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Comment by moonchild | Hacker News Reader

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.

> 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.

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).

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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