I don’t see any value in mandating it.
Can you explain why you feel that way? It just seems like something similar to price transparency to me.
How can anyone come between me and another adult trying to exchange services and money like this? It’s kind of insane if you think about it through that lens.
If you wanna pay your neighbor's kid $15 for 3 hours of lawn mowing, you still can. Unmediated transactions of a certain scale don't require any government oversight, it's only when you start breaking out taxable income that it become a problem.
That's illegal just unlikely to be enforced.
The fact that it isn't enforced doesn't make it not-illegal.
What is this scale? As far as I know you only get away with this because no one knows or cares to enforce the law in that case. But police have been known to shut down kids lemonade stands for not having all the right permits, so I don't believe this is actually true in the law.
I would be happy if this was the case: I used to hire people all the time to do odd jobs for me, but I feel like it's too costly and too legally risky to actually be worth it for me, so I just don't do it anymore. And the people I used to hire aren't exactly relieved.
Can you, though, legally? Or is it just unlikely that you'd get in trouble for it?
This also raises the question of why it's even ok to do this. Isn't this is why labor laws exist? I imagine if you called up a local landscaping company and asked them to come do 3 hours of lawn mowing, they'd charge you something on the order of $300. I think it's pretty safe to say that they're not doing 20x the work your neighbor's kid would do, or would do it 20x better. Even if you were to find an adult handyman on Craigslist or whatever, I expect you're not paying less than $15/hr for that, and often will be paying quite a bit more.
So for some reason it's socially acceptable to pay kids a pittance because they have no leverage or negotiating power, and because they're "learning responsibility" (sounds like "we should be able to use your professional photographs for free because it gives you exposure" or "this unpaid internship will give you valuable experience!"), and well... they're just kids, so who cares? It's kinda gross when I think about it.
When I was in high school (14-17 years old), I was a referee for my local youth soccer club. I took the same training (with annual refreshers) the adults took, worked alongside them, and got paid the same amount for the same work. The pay varied by the age level of players (older kids play longer games and the expectations for referee rigor are higher), but for most games ended up being around $25-30/hr, which was pretty good for a part-time weekend job in the mid/late 90s.
The worker needs to work to make money to buy food and shelter. Without a minimum wage, unskilled labor reaches a race to the bottom on wages. It's exploitative to allow an employer to pay $1/hr because no matter how low you go, you'll find someone willing to accept less because they're that desperate to survive.
Minimum wage basically states "A human's time is worth at least this"
(If you don't think those sorts of things need solutions, then I expect we're not going to find any common ground, though.)
> It’s kind of insane if you think about it through that lens.
No, it's not. If that's the case, then you also have to believe that any kind of regulated commerce is insane, and I don't think that's a reasonable position to take.
So basically, you as a tax payer, as subsidizing someone's business so they can have cheap labour.
It's kind of insane if you think about it through that lens. Social benefits exist to help those who fall on hard times, not to give shitty companies cheap workers.
This law vaguely benefits workers who are nowhere near the poverty line. Just let the employee and employer figure out wages!
Unless I'm misunderstanding it, Colorado's new law applies to salaried jobs in all income brackets. For someone who's poor and desperately job hunting, knowing whether a job's salary range is 20k-30k versus 25k-35k before having to go through a gauntlet of interviews sounds like it could make a big difference.
But to be clear, you're just saying one of those is OK for the government to do and the other isn't. That's not an argument. Do you have some rationale behind that, like a philosophy or a reference to some constitutional clause? Or is that just how you feel?
At that end of the market the pay rates are generally pretty transparent anyway, because there's no negotiation and no "10x dishwasher" that the company worries about deterring if they disclose what the existing staff earn.
One company can go pretty long without hiring a given position.
One person cannot go very long without taking a job.
It is a detriment to the worker to not have good salary information, and the cards are clearly stacked in the employers' favor. Thus, government action.
I also think it's useful for consumers to know how many calories are in their food.
And for small restaurants, the overhead of computing calories is actually onerous. They are exempt.
With wages, the bar is that you must pay the minimum. Anything more I think is onerous and not the role of government to get involved in, and should not be applied.
Companies are the ones gaining from the market failure. Why would they want to empower employees to better know their worth? Obviously companies don't want to support legislation that hurts their bottom line, even if it makes markets more efficient.