> This is maybe a radical argument, but I make it in good faith; if your business can only exist by paying workers at or below poverty wages, and/or enacting dehumanizing controls, it probably shouldn't exist.

The problem is that once you close the business and fire the underpaid employees, they don't disappear. Now they're unemployed and make $0/hour.

This blind spot fascinates me. The best explanation I've seen is "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics". It says that "when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it".

So in this scenario, once you've fired your employees, you are no longer connected to them, and their further destiny is not your fault.

I suspect this is a deep part of our moral instincts, and we have to be aware of it to get to a more rational approach.

https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

Thanks that blog post was really opened my mind on the topic

Thanks for the link. I have some thoughts after reading it, mainly entangling with scale of the solutions, optics, and higher-order effects, but I think it's still an incomplete thought. It does drive people crazy to think about the things we can do for people who need help, the optics of how to help and how much can we help. Do you have any more books/articles related to this?

I don't have any more material I've vetted.

If you google "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics", lots of things come up though. Happy hunting!

> This is maybe a radical argument, but I make it in good faith; if your business can only exist by paying workers at or below poverty wages, and/or enacting dehumanizing controls, it probably shouldn't exist. If the demand for the product or service is sufficient, price should follow accordingly to make that business viable and profitable. Saying a business can't afford to pay workers a living wage and treat them right is equivalent to unintentionally saying 'the business can't exist without worker exploitation'. I do not believe that is a defensible position if you don't axiomatically accept worker exploitation.

I respect your sincere intentions here, but I do object to that proposal, and I hope that there can be a constructive dialog on the subject.

I think my primary objection is to the description of the small pizzeria as being exploitative. Sure, the workers are not payed very much, but the power differential is very small. It seems much more likely that the economic relationship is genuinely one of mutual benefit, and I have a hard time finding a moral objection to that.

My other objection is to the ramifications of such a policy on a broader society. It seems inevitable to me that in such a society, everyone would be forced to be clients of large, faceless entities, be they private corporations or governmental entities. That we could rely on either of these institutions to protect individuals from exploitation is highly dubious. To my mind, it is the very existence of intermediary institutions (like small businesses) which are the best safeguards of individual autonomy and well-being.

It's possible that the owner is being exploited too, but the franchise corporation, or financial interests. That doesn't make it ok for them to exploit others.

> It's possible that the owner is being exploited too, but the franchise corporation, or financial interests.

Irrelevant. I'm not talking about the owner being exploited. We could just be talking about a independent small business that's trying to get by on small margins.

> That doesn't make it ok for them to exploit others.

You're assuming that low pay is exploitation when that is the very notion I'm challenging. The exploitation comes from a power differential that is leveraged to the benefit of one party. If neither party has much power over the other, and neither is benefiting unduly from the relationship, then there is not exploitation.

It may very well be that neither the business nor the employee has much to offer each other. The point is that they're still willing to work together for mutual benefit, however small that mutual benefit may be.

> This is maybe a radical argument, but I make it in good faith; if your business can only exist by paying workers at or below poverty wages, and/or enacting dehumanizing controls, it probably shouldn't exist.

Yeah, I agree, but I think another false general assumption people might make is "every retail or food service job is minimum wage" and that every owner is just shortchanging their workers to pay themselves more. That isn't the case across the board.

Best Buy doesn't pay minimum wage, heck even when I started there as a part time computer tech in 2002 I was paid $9.50/hr. That being said with the 1 year $80/share price they can damn well afford to pay more.

My friend who owns the pizza business pays more than his franchise based competitors, he has employees who have worked for him for years because of this. So he's not paying close to minimum wage but the "meta market" for a pizza keeps his prices in a certain range. As I mentioned in a below comment there are other market forces at work here (e.g., a national franchise has buying power for food price reductions, etc).

So knowing his very loyal customer base, if he had to increase prices to support extra cost, they'd probably stay to a certain extent, but maybe that results in less employees or hours. Who knows.

> If you're worried about the job loss or availability of services caused by such a position, there a whole sea of political and socioeconomic thought on how to solve that. It's probably beyond the current conversation.

Yeah, that's my whole point. Any legislation that increases wages has a disproportionate impact based on your business, and SBA says small business makes up 48% of jobs[0].

But like you said, the conversation is a level up from this.

[0]: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/advocacy/2018-Small-...

The idea that they "shouldn't exist" doesn't make much sense to me.

As long as you treat your employees with respect and pay legal wages, who are we to say that the wages are "poverty wages".

Many of these low wage, entry level positions are/were meant to be filled by young people, still living with parents, or part time workers who may have a spouse that is the primary earner.

The problem is that due to lack of other options, many people are crowding out these type of workers and using these jobs as full time, primary income.

If the alternative is no job at all (i.e. "shouldn't exist") then poverty wages sound better than nothing.

> As long as you treat your employees with respect and pay legal wages, who are we to say that the wages are "poverty wages".

When working those wages leave you in poverty its poverty wages.

> Many of these low wage, entry level positions are/were meant to be filled by young people, still living with parents, or part time workers who may have a spouse that is the primary earner.

This is not the case, and has never been the case. The economy is not set up for the benefit of teens on summer vacation.

44% of all workers aged 18 to 64 made a median of $10.64/hr and an annual income less than $20,000. Its hard to overstate how many people across the country are living on poverty wages - the "young people" theory to me frequently only comes about from people who've grown up in affluent areas and had evening jobs at grocery stores. Most low wage workers in this economy are invisible.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/meet-the-low-wage-workfor...

> the "young people" theory to me frequently only comes about from people who've grown up in affluent areas and had evening jobs at grocery stores.

You've hit the nail on the head. This position is privilege exemplified, and indicates a lack of empathy for people who do not have the skills, opportunity, or desire to obtain higher-paying positions. Everyone in our society should be able to live with dignity, regardless of their vocation. No one needs to scrape by in the wealthiest country on earth, especially when minimum-wage jobs make so much of our society possible.

I don't think calling out people for having privilege is a good way to win someone to your side unless the person has had the opportunity to hear other perspectives and has chosen to ignore them. It turns an otherwise productive educational conversation (on both sides) into combat.

I don't blame anyone for having a (relatively) sheltered life, as there's plenty in our life that all of us being on this forum are sheltered from. I consider it a good thing to be sheltered from a lot of traumas growing up. Our children need not feel the same pains we did. But by using a combative tone you're lessening the change for empathy to win out.

Finally, thats not to say that combat (rhetorical, physical) isn't the solution in some cases.

Totally agree with your point, my comment was lacking the fact that I also have a very privileged upbringing compared to many Americans. I wasn't trying to speak down, but laterally. Tone is hard to convey online, but I can do better. :)

Then I'd say you don't know much about poverty.

I grew up in one of the poorest counties in America.

I now live in one of the wealthiest. And while the occasional affluent family has a teenager or two that works at the grocery store, in poor areas, lots more teenagers have jobs to supplement not only their own income, but that of their parents.

That's not to say that there are more teenagers working these low wage jobs, it's just to point out that "privlege" in this case is merely a straw man and sidesteps the main thrust of my point, which was, what is better, "poverty wages" or no wages at all?

Your second sentence asserts that poverty is some nebulous concept, and that if wages are "legal" then they must be "moral".

It is nebulous from the point of view of a single employer. If someone only wants to work 10 hours a week and you pay them $12 an hour and their spouse works full time and makes $100k a year, is the $12 an hour employee living in poverty?

This part of your your comment hits on the one thing I try to teach younger people, "It's just exploitation, and I work my current job with fear of having to go back to that."

The difference between a job and a career is portability. If you have a career, you can switch employers and they will value your experience. You will make the same or more. If you have a job, when you switch employers you start back at the bottom. Sometimes there is a small premium for experience, but it's nowhere near what you can make at a good employer for longevity.