The Fight for Fair Wages
nybooks.com
nybooks.com
The minimum wage has jumped up several times in the past due to government updates, and it has gradually shrunk over time due to inflation, and neither of those things has been particularly correlated with employment rates
There are better policies to protect poor workers, like reducing taxes on the poor or allowing government welfare for those with jobs. These help workers without distorting markets and hurting workers. The only case minimum wages are useful is if all the alternatives are impossible.
I don’t understand the link to medical insurance. In my country poor people get free healthcare. Low wage earners still get taxed, which I think is immoral and is exactly the kind of policy discussion that minimum wage proponents smother.
You're paid what you're known to be worth. All this stuff is about abdicating responsibility because it feels warm and fuzzy to be a victim, say it's out of your control, and those badies are responsible for your predicament.
The solution to people having low wages isn't them complaining about it, it's specialising into something with more demand or less supply, and getting better at personal marketing. But that's hard work, so they'd rather pour a bottle of whine.
Schools should do a way better job of facilitating this, but again, that's not ultimately their responsibility, but the responsibility of the parents to make sure they do.
You're paid somewhere between the minimum amount you'll accept and the maximum that the company is willing to give you (which in the case of some VC funded companies, may exceed the amount of profit you generate!)
Where you're paid on that spectrum depends on how much leverage you have vs. the company.
How much a company is willing to give you is based on the value you create. Companies are not going to employ someone who costs more than the value they produce. If the person creates far more value than they are paid, then the person is apt to find someone else who will pay more.
Value in collaborative settings is extremely difficult to measure. How much is that DEI officer worth? The corp lawyer who, being honest, is not doing any high stakes work? The team lead who doesn't write code? The careful, slow IC vs the fast, sloppy IC? It's all guesswork.
1. figuring that out is the career of a cost accountant
2. using industry norms for certain job categories is a good proxy
3. getting it too far wrong means you go bust
Most companies are happy to pay you way less than you're worth if you'll accept it.
As an engineer I'm used to all the facts going on the table and then reaching a consensus. That's not how hiring works, the employer won't show you their cards. They ask how much you made in your last job, but they won't tell you how much the employee that left the position you're applying to was paid.
I've had many, many people brag to me how they lied on their resume. Many have shameless posted here how they cheated their way through college.
Employees have the ultimate power - they can just say "no".
I laugh when I see things like this. Would you turn down a job offer if it is way more than you expected?
And they of course suppress wages by cartels, lobby for increased immigration (bonus: h1bs are captive labor), etc.
Spare me the microecon 101 fantasy.
I’m with you on the immigration front. The local town’s largest employer almost exclusively employs immigrants in the plant. If they had to pay wages the rest of the town would want to do that job, it’d probably be what the hourly workers in the office next door make. They’d want more then, which would mean the salaried people would also want more. Instead the entire town’s wages are suppressed.
Do you want to pay more for things when there's a supply shortage?
There's nothing inherently fair about the "intersection of Supply and Demand curves" because employers manipulate them both -- by lobbying for increased immigration, reducing competition through mergers&acquisitions, erecting legal barriers for competing businesses, colluding to depress wages, and reducing incentive to compete via common board membership & equity ownership.
People who are less fortunate are well, less fortunate. They have less of everything to fight for their future.
Don't get me wrong, I am all about self education and self empowerment and being able to improve their lot in life, but system problems require system solutions.
I agree. That's why I don't want the government to forbid them from taking a job that they want by setting a minimum wage. Cutting out the bottom of the labor market doesn't help poor people.
That's how your taxes go to subsidizing massive corporations.
Instead of Walmart paying people a living wage, they will now pay less, and let their employees backfill with government programs.
And the attitude that they have to "fight" for it is wrong and antisocial. They have to build it.
It's never always your initiative that makes things happens.
And the attitude that they have to "fight" for it is wrong and antisocial. They have to build it.
So I misspoken.
Doing valuable and important things and getting paid well isn't necessarily the same thing. The market isn't the end all be all determining the value of your work.
Gold is priced more money than water, and gold is a useless trinket compared to water.
Also saying that fair wages is a problem of parenting makes you seem quite disconnected with the reality of what the masses face. I think what you say is correct but only to a certain degree. Circumstances matter a lot and most of the time one may not have control over that. People come out of that kind of hardship should not fall victim to unfettered capitalism where low cost is attained any cost. Minimum mage protects against that. Keeping the minimum wage low artificially keeps cost of everything artificially low - including your wages that you get for possessing specialized knowledge (white collar jobs). This results in the middle class having a low quality of life non materialistically speaking. This is what’s going on in America. Over the quality of life from a material goods perspective is better than third world countries but softer/finer things of life - family,relations etc people have very little time for and is objectively worse than most other developed countries as people spend their time doing multiple jobs or side hustles in the hopes to escape the rat race for good. Very few succeed.
All of the fettering of capitalism is destructive acts done by fools, or narcissists to feel morally superior, that make economic and social problems worse, rather than being of any help.
The solution to the problems we are discussing here is to increase competition in schooling, so that kids get better equipped for their futures, so they don't fall through the cracks, and that requires schooling to move away from the socialistic publicly funded schooling and towards outcomes-focused private schooling.
Unions do not change the value their members produce, which puts a ceiling on the wages they can negotiate. Companies won't hire people who cost more than they produce.
Not really. The gap is the ROI of what the compensation could otherwise be invested in. The negotiation is about convincing the employer that your work would have a higher ROI.
In the long run, businesses that aren't able to realize comparable ROI with compensation to what they could otherwise invest in must go out of business, since capital will gradually migrate to its more productive uses; but this is assuming a kind of steady state model. It's certainly not going to be clear to managers or anyone else what the entire space of comparable investments actually is.
It's definitely not all investments. One realizes revenue from ramen shop compensation before the employees are even paid, whereas one realizes revenue from bonds only at fixed intervals of months or years, and from real estate after a period of years or decades. Yet short term bonds may actually be a fine alternative to auto manufacturing compensation, since it can take a few weeks or even a couple of months for a car to make it to the dealership from the factory.
That's exactly what cost accountants do. A large part of running a company successfully is determining the ROI of various uses of capital. The people running companies are not idiots.
There's even a word for it - "opportunity cost".
Or other employers, for that matter.
There is no consensus amongst economists that raising the minimum wage as high as $15/hour would substantially increase unemployment. You are, of course, welcome to disagree with them, but you can't claim this is just Econ 101.
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/what-economists-think-ab...
> There is no consensus amongst economists
I don't know any who have run a successful business.
Bargaining power exists. You cannot explain the world we live in without it.
>so they'd rather pour a bottle of whine.
They're actually opening a can of whoop-ass.
Rather than being simple-minded thugs looking to whoop-ass, they should be focused on guiding their members to increased individual bargaining power by upskilling them.
>Rather than being simple-minded thugs looking to whoop-ass, they should be focused on guiding their members to increased individual bargaining power by upskilling them.
Why? The bosses are also simple-minded thugs looking to use their bargaining power to pay as little as possible. That's capitalism for you. We shouldn't have one set of rules for the rich and one set for the poor.
Historically, unions helped workers by improving working conditions in the early industrial revolution (limbs lost from unsafe equipment, deaths due to lack of fire escapes & inadequate ventilation, women paid 1/2 wages for identical work). It's hard to imagine workers "lost in the long run" by ending these.
Wiki [1] lists several studies with evidence that unions decrease worker suicide rates and occupational fatalities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_Sta...
If all the money is owned by the rich, that is only a fixed number of brain cycles to buy things
In addition, advancement in technology really comes from mass markets, and the masses having money funds those economies of scale that delivers life enhancing or saving technology to everyone.
But I'll admit I don't have numbers.
Of course NY and CA and some of the other states would be just fine on their own but we'd be basically abandoning millions of people to suffer and potentially die. Not a good thing to do.
It's not a simple task to figure out which states would survive as independent countries, if for no other reason than there would be, ah, "territorial disputes."
If you want to see meaningful change in the world, you need to make a meaningful change. Leaving much of anything up to the federal government is just a boon to political elite.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_partition_of_Be...
The real problem is that things, especially housing, still cost too much everywhere -- much worse in San Francisco, but not great no matter where you are in the US. Which requires higher wages to make a living, which puts pressure on employers to cut labor costs by making people do more with less. And then you get problems.
But employers can't just raise wages unilaterally -- if they paid more (and thereby raised prices), first of all that increases the cost of living even more, second of all the people who are already hurting because of the high cost of living are going to switch to any competitor who can offer a lower price, so the employers who do this lose to any that don't.
What we really need to do is lower the cost of living.
Where in the US is LCOL enough for that?
Here's the thing though- if you raise wages, the prices for the finite quantities of housing get bid up. The goal should be bringing the cost of living down.
Well you see that's exactly the problem. There are in fact, not a lot of places.