Minimum wages just removes opportunities.
If the previous prices really were bad wages, then Uber and Lyft would be having a hard time finding drivers.
The existence of a job doesn’t imply that said job is unexploitative. People are attracted to (or left with) exploitative jobs for all kinds of reasons.
These Uber and Lyft drivers picked this job out of all their options. They arrived at the conclusion that it was the best job that they could get out of all their options. Why do you think you know better than they do?
Edit: “out of all their options” reveals the point here: the minimum wage exists so that, in theory, there is a cap on the things that people have to do to put food in their mouths.
But the reality is Uber and Lyft drivers aren't idiots and do indeed realize that depreciation exists. This strikes me a quite a condescending take, that Uber and Lyft drivers aren't smart enough to o take wear and tear on their vehicles into account.
This is a long-standing point of public messaging around rideshares. It's not a secret; the reality is that the people who care about it aren't the ones with hundreds of millions allocated for advertising.
None of this assumes that Uber or Lyft drivers are stupid. Everybody discounts long-term externalities; it's a universal human trait, and it's why we have entire society-level issues that boil down to long-term discounting. The only thing that sets rideshare drivers apart in this particular case is that a company is actively exploiting that human weakness, and can do so in part because we allow economic privation as a fulcrum.
The fact that you're allowed to expense your car's deprecation indicates that this is not a long-term externality for you. Of course people take advantage of reimbursements available to them; the fact that none applies here is the thing being discussed.
Again: being "worth his or her salt" reveals the point here: the point of a minimum wage is to ensure that people who aren't financially literate are, in theory, afforded a baseline quality of life. It's fine if we don't agree about the civic value of that, but that's what it boils down to: not punishing people with a life of privation for not having the skills, means, or anything else that others have.
I stand by my point: the idea that a significant portion of ride share drivers are failing to account for depreciation is ridiculous.
There are clearly many people who both want to drive for these companies and want to rules in place to ensure fair pay and working conditions. It is not an either/or.
Nor have you. You have made the assumption that accepting the terms of employment implies that drivers accept/support the companies position in this conflict. I see no evidence for that.
This, too, is baseless. Plenty of people who aren't drivers support legislation like this. Neither the claim that most drivers support this legislation, nor the claim that this legislation has been mostly supported by drivers is substantiated.
EDIT: There are also loads of limitations on what contracts are valid. The government removes the option to contract yourself into slavery, as well as a host of other things. All these laws removing these options were written in response to exploitation, and I'm pretty sure you'd find that they actually reduced exploitation.
Correlation is not causation. It would be illogical to remove options and have less exploitation. When luck and free markets compensate for the removed options - great. A strong labor market with lots of employers is the best tool against exploitation. But here we are talking about a corrupted, monopolistic government-controlled market where there weren't many choices to begin with. New entrants should be encouraged and celebrated, not shunned and punished.
Minimum wage laws are incredibly damaging as well. For example, the unpaid part-time "job" that launched me in the IT field would be illegal now. And I would be much poorer for it. But, hey, I wouldn't have been "exploited".
It may be somewhat counterintuitive, but it's certainly not illogical.
> Minimum wage laws are incredibly damaging as well. For example, the unpaid part-time "job" that launched me in the IT field would be illegal now. And I would be much poorer for it. But, hey, I wouldn't have been "exploited".
First of all, are you sure it wouldn't have existed? Just because you're willing to get something for free doesn't mean you're not also willing to pay for it; and minimum wage is a lot cheaper than a properly trained full-time IT person.
Secondly, having skilled workers available is a public good [1] that benefits all companies, so it makes economic sense for the government to invest (on behalf of all companies) in developing those skills. If these sorts of apprenticeships are generally useful, then having the government sponsor or subsidize them also makes sense.
Please describe the mechanism then.
> are you sure it wouldn't have existed
I know it ended since I am still friends with the owner: the labor regulations become so onerous he gave up on having a couple overly-enthusiastic pain-in-the-butt kids around to train every year.
> having the government sponsor or subsidise them also makes sense
Of course government intervention begets ever more government intervention - it's the only one that can fix the messes it creates. But I lived under a regime where the government controlled everything - and we were starving.
The government is the most incompetent, slow and corrupt organization built by man. It makes sense, as it has no competition to push it to be otherwise - it's the ultimate monopoly. Boggles the mind that somebody would voluntarily rely on it.
There is a massive difference between people of equal power making arms-lencgh transactions, vs people of virtually unlimited power coercing others to work for sub-poverty wages when their only other option is starvation.
Minimum Wage and Unions work against the tendency for capital, owners, and management to exploit workers for their own gain. History shows societies with a large middle class are far better off and more resilient than societies with a thin upper class and mostly impoverished workers.
Whenever workers for a company are disproportionately reliant on public assistance, as was found in MN, it means that the management has figured out a scam to get rest of the taxpayers to subsidize their business.
The taxpayers make up the difference between what is paid vs a living wage which would be required for those workers to sustainably work for the corp, and the management/shareholders pocket the difference. So, Uber and Lyft are literally scamming the rest of the taxpayers for their profits. Do you enjoy paying taxes to support the executives and shareholders of Uber and Lyft (also WalMart, etc.).
There are several solutions, including:
Solution 1: Reset the minimum wage the way it was originally designed (by 1950s Republicans), so that it pays a livable wage for one person working 40 hours to support a family of 4 above the poverty line. This is what built the middle class.
Solution 2: Tax any and all automation sufficiently to pay a Universal Basic Income above the poverty level so that people have options and do not need to work unless an employer makes it worth their while to undertake the commute, etc. Actual minimum wages may be lower, but the corp taxes will be higher.
Either way, we are the wealthiest society in the history of the planet. We CAN afford to treat everyone with dignity, which includes providing for their basic needs of food, housing, healthcare when they work a full-time job.
Allowing some to exploit others in a coercive semi-slavery arrangement should not be an option in the most wealthy society in history.
First:
If all minimum wage did was remove opportunities, we wouldn't have one in most of the civilized world. It's plainly obvious that isn't all it does, regardless how you feel about it's effectiveness.
Second:
Minimum wage does remove opportunities - and so what? There's nothing inherently bad about that. If a business can't afford a minimum wage, then they aren't a viable business. Businesses don't deserve to exist in the same sense that jobs don't deserve to exist. A business that can only survive by trapping employees in wage-slavery isn't to the happiness and health of it's society.
Third:
Minimum wage has little to no effect on inflation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01651...
And it does have a positive effect on the quality of life of low-skilled workers: https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20180622.107025/
People that argue against the merits of a minimum wage are usually:
- parroting something they heard from a right-wing talking head, (i.e.: they have no evidence to back their claims), or
- they are a business owner that knows their business can only survive if they prey on low-skilled labor