentially tax payers pay for people to not work.

At least in the UK, we have an inordinate amount of benefits cheats that live off other people's money. If you only extend benefits to people who physically cannot work -i.e. disability benefits, then you stop this happening.

> At least in the UK, we have an inordinate amount of benefits cheats that live off other people's money

...

> perceptions among the British public were that benefit fraud was high – on average people thought that 27% of the British welfare budget is claimed fraudulently; however, official UK Government figures have stated that the proportion of fraud stands at 0.7% of the total welfare budget in 2011/12

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_fraud_in_the_United_...

Sorry but my definition of a benefit cheat is much more liberal than the government's:

> Fraud: Cases where all three of the following conditions apply:

The conditions for receipt of benefit, or the rate of benefit in payment, are not being met

The claimant can reasonably be expected to be aware of the effect on entitlement

Benefit stops or reduces as a result of the review. [1] <

Firstly, the data is only from those who got caught. I would say there is probably a lot more that haven't been. Also, you can claim benefits by going to the job centre every so often, but you don't need to actually get a job.

Anecdotally, my mate's dad does this. He has been living off of benefits for 10+ years, even though he is more than able to work. If someone can get away with it for that long, how is the system not broken?

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/fraud-and-error-in-...

I think this argument makes sense in white collar jobs, but productivity in blue collar jobs is very scalable by capital (e.g. automation). People without much qualifications can make a multiple if there are adequate jobs.

It's a real good thing that all of the money was imaginary in the first place. It can come from wherever. It's just a means to allocate the resources that actually hold the value, but is not valuable itself.

That’s a false argument. Pretty much every employee is productive enough to be living a decent life. The same can’t be said about their bargaining power.

With globalized world, many of us compete with people and companies from places with much lower total cost of life.

You can definitely manufacture an umbrella or a car cheaper in China or Serbia than in the U.S.

This means that there is a natural ceiling on wages in some sectors, unless people start "Buy American" even if the price of the product is considerably higher. Which, in turn, will lower their own purchasing power.

As seen in practice, most customers would rather purchase cheaper stuff made abroad by cheaper workforce. The E.U. has a lot of protective measures in various sectors precisely because they know that the same would happen if the restrictions were lifted.

The problem with people who think like this is you forget that economics is not a science. Economics exists inside of politics.

What happens time and time again if the working class has it too rough in a country with a sizable 'aristocratic' class just below the ruling class?

Not much; people live with it. Revolutions happen when people see an improvement in their living standards halt or go into reverse. Invoking a past golden age is reactionary in effect if not in intent.

Pretty much the first thing about economics. You have/raise a minimum wage, consumer prices inflate and then it costs more to live with that minimum wage.

What do you want to do, keep raising it every year? The market will outrun the government. This kind of thinking is how you end up with a welfare state, where the only way people can live is with their pitiful stimulus check from the government. People want to earn their own money not freeload of other taxpayers whilst sitting on the couch.

I am not going to be that guy that points out a problem and doesn't propose a solution though. The solution is cut back corporation tax and regulation and make it easier for companies to hire people. This of course is what made the west as great as it is today.

I'm not sure whether you're joking or not. Just have a look at rich countries other than the US how they treat workers and what the rate of people having more than one job but still living in poverty is.

Not really, in countries with reasonable sized minimum wage (say 1/2 of median wage) only small percentage of workers have minimum wage.

>You have/raise a minimum wage, consumer prices inflate and then it costs more to live with that minimum wage.

I've never understood why people continue to make this argument when there are easily demonstrable counter-examples to the "But you won't be able to afford anything!!!" line of thought.

Look at countries like Switzerland, or even in the US there is Washington DC where minimum wage is $15, and society isn't collapsing.

Have you been to Switzerland? If you had, you would understand that exactly what I said would happen has happened has happened there.

No society wouldn't collapse with a minimum wage, that is not my argument. Logic would dictate that if everyone in a town was making $15 an hour then prices would naturally increase. How can you not see this?

>Have you been to Switzerland?

Yes, I live in Switzerland.

Is it more expensive to go to a restaurant than in America? Yes, sure, but at least the people working there can have a good quality of life and don't rely on tips to pay rent. Prices of things that involve service are higher, true, but wages are good enough here that you can still live really well.

Maybe the average person can't afford to eat out every day of the week, but should they be able to? I feel like this is only possible if you underpay service staff.

Yeah, fair. But perhaps higher minimum wages, and no zero hour contacts? Better worker protections?

If economic survival requires depletion of your sleep (which is so important), it's highlighting an imbalance in the overall system.

Higher minimum wage is not without problems.

If someone is not highly skilled and works low end jobs, he could be left jobless if minimum wage increases. Some businesses already have low profitability and they can't absorb an increase in minimum wage.

I know where you are getting from but I don't see a simple solution. UBI might help but from my perspective the cost of UBI is too large to pull off in any normal economy (petro states in the gulf can probably pull it off).

That's a risk, but I don't think it's as big as you think it is; it implies that an employer already has more staff than they need to have.

Social safety nets is another thing that needs to be improved though. I don't believe in UBI myself, I think (and I'm not an economist) that the cost of living will just go up by an equal amount, negating the whole thing. It seems to work on a small scale, but cost of living is not changed significantly if only a small section of a country receives UBI.

Anyway, back to unemployment, in theory automation causes unemployment too, but in practice, while people lose jobs over automation, the overall unemployment rate is not significantly affected. Or in other words, there's always more work to be done.

> If someone is not highly skilled and works low end jobs, he could be left jobless if minimum wage increases.

If you made this argument 100 years ago I might be inclined to agree with you, but "reasonable" minimum wages (i.e.: a 40h/week job pays always enough to feed a family and a roof over your head) have been tried and tested in countries all over the world and as far as I'm aware, they're almost always a success.

The 'low skill worker' losing job opportunities because of too high minimum wages is a myth that just doesn't hold up to reality, no matter how many times conservatives afraid of losing their own bottom line or relative status repeat it.

It may have less of an effect than it is claimed, in some jobs the demand is there regardless of wages, so any increase in cost gets transferred to the consumer. If your janitor gets a 20% increase, it is doubtful he will get sacked because he is needed. But if the same happens to a person packing boxes or working and McDonalds, he might lose a job to overseas or a new automated machine.

If you take it to extreme, it's obvious it's not a myth. Imagine a 100k USD yearly minimum wage. Obviously all unskilled worked wouldn't be able to earn this much for the employed, but in places where you have to have someone do the job, they'd enjoy their new high minimum wage.

You might be interested in this article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opinion/sunday/us-denmark... (note that technically, Denmark has no minimum wage - but mechanism that essentially enforce the same)

A few quotes here:

> Starting pay for the humblest burger-flipper at McDonald’s in Denmark is about $22 an hour once various pay supplements are included.

> Americans might suspect that the Danish safety net encourages laziness. But 79 percent of Danes ages 16 to 64 are in the labor force, five percentage points higher than in the United States.

While the argument might be overblown in many cases you can’t really deny that many South/South-Western European countries have huge youth unemployment rates, especially in low incomes areas, which can at least partially be attributed to minimum wage laws.

I find the assumption so very silly that you could imply increase wages for everyone and everything else would stay the same. Sorry, I can't help saying that.

But very well, let's assume it could work that way. Then you still haven't changed anything about the need for alarm clocks or work at inconvenient hours. So talking about minimum wage is really besides the point here.

Even high paid physicians have to work ungodly hours at times.

Well, one way of killing low wage jobs is to turn them into high wage jobs.

How, exactly? How do you propose making low wage jobs generate enough revenue to become high wage jobs?

Or do you mean to apply this rule only to large, profitable corporations and spare the mom-and-pop shops and other small businesses that are already having trouble staying open?

Low wage jobs are already being replaced by high wage jobs, but not 1:1. There are already higher wage jobs programming the machines that automate away a dozen low wage jobs. I'm guessing that wasn't what you meant by "turn into" though.

It's a solution people come up with when they think in one dimension.

Increase minimum wage = no poverty

When in reality, for some people it would be: Increase minimum wage = they get fired and can't find a job, end up homeless.

If people without a job end up homeless something is seriously wrong with the social safety net.

What do you think happens with single people renting when they lose their income?

Where I live social security kicks in.

We had a minimum wage increase in my country recently. I met a bunch of people that went from having from full time to part time contracts cause their employer could not afford the increase. For about two months. After that what the employer could not afford was part time workers, and everybody got full time back.

> How do you propose making low wage jobs generate enough revenue to become high wage jobs?

They don't have to; it should be a factor of the overall company's revenue. If you take an infamous company like Amazon, they have 1.3 million employees worldwide generating 386 billion in revenue; that's nearly $300K per employee of revenue generated. Surely there's room there to pay people more.

But why would they? If they had to pay warehouse workers twice as much, what makes you think they wouldn't try to automate away even more jobs?

Companies rarely exist to give employees more money; their goal is to increase the wealth of their owners.

You're so close but you just haven't made the leap yet.

> But why would they? If they had to pay warehouse workers twice as much, what makes you think they wouldn't try to automate away even more jobs?

Good. We should automate away more jobs. More automation means people can work less hours, get more sleep, and pursue things that do not provide direct financial rewards but still enrich society. This is what we should be working towards.

The only problem with that is if the value of that automation only enriches a few people at the top. But that is not an inherent problem. The solution is simple: progressive income and wealth taxes. These can pay for universal basic income and other safety nets that provide for the people whose jobs have been replaced with automation.

> These can pay for universal basic income and other safety nets that provide for the people whose jobs have been replaced with automation.

And after that what? Continue taxing the highly productive people, while letting those whose jobs were automated away, live the rest of their lives doing nothing?

People really don't like to do nothing. Of course there will always be people that do, but they are certainly not that large of a group. There are also plenty of things that need doing that don't produce resources or money. If by doing nothing you mean not sacrificing their lives to do menial tasks then yes, I would prefer most people do nothing. That isn't what would happen though.

Revenue is a bad measure for a retailer, as it includes the cost of all the goods they sell. Net income reports the difference and was $152.76 billion for the year you report.

That's still close to $120,000 per employee, so plenty of room to pay people more.

The next step would be to look at the segmented results, to see whether there is a significant difference in net income per employee across the company (It's fine if a high margin operation inside of Amazon ends up supporting a lower margin operation, but you wouldn't want to build economic policy on the assumption that businesses would do that).

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