What if someone doesn't have a skill set or live in a prosperous enough market that supports that wage? Quite a bit of business will simply disappear if the labor is too expensive. That hole-in-the-wall diner in the Ozarks will simply close if they have to pay $25 an hour, and the waitress working there will simply be unemployed without another alternative.
I am not unsympathetic to business owners (having been one myself many years ago), but I am also not sympathetic for having the worker class suffer for the benefit of business and consumers, and living in poverty is abject suffering. Trillions of dollars of capital class/shareholder profits shows there is productivity to distribute more evenly.
Says who?
There are countless people on this site who run businesses that don't even pay themselves. Are they under moral obligation to shut down their own business?
The majority of minimum wage work is done as supplemental income to a household (teenagers or spouses or partner). There would be a large subset of people who would not qualify for social safety programs but who would not be better off without these positions.
Voters and dollars spent on political speech.
> The majority of minimum wage work is done as supplemental income to a household (teenagers or spouses or partner).
The characteristics of lowest wage earners does not justify underpaying labor. It is an excuse by business to underpay.
It's hard to imagine that job makes any sense at $25 an hour.
This wasn't a case where I was being underpaid for my labor. There is only so much value a job like that is ever going to create, and at a certain point it doesn't make sense to employee people doing it anymore.
I’m honestly convinced a growing slice of America sees employment as inherently oppressive and undignified, and so yes, believes you would have preferred unemployment to working.
The problem is that this slice mostly isn't the unemployed but people far from it.
This is yet another societal problem where people are telling other people what's good for them and would probably be solved if people put their money where their mouth is.
My wife has talked about enjoying the merchandising aspect of her early jobs for a bakery and winery.
Good times.
> Voters and dollars spent on political speech.
Pretty flimsy argument. It appears that the voters and funded political speech have actually decided the opposite. There is no $25 minimum wage. If we accept your assertion that voters are the moral authority, that implies the current 7.5~ rate is fair.
>Voters and dollars spent on political speech.
If the dollars go the other way, will you change your opinion?
Is this actually true?
https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/research-publications/w...
But for the most part, minimum wage workers are young white women: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/08/who-makes-m...
The inputs of a business are labour, materials, and capital.
A wage pays the support, training, risk, and trust costs of labour.
And if that wage falls below those costs, then labour cannot be sustained.
Given numerous market and power asymmetries, it's often possible to impose lower-than-living wages by shifting risks and costs to labour.
A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more, otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.
Adam Smith actually writes on this extensively in Wealth of Nations, with insights that remain valid over 240 years later. Which answers your initial question.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127620
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/
http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/smith-an-inquiry-into-the-...
Prove that all jobs are supposed to supply a living wage first.
To get extra money? A teenager could be living with his parents and not need a living wage.
Even now they pretend it's just 'entry level jobs for schoolchildren without bills'. In reality it allows them to pay the bare minimum as now people who need to support themselves now directly compete with those who do not, artificially depressing the wages such that they almost never go over the bare minimum.
I'd also like to add they use this to their advantage ad nauseum. They use this to- while paying the bare minimum- demand workers do demeaning jobs, in demeaning uniforms, are generally disrespected by customers, can't get time off when they need it, supplying the bare minimum insurance, placing all the monetary onus on the employee. What we have does not work, we need to try something else.
There is also an increasing number of lower paying jobs that are going away due to automation. Raising the minimum wage will speed up the adoption. This will make it even harder to get a job.
I fully agree that some companies and customers do not treat employees with dignity. This is not really relevant to the minimum wage.
I also fully agree what we have doesn't work. We need good paying jobs for people with minimal / no experience and education. I don't think just raising the minimum wage will fix things. At best raising the minimum wage is stop gap that will cause damage in the long term and create even more poverty.
Yes.
>his parents are already providing what he needs
And what about people who aren't in this particular situation? What is the policy solution to filter out people who you feel don't deserve this level of compensation for their labor?
The guiding principle should be that if the government/society thinks some people need assistance, then they should just provide it directly, rather than just force others to provide it for them.
They simply should try to get the skills for a higher paying job. And if they cannot (for whatever reasons, there are actually plenty of very legitimate reasons) - you can help them out with social welfare/charity money, especially if they have a family to feed. And then you can further help them, by providing free education with low barriers (that you can even do, while having little kids) etc. so one day they can stand on their own.
There are many things that can be done, before you have to negate the right of 2 free parties to make a contract under their own terms.
So my ideal policy would be the economy should be simply as policyfree as possible to sort itself out. That doesn't mean, society cannot help those, who need help. It can and it should. But this is called charity and not economy, so why mix both up?
Why? The point of a living wage is to ensure a person can live on their wage. In this situation the person can live of their wage.
>And what about people who aren't in this particular situation?
If the best a person can do in life is a cashier at a fast food restaurant than they either have a problem (substance abuse or mental) and should get help or lack any motivation to grow. I don't think we need to make rules out of exceptions like that. The point of jobs like that aren't to stay at it for the rest of your life.
>What is the policy solution to filter out people who you feel don't deserve this level of compensation for their labor?
I don't believe somebody who can't get a simple order correct should get $25. Maybe if they got it right 99% of the time that would be one thing, but they aren't even close.
I don't know what you mean by policy solution? Somebody should get a better job if they want more pay.
The point of a teenager having a job is not to support his family, but to have some extra spending money and to gain experience. I don't think a person should make a career out of minimum wage jobs. They have them to gain experience or to fall back on in hard times.
That was my privilege growing up in a middle class family, too. But a whole lot of my friends had jobs to support their families as soon as they were old enough to legally work.
Wilful ignorance is not a good-faith approach to conversation. Have a nice day.
But have you considered that the worker IS the consumer and without the business the worker wouldn’t have any income at all or anything to consume?
Much of the debate around minimum wage centers on the idea that a person working full time should be able to have basic necessities. There's some nuance around what "full time" means or if it's even reasonable to expect people to have to exchange their limited lifetime for resources if we have alternatives, but the base of it comes down to "if people are already exchanging the accepted-normal-maximum of their free time a week for money, that money should be sufficient to provide base necessities."
Yes, there are businesses that can't afford to pay $25 to waiters and waitresses, but that doesn't invalidate the fact that those people deserve to be able to live. Right now in the absence of UBI or state healthcare about the only other 'lever' we have to pull on this problem is minimum wage.
I suppose they would be fine if they didn't freeze or starve to death most of the time. Or die from treatable diseases.
Like DHS fills an airplane with Wahhabi Muslims masquerading as Mexicans to send them out of the...the Homeland, and the executive says no turn that plane around. So they can compete with that waitress for her job, and play with fireworks on the 4th of July.
And suprise, immigrants can learn to wait tables pretty quickly, but don't exactly own any land for a diner already and have much capital (like $30 in their pocket), so their benefit to the economy will be higher for the diner owner who enjoys their competition than the diner waitress you competes.
“Sell your labor at any price you want” perspective works great as an abstract concept. But we’ve already been here many times over and over and all sorts of labor/union movements had to push forward. Somehow waitresses and diners never stopped existing.
If the minimum wage becomes $25, for some workers, the result will be them making $25 per hour. For some other workers, the result will be structural unemployment.
If you suspend market reasoning and just virtual signal, you can just assign blame to the business owner. But virtue signaling itself and assigning blame doesn't actually fix the problem that in the alternate $25-an-hour-universe some subset of workers become structurally unemployed by the invisible hand of the market.