What do minimum wage supporters expect to happen with people whose labor does not produce >= $minimum_wage worth of value?
And I say ‘curiously’ with some sarcasm, because it is very obvious why the focus is always disproportionately on needing to justify minimum wages for the poor, normally with ridiculous economic value arguments, but not extreme wages for anyone else - which is apparently fine and has zero negative consequences
However, the government mandating a certain wage has a tremendous effect on me.
> However, the government mandating a certain wage has a tremendous effect on me.
"the government mandating a certain wage" is the definition of minimum wage in this thread. If you are not a minimum wage worker and would not become a minimum wage worker after an increase in the minimum wage, why and how does that have an effect on you, and why would an increase in an executive's salary (multiple orders of magnitude more than minimum wage, and annually increasing in orders-of-magnitude higher dollar amounts than minimum wages do) not have a similar or greater effect on you?
Gee, wonder why they only accept advice from people that tell them to give executives more money?
The whole point of civilization is to help people.
If a business cannot support civilization, then why should it continue to exist?
Sorry, how does this relate to my comment?
Your original comment was what to do about those people whose labour does not equal or exceed the minimum wage value.
In everything I have read and all the people I have talked to about this, after sufficient questioning, the answer always seems to end up being murdering the poor. Oh, it's never going out and killing them personally. Oh no, that would be terrible, it's always destroy support systems and flooding the market with cheap but eventually deadly substances of varying sorts, so it's always at second hand.
Yet on the other hand I have seen so many companies damaged and even destroyed by someone whose economic value is extremely negative, but somehow spins it as a good thing and so walks away with big paychecks and fat bonuses and go on to another company to do it again.
I saw a PM so thoroughly mess up that they made it impossible for the company to provide software licenses to their customers. Managements response was not to fix the broken spreadsheet, oh no, that would be the smart thing to do. No, it was to lay people off because revenue was down. It was like selling cars but never giving the customer the keys to drive off. Who would actually finish the transaction?
But hey, he's are an executive, so it's fine when he destroys tens or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of customer revenue. Now, that teenage girl trying to feed, house and transport herself, now she deserves to have her every action, interaction and off-duty thought scrutinized at the nano level because how dare she want to live a life worth living when her parents aren't already rich?
I remember when a fast-food place was staffed with a dozen people and the food was good and was actually delivered quickly. Now it's just a couple and it takes forever to get through the drive-thru to get food that poisons you. At least corporate is posting record profits again.
It's not that the girl at the drive-thru isn't generating huge profits, she and all of them very much are. It's that someone else has decided that she doesn't deserve to participate in the rewards of those profits.
I always get the feel that they are so disappointed that slavery is mostly illegal. So many systems have been put in place to suck all the money off the table so it becomes more and more expensive to survive, minimum wage was an attempt to protect people, that is what a functional civilization does.
So back to civilization, people come together to share resources, so people can support each other. Some people think they are special. They treat people as things and that is the problem. When people are things, they become disposable, and that is wrong.
Sorry, what? I mean, helping people is nice, but that's a very sweeping hippie sort of claim. I suppose you could say trade helps people, but that is a side effect of trade, not necessarily the point. Also, minimum wages often 'hurt' the very people they were designed to help.
I’ve seen the same reply to my comment multiple times. Each time it has nothing to do with what I said. I made no claim regarding businesses surviving or not surviving. Why do people keep replying the same thing?
If a business isn't structured to pay external staff the minimum hourly wage in exchange for what they are expected to do in an hour, that's tough.
If people are unable to genuinely find a job in exchange for what they can do by their best efforts in an hour then they can apply for assistance.
Interesting, first I'm hearing of this idea. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - do you have evidence to support this?
Same thing we’ve been doing for other fields like software engineers - just pay them more.
Nearly every app or website I use today is broken, slow or hostile to the user. Show me the value for the pay.
Every minimum-wage supporter would actually be fine with the extremely reasonable position of paying everyone in proportion to the replaceability of their actual work and then letting businesses that don't know how to provide value just go out of business. Raising the wage floor is just an imperfect-but-actionable proxy for that because nobody is willing to honestly explore curbing the excesses of the executive and investor classes.
> "What do minimum wage supporters expect to happen with people whose labor does not produce >= $minimum_wage worth of value?"
Can I assume that you're referring to the executives? Just kidding. Of course you aren't.
You can either mandate that people get paid commensurately with the difficulty of replacing their actual labor (as opposed to merely of their position[0]) or you can raise the floor and hope that it approximately achieves something close enough, but you must pick one.
[0]:
The position of CEO of a company has great value, someone needs to make those decisions. But the actual labor of a CEO can often be trivially done by even the least intelligent and least motivated employee. They are eminently replaceable. And yet the CEO gets paid in proportion to the position rather than their labor.
Right now executive pay is artificially high relative to their actual labor as "the cost of doing business" and laborer pay is artificially low relative to their actual labor as "the way to stay in business". Why does that seem ok?
Of course not, why would I be? I don't mind if a company decides to pay their employees a lot. In fact, I'd prefer companies pay their employees a lot!
If you think this will lead to large scale unemployment, you're wrong.
It might, however, lead to exploitative employers going out of business, but alternatively, and hopefully, seeing the light and investing in productivity improvements.
Let me put it this way - the USA's (Land Of The Free, and the Criminally Underpaid) unemployment rate is near identical to the Norwegian unemployment rate, so obviously the American should-be-criminal low (well, it would be criminal in a sane society not captured by the owners) minimum wage isn't exactly the magic "everyone gets a job" juice you obviously think it is.
And to prëempt you, yeah yeah, you're "just asking questions" even though you have an incredibly obvious pre-existing belief that you never explicitly identify upfront because it makes you feel clever or whatever the hell wee kick you get out of this attempt at sophistry.