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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently working for a company that forces office staff to work a half day on christmas eve with the additional stipulation, of course, that you must burn a full day of vacation to skip it. This despite the fact that no one in the company can ever remember a customer calling on christmas eve.

So I'm very skeptical that this trend will grow. It took the IWW to get us the concepts of The Weekend and Sick Days, and I expect it will take nothing less extreme to claw back any more of our time from the corporate slave-driving overlords. Absent a few easily-dismissed outliers, of course.

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On the opposite end of the spectrum, the company I work for shuts our offices down from the 24th to the 2nd. Engineers submit availability for on-call schedules, and get a gift card for each on-call day they're responsible for. I feel very spoiled, but I think this is generally a trend amongst west-coast tech companies?

I've had a similar experience at previous places, and it seemed like the rationale for the holiday shutdown was "we don't want to risk any downtime while lots of engineers are out and potentially unreachable if something breaks". All that is to say, if it's within your power to leave, the grass is potentially much greener elsewhere.

The real rationale is to remove a metric shitton of accrued PTO from their books if paying out PTO on employee departure is something the company does.

Hmm... in a few companies I've worked holiday shutdown was not coming out of PTO budget.

How does shutting down the office remove PTO obligations?

I worked at a company where we had 10 days of vacation + the office shut down for the last week of the year. Nobody had to use vacation time during that 1-week shutdown. If anything, it increased PTO accrued obligations because nobody had to use their PTO for time off during that week.

It varies by company. Accrued PTO is carried on the balance sheet as a liability, since it's owned to employees and would generally have to be paid out in cash if the employee is terminated. Reducing that liability makes several financial metrics look better. Some companies shut down for a week and require employees to use up their accrued PTO (or take unpaid leave). Other companies give it "free" essentially as company holidays. There's no right or wrong here, it's just one of many factors you have to consider when deciding where to work.

Worked at a company that would do that (using PTO or unpaid) with a couple months notice.. really messes with any vacation plans you might have made before you've been there long enough to accrue significant PTO!

In my experience xmas to NY holiday shutdowns are more likely to not come out of individual PTO, but I'm sure this varies.

We do something like this now, and the rationale is that it's a positive experience for the staff, gives everyone a bit of a break, and you only "lose" days that nobody was very focused in anyway.

Our office shutdown doesn't use PTO, either.

My friends in agency life used to have their office shutdown from the time of the holiday party, until the new year. Which was about 2 to 2.5 weeks.

My office shutdown this year is three full weeks, from the 20th to the 7th. Nobody is burning PTO.

Where I work everyone gets Dec 24 - Jan 2nd off, "for free." You can also take PTO along with it if you want a longer break.

As long as "elsewhere" is SV or some other big city, that grass will never be green enough for me.

SV is a big suburbs, not a city. SF (and Oakland) are medium sized cities.

San Jose is over a million people. That counts as "big" in the US, I think? 10th most populous.

The "suburbs" between SJ-SF-Oakland range from very dense urban areas, to very sparse (and expensive) bedroom communities, to uninhabited (protected land) areas.

I think it's fair to loosely characterize SV as a big city, from almost all US perspectives.

> corporate slave-driving overlords

> big city, that grass will never be green enough for me

Take your pick, I guess. I like cities, and I certainly don't want to feel like I'm a slave.

It isn't uncommon in industrial situations to shut the plant down for two weeks or so around Christmas/New Years.

Since A: The staff want it off and B: It gives a good window to do heavy maintaince and such

Who does that maintenance?

Hopefully split off among staff so nobody works more than 1 or 2 days during those 2 weeks off, plus they get a bonus.

My employer does this, and is the only one in town who does. It isn't deducted from our 4 week of vacation either. Its the only reason I stick around despite subpar pay.

It turns out the HR books are right and pay isn't the primary consideration after a certain point. The problem is that most HR people take that and say, "We're already soooo generous, we already offer unlimited vacation (lol), so we don't have to pay people too!"

Once you have a full time employee who is "the HR person" who has a department to run, and has OKRs, unless there is absolutely stellar company culture pushing for the contrary, that's it, that's the end, all your good benefits are going to get micromanaged away.

> we already offer unlimited vacation (lol),

I offered unlimited vacation in every business I started or ran since 1989.

But the abusive bullshit many companies have pulled while claiming “unlimited vacation” has justifiably made people cynical. This stated policy has become a warning sign instead of a benefit.

So in my new company we have a written policy four weeks but there is no way to track it (where the law permits this). sigh

I have worked 3 places with unlimited vacation, and there was zero pressure to not take vacation.

One company specifically said they we needed to get our asses out of the office because they saw people not taking at least 3 weeks a year.

That’s how it’s supposed to be.

> On the opposite end of the spectrum

I'm so stockholm-syndromed into typical corporate apathy, I'd probably feel so weirded out if I found out myself in such an environment I wouldn't be able to handle it like somebody who spent 50 years in prison is unable to cope with the reality of life on the outside.

This is probably a silly question, but she not just give the cash value of a gift card instead of a gift card itself? I've heard from people who work in HR that gift cards given to employees are still taxable as income for the value as if it were cash, but maybe that's changed or just a conservative interpretation of IRS guidelines.

I personally believe that the government should focus on a shorter workweek rather than minimum wage increases in the near term.

If we shorten the nominal workweek to 36 hours before overtime is required (and encourage this to be in the form of 4x9 or 9/2 * 8):

* Supply of labor will fall, increasing equilibrium pay for everyone

* Everyone's quality of life goes up

* Traffic and environmental impacts from commuting should improve (a little).

* It's a better hedge against automation and outsourcing than artificially increasing the minimum price of labor.

You need both: A minimum wage ensures a wage of enough income someone can pay for basic needs (housing, food, health, etc) and ratcheting down the work week distributes productivity gains of capital to workers in aggregate. The former is, arguably, more tenable politically at the moment ("Fight for $15" and so on), the latter likely in the future as the electorate (and the beliefs around work and its contribution to someone's identity) evolves. Increasing the minimum wage would also lift ~20 million people out of poverty (at the cost of about 1.4 million jobs) per the US CBO [1] [2] [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...

[2] https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2021-02/56975-Minimum-Wage....

[3] https://www.npr.org/2021/02/08/965483266/-15-minimum-wage-wo...

I agree that one needs both and that they serve complementary purposes.

But a minimum wage is useful to the extent that there are jobs for your lowest skill, least desirable workers. And ensuring that may take reducing the work week.

Higher minimum wage laws do hurt low skilled workers. We have two great big machines at work each will pay for it's self in under a year at current minimum wage rates. There is no choice but to replace the people for machines if we want to remain competitive.

It is a win-win. They force other businesses who can't buy a machine to pay a higher floor. If no jobs exist at all those voters will bring in someone who will tax companies like yours and spread the wealth. Your company gets more productive.

Paying some a lower wage because it delays another machine purchase is not a long term solutiom

> If no jobs exist at all those voters will bring in someone who will tax companies like yours and spread the wealth.

And those companies will calculate the ROI for moving into a lower tax burdensome area. After the company leaves the people wont have a job or the tax revenue.

Which is why all companies move to Somalia rather than say California

No one lives in California; it's too crowded.

I hear Hargeisa is nice these days.

Tesla? Some companies are leaving California.

That job was not a long term position most would either move on or up. People are more flexible than machines. They're a better choice if you can afford it.

Living off of redistributed hand outs sounds like a horrible way to live. How do you improve your life? How do you find meaning?

I live in a country that has 3rd generation beneficiaries. Their lives don't appear enjoyable. Once in that mind set it's so hard to get out. They often turn to drugs and mindless entertainment.

You're on a site full of motivated self-learners who would hopefully use that free time to improve their selves and contribute to far more interesting, useful, and fulfilling things than making the widgets the machine can make.

Most of us also probably live in countries where a significant fraction of the population would choose Playstation/Netflix/heroin instead. That's their choice, but you're probably right that much of it is learned behavior. Perhaps some significant resources (government funded or volunteered) should be applied toward teaching people how to make better use of their free time, if that's what they want.

It's certainly a better vision than making widgets 40 hours a week for a company with dubious social impact.

If the machines can replace people then they will replace people regardless. Its a capex vs opex decision and capex is almost always better in the long run. That's why that argument is a bit of a red herring.

Self checkout came regardless of whether the state had a minimum wage increase or not. As soon as the technology was mature enough it was rolled out.

We should consider thinking of those jobs not as lowest skill, but jobs where the workers have the lowest negotiating power.

They go hand in hand.

Why do the workers have the lowest negotiating power in these jobs? It's because they are the most easily replaced and the net benefit from employing them is smallest.

[There are some edge cases, where a field is swamped from people doing the job for the love of it... But this is not the typical case.]

Isn't the whole point of the minimum wage that the federal / state / local governments are the negotiator of last resort?

I.e. people with minimum wage jobs would be paid even less, but for the government using its power to negotiate for them

> Isn't the whole point of the minimum wage that the federal / state / local governments are the negotiator of last resort?

Yes. And it's a necessary thing to have.

On the other hand... if someone is doing work that returns $15.50/hour on average to the business, and is employed at $10/hour, raising the minimum wage to $15/hour doesn't get that person a raise: it gets them laid off.

The things that IMO really help the fundamentals are:

* Raising the demand for low-skill labor (e.g. economic growth above productivity improvements)

* Raising the average skill level of the workforce, and/or

* Reducing the supply of labor.

> On the other hand... if someone is doing work that returns $15.50/hour on average to the business, and is employed at $10/hour, raising the minimum wage to $15/hour doesn't get that person a raise: it gets them laid off.

No, what it does is it causes prices to go up, which are amortized across all of society - between both people who are paid $15/hour, and people who are paid $150/hour.

On average, it is a small wealth transfer from the average person to the working poor.

> No, what it does is it causes prices to go up, which are amortized across all of society

It does both of these things. Some jobs are lost and some prices go up.

Some tasks are better off outsourced, automated, or not even done at all as the floor price on labor increases. Raising minimum wages here hurts. Shortening the work week helps.

The demand for some tasks is inelastic but easily performed by many different people. The price of these tasks increases in proportion to minimum wage. Raising minimum wages here helps the employees, and shortening the work week is a small hurt.

Some tasks already have an equilibrium price well above minimum wage due to a supply limitation of the capable labor. Raising minimum wages here is relatively neutral. Shortening the work week should increase compensation here and increase the motivation for employers to find ways to bring more lower skill people into the field.

Most things are somewhere between these extremes.

> No, what it does is it causes prices to go up, which are amortized across all of society - between both people who are paid $15/hour, and people who are paid $150/hour.

Do people who are paid 10x necessarily consume 10x over a person paid minimum wage? If raising the minimum wage causes across the board price increases (aka inflation), then those whose income is lower are affected more since a higher percentage of their income is spent on essential consumption (food, water, shelter).

If the operational concept is "small wealth transfer" to the folks earning the lowest income using inflation as a stealth tax then it is a highly regressive tax.

Using polling data for 31,869 households in thirty-eight countries and allowing for country effects, we show that the poor are more likely than the rich to mention inflation as a top national concern.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2673879

> Do people who are paid 10x necessarily consume 10x over a person paid minimum wage?

Even if their consumption was 1x, my point would still stand. Most people aren't earning minimum wage, nor are their salaries affected by minimum wage increases. This means that the cost of most products does not increase as minimum wages increase.

Minimum wage increase money comes from somewhere, and since ~everyone relies on minimum wage workers, that means that ~everyone pays for that wage increase.

If you take a dollar away from 100 people, and split half the resulting money between the 10 poorest in that group, and the other half between the next 20, it's a regressive tax, with a progressive benefit that has a net benefit for the poorest. Minimum wage increases work the same way. The rich lose very little, the middle class lose some, the poor win.

Are there better ways of structuring this sort of thing? Theretically yes, but practically, the rich are really, really good at protecting themselves from wealth redistribution. If you're going to hold the poor hostage to them, you're never going to get anything done.

The stealth taxation of inflation affects the lowest 30 in the 100 the most in order to pay the lowest 10. The change in purchase power is not like taxing everyone $1. Whether it’s like taxing on a sliding scale from low to high income that is $1 to $.5 or $1 to $0, I don’t know, just $1 across the board isn’t right. There are probably second order confounders as well, for example since federal gas ax is not inflation indexed, inflation acts as a tax cut.

“It isn’t the sum you get, it's how much you can buy with it, that's the important thing; and it's that that tells whether your wages are high in fact or only high in name.”

Mark Twain A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)[0]

0. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221480431...

$1 across the board is, indeed, not right. In reality, people higher up on the wealth scale would pay more (as they consume more goods and services - just not 1:1 proportionately more.)

A change in real dollars still affects lower income folks more because a higher percentage of income is devoted towards basics. Inflation reduces purchasing power for all, but some categories of spending cannot be substituted or eliminated.

U.S. households with higher incomes spend more money on food, but the amount spent represents a smaller overall portion of their budgets. In 2020, households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of $4,099 on food (representing 27 percent of income), while households in the highest income quintile spent an average of $12,245 on food (representing 7 percent of income).

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

So, you're saying that for every dollar taken from the poor (to be redistributed to the working poor), we'd be taking three dollars from the rich (to again, be redistributed to the working poor)?

That seems to support my point that raising the minimum wage disproportionately helps the working poor.

Key word is proportionate. Inflation disproportionately affects those with low income. The affects are not linear—look at the difference in pct income to food in lowest quintile compared to others. A dollar from the lowest quintile is objectively more valuable in purchasing power than three dollars is to the highest.

It’s akin to the company town giving a buck more in wages but charging 2 more in groceries. Sure you make “more,” but since you can buy less of what you need, you are effectively making less.

https://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/HighSchool/RealvsNomi...

> A minimum wage ensures a wage of enough income someone can pay for basic needs (housing, food, health, etc)

This isn't really a criticism of your comment, but I've always felt that this is a convenient supporting argument that obscures so much nuance that it is actually harmful to the broader goal of more fair wages. There are three huge assumptions that a statement like "an hourly wage should be enough income for basic needs" obscures:

1. that the person is employable (I don't think it's necessarily good to economically guarantee that severely disabled people are forced out of the workplace, even if they have other support systems to guarantee their needs)

2. that the person works a certain number of hours. ($100/hr is not livable if you work one hour per week.)

3. that a person has an assumed set of needs and an assumed support system (different life circumstances require different incomes to meet basic needs)

Everyone deserves to afford their basic needs, regardless of any of these confounding factors. Much of our worst poverty is because of one of these factors, not a variable as simplistic as hourly wage. Wages should be fair, but basic needs should be for everyone regardless of their ability to work a 9-to-5. While I do think we need some upwards pressure on wages, I also think social safety nets are a more equitable way to ensure basic needs are met. And we don't need to let employers off the hook for paying the bill, we can tax them to do this.

I'm a little worried about how that would affect the lower class in the short term. It's easy to say that they'll get more money as they'll get a day of overtime, but I think it's more likely that a lot of people will find that businesses just staffed up more for low skilled positions (and eventually for skilled positions), and then people have more time but are only making 80% of what they were previously, and can't afford both rent and food together in a given month anymore.

I think the instability this would cause i the lower class would be devastating. The very people that don't have savings and that can't easily weather large financial events would have once forced on them all at the same time.

I'm not saying to abolish the minimum wage. I'm just saying to reduce the nominal workweek before overtime.

> just staffed up more for low skilled positions (and eventually for skilled positions),

There's not an infinite supply of bodies out there. It's not clear where you'd just "find 10% more people"-- at least not without raising comp. And, of course, getting closer to full employment is a good thing in itself...

> but are only making 80% of ...

36/40 = 90%, even in this worst case where someone has their hours reduced from 40 to 36 to avoid overtime pay. I think there's a lot more poor people that are getting 30-35 hours from their job who would be nowhere close to the overtime threshold before, but now that their normal workweek is closer to the max get it sometimes.

Any policy change will hit some people negatively, but I think this would be a net positive for the vast majority of lower earners.

>It's not clear where you'd just "find 10% more people"

Well, you just gave millions of low-income workers 10% less money and 10% more time, so my guess is that more people would be forced to get a second job.

On the absolute margins, of people already working 2 jobs-- sure, this policy is likely to mostly cause a reallocation in hours between employers at first.

* Some other people will be content working less.

* Other people who already get overtime every week will be getting more overtime.

* Exempt employees are likely to slowly evolve to working less as the 36 hour workweek becomes the norm.

* Employers faced with paying more overtime or getting less hours will need to pay more and work harder to train up lower skilled workers to fill positions.

And in the end, everyone shifts up a bit from this reallocation.

> It's not clear where you'd just "find 10% more people"

As another commenter noted, maybe from all those people that are no longer making enough to make ends meet. Now you have someone working two jobs, maybe at like 16-24 hours each, and if one of those needs more hours, well, now you're working more than 40 hours a week overall but less than 32 per job and not getting overtime for any of it.

I could easily see something like this being one of those well intentioned policies with major negative outcomes.

> 36/40 = 90%,

My mistake, I missed where you defined it as just dropping four hours off, and "shorter work week" sounds like cutting a day off to me, so I assumed the wrong thing.

Even so, 10% is not an amount a lot of people can sustain. You posit that there's a lot more people getting 30-35 hours, but I'm not so sure of that, so would definitely want to see some numbers before endorsing anything like this. Additionally, I think a lot of people that are working less hours are doing so because in some cases employers can get around some laws about sick time and paid time off if employees aren't "full time".

The bottom line is that if people have more money, they can choose to work less. Just make sure people are paid more and they'll choose to work less if that's actually important to them, and they'll seek out jobs that offer things they care about (such as less work hours) if that's important to them. Reducing the expected working hours is nice, but I doubt most the people that would actually need it (those working demanding or demeaning jobs) would trade that for less pay given the realities. The only people that can really make use of that are the middle and upper class, and they can already choose to prioritize that and look for work that allows it given their financial stability.

One of the problems with low wage work is that it also sucks down all of your time AND you can't afford to take time off--unpaid. The only way to get a new job is finding another low paying job that can hire you on the spot. There is no time for personal growth...job hunting and interviewing. Getting out from underneath it requires a massive time and energy investment that a lot of people cannot maintain for the length of time needed.

>I personally believe that the government should focus on a shorter workweek rather than minimum wage increases in the near term.

The government being involved is the most likely answer as to why a 40 hour work week is standard and why there are so many "minimum wage" jobs. A funny thing happens when you set floors or ceilings in markets, you hit them. There should be no minimum wage. People excepting jobs will set the minimum wage because people act in their own self interest. If the pay is too low, no one will take the job. This is how labor markets are set everywhere else in the economy, I don't understand how the bottom is different.

The government shouldn't have anything to do with the work week, the market should decide because what works in one sector in one region may not work in another. The government isn't as smart as the entire labor market making decisions for themselves.

In an ideal spherical cow world, having no minimum wage would work exactly as you describe. In the real world, that's you how get slavery. For many reasons, not everyone has a choice to turn down a $1/hr job.

Where I am McDonalds is begging for people to work at $15/hr. How would they even think about paying less?

They'd simply cut wages when the labor supply shock recedes and labor is in surplus again. Businesses do not pay the minimum wage out of the goodness of their hearts; on the contrary, it communicates "we'd pay you less if we could, the law simply doesn't allow us to."

Sure.

But note also that there are people one might be willing to gamble on employing at $12/hour but that don't offer a positive return at capital at $15/hour.

I think minimum wage laws are important, but that reducing the supply of labor will do more to push up the wages of the lowest earners.

Then pass UBI instead and drop the minimum wage laws (there's no need for them if UBI were a thing). Problem solved.

Right now the problem is in the power dynamic between companies and employees - the dynamic is very unbalanced in the companies favor. In "Bullshit Jobs" Graeber compares the current system to a Dom-Sub relationship with no safeword for the "fake-competitive" industries that are not unionized.

UBI is the safeword.

Why aren’t they offering $20 an hour?

I don't understand how people hold your view. Would you except a $1/hr job? No, then why do you think other people would. If you can make more money walking through a parking lot picking up change, why would you work. Plus companies wouldn't want to hire at $1/hr because what kind of employee are you getting? Your competitor down the street paying more money would then get the better employees and drive you out of business. This would then lead to wages going up as companies compete for employees.

This is not some ideal spherical cow world, this is how literally the entire labor market works except for the mystical bottom that the government feels they have to be involved in. Why else do you think FAANG's pay so much money? Its because they want to attract the best talent.

We're actually seeing this with massive labour shortages in traditionally low paying fields. People did better off government hand-outs and then didn't ever go back to these roles at the offered wages.

> Its because they want to attract the best talent.

When we are talking about minimum wage, you need to consider the people with the worst talent. Think sweatshops in China, construction camps in Dubai, prostitutes in the US. Not Google or Facebook employees.

Yes but you want the best of your labor pool.

As for sweatshops in China, these are the growing pains of a developing economy. The work conditions there suck but I bet they are better than being bent over in a rice field all day. You are also rapidly seeing this change as the economy becomes more developed there, even in the face of an oppressive government.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-is-working-its-way-up-fro...

The construction camps in Dubai is about government corruption. They lure in overseas workers then take away their passports so they can't leave. Not exactly a free labor market.

Again prostitution in the US is not a free labor market because of government interference. If you go to places where prostitution is legal, the girls there make pretty good money.

Most of the areas where you can point to the worst employment situations is because of government interference in a market place.

You're still looking at the best case scenario (ie. a person willingly entering into prostitution), while blind to the worst. The are reason why unions, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, universal healthcare is so common around the world.

How do any of those things fix slavery? Or are you using a different definition for "willing" more akin to "would strongly prefer to".

I don't understand your questions exactly, but I was differentiating between "I do prostitution because I don't mind it and I make lots of money" vs. "I have to sleep with landlord because my minimum wage job doesn't pay the rent".

This is the very reason unions exist. To protect all workers from the bad deal that other workers will accept. You have little appreciation for how much people can undervalue themselves. It is enough to where people think working at an Amazon warehouse for $15 an hour is a good deal. Sounds like a great deal for Amazon and Walmart. The workers making that wage don't know that it's a bad deal. Same way people pull out money from thier retirement accounts to buy cars "because they don't want a payment." Dumb personal choice.

I am all for unions as long as they aren't mandated.

In some areas an Amazon warehouse job is an exceptionally good job. I grew up in a place where one of the best job you could get was working at a Walmart distribution center. Basically like an Amazon warehouse but the whole this is a freezer.

Also the government can't and shouldn't try to govern bad choices away from people. This would lead to a very authoritarian society.

Unions are not allowed to negotiate benefits and wages exclusively for their members. Non-union employees are forced by this to become free riders.

https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em...

> > I am all for unions as long as they aren't mandated.

> Unions are not allowed to negotiate benefits and wages exclusively for their members.

Parent is talking about "closed shops" where a union uses its bargaining power to ensure the employer will only employ people represented by the union. On the one hand this prevents the free-rider problem you mention. On the other, this is coercive and can erode employees' ability to negotiate about things important to them.

It can also be inefficient-- I've been in workplaces where I got in trouble for moving a desk in my office a few feet, because moving furniture was a closed-shop union job, and I wasn't a member.

I don't have a problem with no minimum wage, but I do have a problem with people starving and homeless. So I'm willing to give up on the minimum wage for any viable alternative. For example, UBI paid for by taxes on employers.

> I don't understand how people hold your view.

The usual argument for this is that while there is some efficiency gained in trying for a pure labor market here, the externalities can be brutal. So the reason that the government gets involved in the lower end is that typically they are the ones that have to deal with the fallout when things aren't working well. There are other approaches, but for whatever reasons many places find min wage more politically acceptable/expedient.

> Your competitor down the street paying more money would then get the better employees and drive you out of business.

No, they would cooperate and set an informal maximum wage to replace the minimum one (or more accurately, they would lower the already informally established maximum wage.) This would be a win-win for both businesses.

It's not a coincidence that all low-wage jobs pay between 0% and 25% over the minimum wage, and it has nothing to do with labor demand. It's because a bidding war is no good for anyone, and because having the best low wage employees will not improve net revenue more than always paying as little as possible. The idea that the Burger King paying $22/hr is going to drive the McDonald's paying $14/hr out of business is a libertarian fantasy never borne out by reality.

I don't entirely disagree with you, but:

> and it has nothing to do with labor demand.

If not having an employee costs you $30/hour in revenue-- your desire to avoid a bidding war won't prevent you from making an offer at $22/hr if it's necessary to fill the slot.

It has everything to do with labor demand (and supply). Collusion (formal or informal) between loosely coupled, adversarial entities breaks down under pressure.

A recent immigrant who was brought here from a foreign country by a "relative" and then told to work in their shop for $1/hr or be sent back home (or worse) would gladly take that $1/hr job. This actually happens in places that don't have labor protections.

And not just immigrants. Anyone with an abusive parent or partner or any situation where one person holds power over another.

Hence "this is how you get slavery".

It actually happens everywhere, even in places that have labor protections.

True, but in the US, you have to commit illegal acts to do it (like paying under the table), putting the employer at risk and lowering the chance that it happens.

If there were no minimum wage, you could put the person on payroll and be completely legal in your actions, allowing the employer to exploit unknowledgeable employees.

People work and sleep in factory floors during periods of overtime in some places in China. In the most competitive tech companies, they worked 996 until the government stepped in.

All of this bullshit free market fundamentalism relies on many nice assumptions - one being that there is plenty of good, high-paying work to go around. The actual fact spelled out in a hundred different ways, from wages to market conditions to books like Bullshit Jobs, is that the economy doesn't need nearly as many workers as we have people particularly in low wage jobs that don't require much training. There is much more supply than demand. Its perfectly possible that if McDonalds paid $1/hr, their competitors would ALSO pay $1/hr. In that situation someone with little skills would have a choice of 1. making $1/hr 2. making $0 and starving. These are the conditions 50-60% of the world works in. We've already seen collusion to keep wages low in technology, not to mention other industries and times in the past, no doubt it happens and can happen again.

As is usual, every time someone points out a bad situation, you say its "not really a free market". So its not, most markets aren't ideal "free markets". Employers can collude, information asymmetries do exist, power imbalances are real. There are literally zero "free markets" in the world. They don't just arise naturally. Even with all the intervention we have, I have yet to see any market where there is no information asymmetry or imbalances. Its a fucking idealized model from Econ 101, not the state of reality.

This kind of thinking is fundamentally un-empirical. It starts with a theory and insists that the world conform to it rather than looking at the world and examining which theory really does explain it best. In this world I would simply refuse to acknowledge the existence of non-spherical objects as a non-spherical boulder rolled down a hill and killed me.

>People work and sleep in factory floors during periods of overtime in some places in China.

lol - then you go on to complain about free markets? China is NOT a free market!

I don't care how many fast food joints colluded, no one is going to work for $1 an hour. Heck with all the COVID bucks floating around I see fast food joints advertising $15 an hour jobs and STILL not getting any takers.

Your position is utterly nonsensical. This isn't the turn of the century. Workers have never had more mobility or information. If anyone tried to set up a "Company town" in todays economy it would be empty from day one.

>this is how literally the entire labor market works except for the mystical bottom that the government feels they have to be involved in.

Several replies are addressing your wrong points but I had to bring this up: https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...

> There should be no minimum wage.

Spoken like a true capitalist! The young, dumb and disadvantaged should be thankful for the pennies that trickle their way. It's not like they're gonna sue if they get ripped off, they're broke. Besides, they can always move into high paying career ladders just as soon as they can afford to stop taking the bus everywhere. /s

Yeah horrible idea to copy countries like Denmark and Norway.

You will be paid at the highest rate you can command based on the value of your skills in the labor force. If you have no relevant skills, you don't make much money until you do have relevant skills. You earn shit money and then build your skills and then you will no longer earn shit money. It's pretty simple and it is what happens to most minimum wage workers and workers in any sector of the economy.

How do you build your skills, if you're spending 40+ hours a week working to make ends meet and trying to care for a family?

You're arguing from an ideal situation, without taking into account that reality's average is very much less than ideal.

You are building your skills while you are working. If you can find time outside of work, you are just accelerating things.

> You are building your skills while you are working

What skills would they be? Surely the only skill you build while flipping burgers is that of flipping burgers. Is it applicable to any other job?

You sound like someone who has never worked a minimum wage job. None of the skills you learn in these low end jobs is ever going to help you do anything but work similar low end jobs. I put myself through three associates degrees cleaning cars for a rental company. You know what that taught me? How to clean a car interior in 5-15 minutes. That's not exactly the most marketable of skills.

Fortunately that wasn't particularly laborious, so I still had the energy to do school too. Many people are not as lucky, and these days often have to work 2 or more jobs to get by. Worse, the kind of schooling I took advantage of is increasingly turning from vocation-oriented education to cheap-university-transfer education.

> You sound like someone who has never worked a minimum wage job

Nah. He sounds like someone with class and privilege who's worked a minimum wage job.

See, a minimum wage job for someone who is a privileged youth-- is a good way to learn the last little bit of organization, focus, "eye on the ball", working with a supervisor, attention to detail skills-- that will serve them the rest of their life. It's a great skill building opportunity.

For someone who's been stuck in it 3 years--- well, it's exhausted all of its value in those respects by this point.

People who are scared of the minimum wage going up are often worried that it's going to squeeze out kids from getting these first work experiences. And it's a valid concern. But the people who spend their lives stuck in those jobs are invisible to them.

I personally favor shortening the work week because I think it will increase the compensation associated with low skill labor; provide additional incentives for employers to ramp people into higher skill positions; and leave room for kids in low skill jobs.

Great for those with support, safety nets, options & abilities. The young, the mentally challenged, the old, the handicapped, the convicted... they're supposed eat cat food and go sleep under an overpass until they get motivated/healthy/unconvicted/a car/____?

> the mentally challenged, the old, the handicapped

We have disability safety nets (that could be better). And FLSA and state regs all allow paying these groups under minimum wage (and this is a good thing).

My wife's brother is severely mentally handicapped. He lives in a nice, well-run group home (I'm aware this is not universal). He also has the option of going to "dayhab" where there's educational content and the option of working making crafts for a couple of dollars per hour of spending money.

I am not sure his labor output is worth the $2-3/hour he gets paid: a lot of this is probably charity, but it makes a difference to him to be able to earn something and work towards goals, and not just spend his entire day watching TV instead.

You don't fix these things with a minimum wage and you possibly make them worse. They've got different solutions.

> The young, ... the convicted

These are harder problems.

* How do we provide a good on-ramp to productive work and independent life for at-risk youth?

* How do we allow those who have broken the norms of society in the past to rejoin in an orderly way, with hope and better prospects from compliance than reoffending?

Note that I think we should have a minimum wage. I just think it's also a band-aid at best, and often causes a fair degree of problems as well. It's better than nothing, but one would be better off addressing the problems it's targeted at in any other available way.

The old - One's employment options often severely diminish as they approach retirement. With health insurance (and those costly prescriptions) tied to employment, how little do you think some are willing to work for? Would you work for free if your life depended on it?

I feel like you avoided engaging at all with my comment. I explicitly commented that the safety nets and retirement system are not perfect and could be better, but that I believed minimum wage was not a solution. Increasing the minimum wage isn't going to get more people just short of retirement health insurance.

Why would I pay you more than I have to if I know you're desperate and have few (or none) other options? Mind if I pay you in scrip?

I don't believe in your good faith desire to discuss. I've said above I believe there should be a minimum wage, but that it's a crappy lever for the groups that you describe and that there are better ones for different subgroups (social safety nets, reducing the supply of labor by shortening work week).

Instead, I get a bunch of strawmen that have nothing to do with what I said.

You've presented a group home as a possible solution for the severely mentally handicapped. Presumably great for the few who can get it.

What you have not addressed is the extreme imbalance in power for many employers at the expense of employees. If there is no floor on what someone can get away with paying, then it is reasonable to expect the marginalized or powerless to be fully taken advantage of. Even today, some employers try to get away with not paying by having employees work "off the clock". At least with the minimum wage, litigious employees can eventually expect something for their lost time.

> What you have not addressed is the extreme imbalance in power for many employers at the expense of employees. If there is no floor on what someone can get away with paying, then it is reasonable to expect the marginalized or powerless to be fully taken advantage of.

???? I have stated throughout this entire conversation that I believe there should be a minimum wage. I do not know why you continue to argue with me as if I have not. Your messages have nothing to do with what I am saying. I have pointed this out to you now three times.

You haven't confused me with trcarney who said far above that there shouldn't be one, have you?

I just don't think the minimum wage is a solution to many of the problems you cite. It will not generate more employment income for the severely disabled, etc.

As I noted above, if we had UBI to cover bare essentials, we wouldn't need a minimum wage.

That's basically what Walmart abuses anyways via the welfare system; it's almost a subsidy to make their model kind of glue-together in the end. Let's just make it explicit. Pass UBI, repeal minimum wage laws.

Just look at the chaos being cause by COVID bucks right now - fast food joints offering $15 an hour and $500 signing bonuses and still having no takers.

That anyone has the guts to still be pushing UBI when we can see how a limited UBI with the current government handouts are utterly destroying the current labor market is beyond reprehensible.

First, COVID bucks stopped quite a while ago (September at the latest)

It's not destroying anything, it's giving labor bargaining power back versus capital. Yes, it's harder to hire workers at $X/hour when they have alternatives. That's the whole point of UBI.

Also note that pre-handouts, the companies were hiring workers for $10/hour, now they're willing to pay $15/hour with bonus (and can't find anyone). What that means is that companies actually had room to pay much higher than they were actually paying (and still make sufficient profit) - so the previous wage was not a fair market wage, but was rather exploitation; which the article goes into below:

"Labor markets in capitalist economies are fundamentally tilted against individual workers’ ability to bargain effectively with employers. Policy does not have to be rigged for employers to give them particular clout in labor markets; instead, the very nature of these labor markets gives them clout. In the past, when economic growth was broadly shared across the population, it was because policymakers understood this basic asymmetry and used policy levers to bolster the leverage and bargaining power of workers. Conversely, recent decades’ rise of inequality and anemic wage growth has resulted from a stripping away of these policy bulwarks to workers’ labor market power."

https://www.epi.org/publication/what-labor-market-changes-ha...

Additionally: "This collapse of worker power has been overwhelmingly driven by conscious policy decisions that have intentionally undercut institutions and standards that previously bolstered the economic leverage and bargaining power of typical workers; it was not driven simply by apolitical market forces."

(Same source)

The way to get young/unskilled people to build skills earlier in life is to lower the minimum wage, not increase it.

No one is going to hire a 12 year old for a part time job if the minimum wage is $15. It just increases the minimum skill level to be hireable. But hire them for $7.50 and they might have skills worth $15 by the time they're 18.

I think you overestimate how wage-sensitive most industries are. Most companies today have consolidated enough to have a lot of pricing power - if they raise prices, consumers will just have to buckle up and take it.

We've already had history in the U.S. where the inflation-adjusted minimum wage was way higher than it is today and yet the labor participation rate was also higher than it is today.

But my personal preference is for UBI coupled with a repeal of the minimum wage.

> There should be no minimum wage. People excepting jobs will set the minimum wage because people act in their own self interest.'

I'm very capitalistic and libertarian, but reality is all systems need to manage edge cases. Minimum wage is a part of that. To believe that the market can figure everything out requires serious tunnel vision.

> Minimum wage is a part of that.

It's not the only way though. We have no legally defined or mandated minimum wage here in Norway (nor elsewhere in the Nordic region I think). But the effective minimum is probably higher than the mandated minimum in any other country.

Broadly speaking the way it is done here is that the national association of employers and the principal unions negotiate a tariff for each industry and type of work each year. The state is involved to the extent that it provides an official who acts as referee in the negotiations and tries to chivvy the parties to an agreement.

Employers are free to ignore the rules but risk losing employees to companies that pay according to the tariff.

Of course the difference between here and the US is that solidarity is stronger here so the negotiations are less hostile here.

It's not perfect but it seems to work quite well

Sure, not the only way. But unions are an example of circuit breaker for when a pure capitalistic system fails. Some countries extend the union to all citizens in all industries as a minimum wage. The nordic region (including gov't) seems to have their shit together, more than the rest of the world. I think less gov't is better, just not the anarchy the previous poster suggests.

Lol, Congress couldn't even get a minimum wage increase with majority Democrats, there's no way anything else about the workweek is changing any time soon.

I'm on a 40 hrs one week, 32 hrs the next. That yields every other Friday off. If I get a pronotion / pay increase I'm gonba try to opt for 32 hrs every week.

> Everyone's quality of life goes up

Ideally, yes. But for those who struggle in various ways the extra free time could be dangerous. I'm definitely in favor of a shorter work week. But there are always unintended consequences.

For example I live in NJ. As the pandemic lockdown kicked off so did the adverts for gambling via your mobile device. I'm not in favor of the Nanny State but I can't help but wonder how many ppl are nursing an addiction and associated debt from this intersection.

Yea- if you're not making money, you're usually spending it. Idle time costs more than the $0/hr you make while not working.

Unless you use part of your free time to do things that you previously had to pay someone to do because you didn't have time.

The biggest problem is the minimum wage for salaried exempt workers needs to be a few hundred thousand dollars.

Otherwise, businesses will continue to label employees managers with no actual management responsibilities with the sole goal of paying someone a lower hourly rate in exchange for a more certain periodic payment.

Once you remove this loophole, hourly pay will naturally rise as businesses will opt to hire more hourly workers. The biggest reason hourly workers lack negotiating power is businesses can lean in the salaried “managers” to fill in at no extra cost.

This is an interesting idea, but it seems really impractical to me. As you point out, people enjoy some benefits from certainty in compensation. Outlawing a compensation arrangement far in excess of minimum wage seems questionable.

And how far does this extend? Can I not pay a contractor a fixed rate for a project? Or a fixed rate to handle _____ for me for a week? It would seem to encourage arm's-length contracting arrangement for services and coverage, which isn't ideal.

Is it far in excess of minimum wage? A manager can be asked to be on call 24/7. But per hour, that is not much.

I don’t see what it would have to do with contractors. Minimum wage laws apply to employer employer relationships. Independent contractors can charge whatever they want.

> Is it far in excess of minimum wage? A manager can be asked to be on call 24/7. But per hour, that is not much.

So you want to pay someone for every hour they might get called, too? Even if that is a very rare responsibility?

> I don’t see what it would have to do with contractors.

It would further encourage contractor relationships, as I said. I don't see this as a good thing.

Yes, because as is demonstrated in real life, businesses will skimp on hiring sufficient, quality hourly staff and dump the workload on meagerly paid “managers”. One popular way is to use immigrants from one’s own country, and tie the ball and chain around them. They need the consistent employment to get established in the country, and have few options.

It will not encourage contractor relationships anymore than now, it will simply require businesses to pay the hourly workers more and give them steady schedules, benefits, etc.

> It will not encourage contractor relationships anymore than now,

Doubtful

> it will simply require businesses to pay the hourly workers more

Why? It seems like this is a lever you're hoping to use to get the exempt workers paid more and/or a slightly greater allocation of work away from what had formerly been exempt workers.

> benefits

Why?

Because they will need to hire more hourly workers.

The whole concept of hourly minimum wage is undercut by the ability of businesses to pay a meager salary.

The mechanism of action for increases prices paid to workers is by decreasing supply of man hours from one individual at a low price (i.e. increasing salaries minimum).

> Because they will need to hire more hourly workers.

I think this is absolute rounding error on the number of additional hourly workers needed.

Yes, a reasonable percentage of salaried workers in low wage industries are exploited as you describe. In turn, with an hourly wage, they'll work a small percentage fewer hours.

>> forces office staff to work a half day on christmas eve

...or that traditionally lets people go home at lunch? This is pretty common but you frame it pretty negatively.

Obviously on-call has to cover holidays but Christmas eve is a work day for everyone (in an office) at your company? Why stay? That is simply barbaric

As with all things, it's about trade-offs. As much as I dislike this company for its policies towards time off and butts-in-seats[0], I am not on-call and am never obligated to answer my phone outside of work, no one bats an eye at me taking a few hours to make an appointment every now and then, I don't hate my manager or coworkers, and generally little is expected of me which suits me fine because I haven't found IT work fulfilling for at least 5 years.

[0] Which is directly responsible for infecting my household with COVID. Literally everyone in the company has had it.

As they wrote, barbaric.

Ahhh....the plantation still lives.

He was literally talking about how it was his choice to stay, and you're calling him a slave. Over only getting half a day off on Christmas Eve, which is not even a holiday. I honestly cannot tell what is sarcasm anymore.

Christmas eve is usually a work day for the vast majority of the world, even the out-of-touch white collar minority. We benefit from the fact that (a) the work is easy, (b) not much of it gets done and (c) you go home 1/2 way through the day. You sound even more out of touch than the rest of us if you think this is "barbaric".

Is this unusual? A quick google search shows Trump issued an executive order just last year to give the day off to federal employees, but Wikipedia doesn't list it as a federal holiday.

According to The Atlantic, religion started the weekend/5 day workweek, not the IWW.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/08/where-t...

In fact, I cannot find any source at all that says the IWW caused the weekend.

You are probably right, I am also unable to find a credible source saying that.

Why would you expect to get Christmas eve off? It's not a holiday and not everyone celebrates Christmas.

I don't see where OP expected to get it off because it was a holiday. They expect to get it off because no work gets done, and they're annoyed because the company requires double the vacation time for those that do want it off for the holiday. Finally, Christmas Eve is definitely as much of a holiday as Christmas Day, for those who celebrate it.

I think the question is framed such as it already assumes the employer perspective: you should only get off on federal holidays, or at least religious ones.

But if you want some justifications: christmas is the biggest holiday in the (once?) christian-dominated west, and in the US in particular it is quite common for family to be separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles of travel. It is also common practice for people to celebrate christmas eve with one side of the family and christmas day with the other, if they live closely enough to each.

All that aside, it is less about not getting christmas eve off than it is about there being absolutely no reason for us to be there at all. The company recognizes that there is some importance to the day for its employees by cutting the day in half in the first place, yet even though all evidence shows that there is no reason whatsoever to be there and it's costing the company more to have people there than it will ever make from it, they still insist that people show up. It's not even rational slave-driving.

Not American celebrates Christmas as a religious holiday, but most everyone observes it as a secular time of rest, travel, and/or family before the start of the new year.

Schools are off during this time. And many professions take a break during this time as well, not just office workers, but factories often use this down time for maintenance, and trades use it as reprieve from working in the cold.

I tend to attempt to ruin asshat companies like that, usually because it’s only the tip of the iceberg of abuse. I’ve taken out two so far, one by quitting as the sole engineer when their only client went down and i wasn’t paid properly and secondly by scaring all the permanent staff off after getting a bailiff appointed to take kit away from their office because they didn’t pay my invoice. I don’t shed an ounce of guilt for this.

There's power in a union.

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