Hacker News Reader

Comment by wat10000 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see anyone not acknowledging the problem. Some don’t see a good solution.

You propose a legal requirement to pay these people more. That will indeed solve the problem of unfairly low pay for these jobs. It will also create a problem of reduced hiring for those jobs and reduced output, possibly substantially reduced depending on how much more they have to be paid.

In short, you can mandate that lumber mill workers must be paid more, but you have to accept that less lumber gets produced and fewer people get paid to work there.

View on HN

Less lumber gets produced, luber prices get higher or lumber productions profits get smaller, yes. Ideally it's a mix of the three.

But this isn't nearly as bad as you're making it sound. Lots of things used to be done by extremely low-wage workers or even slaves, and haven't gone away now that workers have to be paid better (or at all). Obviously many of those people are still paid very poorly and there's lots of work left to do there, but we improved things to a noticable extent and we didn't really suffer any bad effects. We can go further.

A lot of that was automation rather than legislation. You could use this as an automation push. That could work well. My main point is that this should be something like “legislation should mandate higher wages for riskier jobs and push for automation to control costs and reduce risk” rather than “it’s unfair.”

You're mixing up two parts of the discussion. This is unfair, THEREFORE we should ____. You need to agree on what the problem is, why it's a problem and what the outcome should be, then you can get to the methods.

And no, not that much. Automation is of course a factor, but it came at different times for different things and don't forget that it often made things worse for workers, at least where or when they didn't have institutional support.

Having institutional support for workers (unions and a pro-labour government) is what ultimately matters. Even if some prices go up and some jobs are lost, such institutions help smooth out the transition and put pressure on businesses which would otherwise jump at the opportunity to also increase their margins.

Pretty much everyone will agree that, all else being equal, it would be good for riskier jobs to pay more. Higher pay is pretty much always better than lower pay if that's the only difference. Where it breaks down is that all else is very much not equal. Whatever method you use to increase pay is going to have other consequences and people disagree about what those will be and whether they're worth it.

My problem is that "it's unfair" turns it into a value judgment. Then when someone is skeptical that it can be improved without making things worse overall, or worse when someone is skeptical of a particular proposed solution, that gets turned into a moral failing.

If you perceive disagreement over the fairness of paying people badly for risky jobs, I think it's because it's so basic that people just skip over that. A small child can identify unfairness. The interesting and difficult part is what to do about it.

You'd be surprised. People regularly say that this is completely fair because the higher-paid people worked harder to get their education/skills/whatever, or that they literally just paid more for their education and that investment should be returned. I've head many other roundabout ways of basically saying "it's a fair system, people just need to work garder/smarter/whatever" and they actually believe it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com