There's still the challenge of overhead that comes with onboarding and managing a new full-time or part-time worker.

Most companies hiring for minimum wage positions want a respectful employee who will show up on time. I don't think they'd bend on those requirements for cheaper labor as the management overhead would quickly eat into any cost savings.

So, while I understand it's a "good faith argument", I don't think it holds much water. Companies will just use a no-minimum wage environment to negotiate cheaper deals with employees they would have hired anyway.

Also, one's salary is in large part due to one's ability to negotiate. A manager who hires dozens of workers a year is probably pretty good at negotiating while a low-income worker might not be experienced in that area. The minimum wage also helps correct that imbalance in negotiating power.

What job skills exactly are you learning doing minimum wage jobs in 2019? That always seemed like a bit of a meme to me, considering if you've already held one minimum wage job before then you've already learned everything they have to offer practically.

This might be different if companies were interested in training employees but they aren't. So what happens with no minimum wage is that you have a class of workers who work over 40 hours a week yet have to survive off of government assistance.

The government is literally subsidizing the profits of that company at that point. So why should companies get away with being a drain on society?

Job skills to learn for people who can't get a minimum wage job can be

- Getting to work on time and every day.

- Functioning in a workplace without getting in fights.

- Sobriety.

- A basic knowledge of English.

Once you've mastered those, McDonalds will be happy to hire you.

Those aren't job skills. Those are all things you learn as part of your basic education.

So again, what actual skills do you learn on the job? If your argument is that we should remove the minimum wage to help people who can't make it through the educational system, I think the actual argument is that our educational system is fucked and needs to be fixed. Even then, most of the unemployed have those skills you've mentioned but aren't hired for any number of reasons unrelated to their competency or wages.

Those are definitely skills many at the bottom lack. They weren't part of my basic education, but I'm sure we went to different schools.

Regardless, people without those skills exist. Us HN people never meet them, and have a hard time imagining their lives, but they're still out there.

I completely agree that our educational system is fucked and needs to be fixed. I don't see how that would help the people who already went through the fucked up version, even if it ever got fixed, which I think we can agree isn't likely the next decade at least?

To learn about how the "permanent underclass" lives, You could do worse than reading "Dignity": https://www.amazon.com/Dignity-Seeking-Respect-Back-America/...

I am very, very familiar with how the poor and poverty stricken live considering I've been there and have been very public about my and my family's experience.

Which is precisely why I find framing arguments around removing minimum wage as some benefit to the poor to be rather disgusting, because it does absolutely nothing to solve the problem.

A job which can't pay shit isn't going to help you survive when the rent is due and you're earning $5 or less an hour. Even moreso if you're disabled and companies further take advantage of your desperation to work you into the ground until you break.

This isn't about helping the poor, it's about allowing companies to fleece them harder.

I honestly can't understand how people think earning $5/h is worse than earning $0/h.

I'm not being sarcastic. It's such a bizarre mental contortion.

Because the way the American social safety net works, you often wind up losing more than $5/hour worth of benefits to get that $5/hour job.

Many low wage jobs are physically demanding, have terrible (or no dependable) schedules, and offer limited hours so as to avoid having to offer benefits. It's not uncommon for low wage workers to juggle two or three jobs in order to get enough hours of paid work to survive. The problem then is that it is very hard to manage schedule conflicts between the jobs when they occur. Too many conflicts can cost you your job. I've seen this happen many times.

Check out this article in Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/life-af...

Also highly recommend On The Media's multipart investigation into poverty in America: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/projects/busted-ame...

> Because the way the American social safety net works, you often wind up losing more than $5/hour worth of benefits to get that $5/hour job.

Yeah, the marginal tax for the underclass is a huge problem!

If you lose $12/h in benefits by taking a $10/h job, most people won't take the job. Not because they're lazy, but because they're sensible rational people.

That's a big poverty trap we've built.

> The bottom of the ladder is the unemployed, who make $0/h.

If government programs are included, the unemployed definitely don't "make" $0/hour. As is often pointed out, taxpayers are effectively funding the underpayment of workers Walmart, McDonalds, etc because of government subsidies.

I don't have a dog in this hunt but the issue is much too complicated by government action to say unequivocally that the unemployed "make" $0. I'm not sure if it's good or bad but I definitely lean toward "we've made it too complicated".

[Now I'll go back to sorting through baffling health insurance complexity...]

I made $0/hour when I was unemployed at the start of my career. Never had a job before, and nobody was willing to give me a chance, so I got nothing.

I'm thankful that I will never be in that situation again. It was awful.

In the US? You should have been able to get heavily subsidized health insurance (which is a hassle), unemployment, etc. Still crappy but it's not $0.

But that's exactly my point: it's very difficult to discuss this when policy is such a swirl.

Canada, but it's the same in the States. Unemployment is for people who have lost a job. I would not have qualified.

What stuck with me was that everything required that I already had a job. Maybe it was the economy at the time, but nobody wanted to hire someone without work experience. When I discovered that even unemployment required I have work experience, it felt like I was living in Catch-22.

For that reason, I support the government acting as an employer of last resort. Everyone should be guaranteed a job if they're willing to work.

> For that reason, I support the government acting as an employer of last resort.

I like that concept as well. But there are problems. Quality of work is one. Another is the complication of getting something useful out of that manpower. Would probably be done by lending that workforce to companies... subsidized if necessary, but with significant bargaining power. Still this could end up becoming a nightmare with incompetent / corrupt governments. It would be a great natural minimum wage, though, since you'd be stupid to work for less than you could get at you gov job.

How did you shelter and feed yourself at $0/hour ?

Somebody or something was providing you liquidity.

Usually, in that situation, either you have family or friends who can help you or you end up homeless.

You clearly do have a dog in the hunt because you're framing it as the government subsidizing the companies. All of your examples are jobs with a ground level bar for entry so low that people with zero skills or clear mental illness can still manage to learn them and become gainfully employed. Were these people not employed at all they'd require /more/ government support not less.

How will it improve your life to work 80 hours a week for 3 cents an hour, living in the USA? What can you purchase with your two dollars and forty cents (before tax) of weekly pay? What job skills will you be learning?

>The good faith argument for no minimum wage is that those people would have a much bigger chance to find jobs and build job skills.

That isn't a good faith argument at all. That the "nice job you have there, stop asking for a living wage; it would be a shame if anything happened to it" argument.