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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Why don’t you let people decide who works with who in a free market and if you are worried about low wages introduce higher minimum wages.

Or, what I actually prefer is face who you are and say I don’t want those people who are a generation or two behind in wealth? Why the gymnastics? As if there are people pf your kind who would have done these jobs but they are just sitting around or doing rocket science because the pay is %15 lower than what they desire.

Just ridiculous.

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In Switzerland the problem is the cheap foreigners commute over the border from Italy or France, and drive down the going rate for labour to levels where it's then unreasonable for people who actually live on Switzerland to do those jobs. This is especially the case in Ticino.

Sounds like they need min wage increase then.

The differential cost of living will always mean that for any wage, the job is more attractive to cross border commuters.

If the labor supply is flexible (which is the case being discussed here with foreign workers commuting to Switzerland), then increasing wages will tend to increase the number of potential workers, but it won’t create additional jobs.

Meaning that if you are able to get a job yes you’ll get paid more, but because there are now more people competing for the same number of jobs you’re also less likely to get a job.

That's fine, the complaint is that the wages are too low. It's not that there are no jobs. In the case of Switzerland its not even that, the unemployment and the wages are both fine which results in people being able to work in those jobs and build a life in Switzerland and making the country overcrowded thus 10million population limit was proposed. What the Swiss demanded was that the workers go away once they finish the work, they did not demand shitty jobs for their kids.

Weird to see free market and minimum wage in the same sentence. The people that I know who voted yes on this don't want the people at all, no matter if the wage. They don't want the population density and they don't want the dilution of their culture

What is weird about it, free market is not rule-free market.

It's an explicitly non-market-determined price.

It's actually market determined with extra steps as these rules are determined by the people who are the market. In Switzerland its actually significantly more direct than the rest of the world.

Instead of supply/demand, capital availability and information disparity the price is determined by voting on it. A way to overcome the tragedy of the commons.

Except that the voter base skews heavily to the non-working elderly and also excludes all the immigrants who might be quite happy to work for "low" Swiss pay.

Voting on prices is not a free market. It's something entirely different.

Most salaried people don't choose their coworkers, their bosses do.

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