Because it isn't in any way specific to an occupation. It's anything where the employee receives a non-monetary benefit from working somewhere that offsets a reduction in monetary compensation. It doesn't matter if what they're teaching you is to be a lawyer or an electrician or an auto worker, what happens is that you receive long-term training in exchange for less pay.
> My argument is exactly that you need a minimum wage in a sellers market because the market is exceedingly inefficient for workers and allows companies to exploit workers and pass that profit off to already wealthy shareholders and upper management.
This is not a description of a seller's market. When labor becomes more scarce or more in demand, the price goes up without need for any special rules.
> If it is between a job that pays enough to survive vs one that does not?
The point is that minimum wage is a garbage metric for this.
Suppose one job requires you to incur $4000/year more in transportation expenses for commuting and then pays $15,000/year instead of $12,000/year. The lower paying job leaves you with $1000 more in your pocket after expenses, but it's prohibited. If either of those jobs doesn't pay enough to live it's the one with the higher nominal pay.
> I fully agree that would be a better policy. It has proved much harder to pass through the political system.
I don't think they've had an easy time raising the minimum wage either (for much more legitimate reasons) and would do better to give up on the worse policy so they can concentrate on the better one.
So provide an example of what such a role would be...
For example, lawyers write. How is it possible for this person to develop their writing? Typically in law school, you spend an entire school year in one class developing your legal writing. Writing briefs from scratch for your professor, so he can IN DETAIL explain what you did right and wrong. Do you think a firm is going to invest this time in such an individual? I don't think that is a likely circumstance.
Nevertheless, what you describe is essentially an internship, which law students typically do their 1L and 2L summers. Oddly enough - the minimum wage has nothing to do with it. They are jobs where you are either working at a large firm and getting compensated at the same rate you would as a full time(180k a year - not too shabby for a fresh grad), or you are working at a smaller firm and probably for free... Nowhere is the minimum wage getting in the way.
I can see why the other poster kept taking up the issue with you. I can't imagine an actual situation where it's as you describe.
You say I'm pigeonholing you but you have yet to name a single occupation - what am I pigeonholing? Also, my "pigeonholing" is not arbitrary, it is the breadth of jobs that can exist with a minimum wage enacted...
No, it is not a sufficient example because you haven't said a word about what this person is doing. You can see how this feels like pulling teeth on my end, yes? I just want an actual concrete example of a job that could exist. If there are so many of these that there is a notable economic impact from this, it really isn't unreasonable to ask someone to name one, is it? I can't imagine what the job looks like that you described.
> But that's the whole problem, isn't it? When things are going well it's a seller's market and you don't need a minimum wage. When things are going poorly, the option isn't minimum wage job vs. less than minimum wage job, it's less than minimum wage job vs. unemployment. So then you're prohibiting bad and leaving them with really bad.
My argument is exactly that you need a minimum wage in a sellers market because the market is exceedingly inefficient for workers and allows companies to exploit workers and pass that profit off to already wealthy shareholders and upper management. For non-sellers markets the minimum should be adjusted to match economic times, I'm not saying we set a $25 minimum wage during a recession here. I'd be very happy to pin minimum wage to economic times.
> Can you not imagine that some jobs might pay less money but be more flexible or closer to home or less emotionally taxing and thereby preferable despite the lower pay?
If it is between a job that pays enough to survive vs one that does not? No I can't. Between two jobs that pay enough to survive? Absolutely.
> Even when a minimum wage does exactly what you want it to, the effect is to transfer money from the large institutions that can absorb the minimum wage increase to the minimum wage workers. But you can get exactly the same desired effect simply by changing their relative tax rates (using negative rates if necessary) without incurring any of the harm caused by constraining anyone's choice of employment.
I fully agree that would be a better policy. It has proved much harder to pass through the political system. I have said it in other threads here but I am 100% not saying a higher minimum wage is an ideal economic state, it is simply better than the current point we are at and the seemingly easiest to pass at the moment. In the end, the clear way to do this is through UBI IMO. And I think that is the root of a lot of these threads that I'm not going into responses on - this isn't a one and done policy change, you need others to match it like an increased social safety net to make that "really bad" unemployed scenario not as bad.