If a potential employer chooses not to employ someone, who pays? The welfare system.
For either low pay or no pay, low value workers will require welfare. I don't see how this is a valid argument for a minimum wage.
Sure, workers on minimum wage may receive benefits - but they would require less benefits than if there was no minimum wage.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/01/america-195-week
And this is with a minimum wage.
The store may even help alleviate the problem, by providing Some income for these people.
Its not very clever to ask WalMart to just pay these people more; how about UCBerkely show some sincerity and pay them themselves?
For example, they could have expressed how much is Saved the public per WalMart. They didn't express it that way. Because it made a more sensationalist article the other way.
The whole idea that the minimum wage causes unemployment is a myth that is based on incorrect labour market models.
That's because the minimum wage is usually set at such a low level that it applies to very few workers (<1.5M in the US, as of 2007), so very few natural experiments are available.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2007.htm
I'll give you one natural experiment, however. A min wage hike in American Samoa caused unemployment to increase by at least 6% (= 2041 workers fired by Chicken of the Sea / (65k American Samoans x 52% labor force participation rate)).
I disagree. My unpaid jobs have always been much more accommodating when I leave - they realize they're not paying me so they don't give me a hard time at all. It's more of an attitude of, "We knew this day would come. Good luck, and if you need references or anything feel free to ask." My paid jobs have generally been a bit more stubborn, like leaving insulted them.
Also, many unpaid internships give at least enough experience to have something to talk about in a job interview. I know my unpaid work was critical in landing a paid internship in January. While some people may take advantage of students and the poor work environment, you can't make a blanket statement and say every unpaid internship is unequivocally bad.
If unpaid internships become the norm, that is it becomes expected that a person has to perform a period of unpaid work as some kind of apprenticeship, then they will be forced to do so if they want a paid job at the end of it.
So I might walk away from an unpaid internship, but I'll still need to work unpaid in another internship until at such point employers deem that I've done my time.
Therefore the individual has no choice but to accept unpaid work - regardless of which company they happen to be working for.
It's a bad precedent that needs to be stamped out.
Do you believe that requiring/favoring people with college is also a bad precedent that needs to be stamped out?
What skills do you really mean to ask for? If you waste time asking for things you think imply those skills other people will be out-recruiting you.
It's a question of producing wealth. The value of a day's work depends upon the worker, but you can't seriously expect a business to pay someone more than the amount of wealth they create for them. If it's a fundamental human right to have a certain level of income, pass a law providing for a guaranteed minimum income and let businesses pay the market rate. It makes no sense to expect businesses to operate as charities.
You're joking right? Have you seen any of the immigration reform/debate over the last 5 years in the US? One of the primary arguments is over the availability of labor so cheap that not even prisoners will take the jobs.
If people don't get enough from employers, who pays ?
I think you're making a static view of the world, and are not considering the dynamic of the system. Legislation like the minimum wage has an effect on the economic systems that you apply it to. It changes the numer and nature of employers, and the number and nature of employees.
It's impossible to measure the opportunity cost, but we can talk about the sort of costs we'll be taking. There are potential businesses that would exist if they could pay less than they do. This would create greater economic activity in general, and skill development. Both of these things which would feed back into stronger businesses and ultimately demand for labour, higher wages, lower tax.
The Internet should offer us awesome opportunities to reduce knowledge asymetry coming from labour being misallocated, or taken advantage of. Consider a version of linked-in that was oriented around networks that tried to offer and make contracts. You could see who worked with who, and then the contracts that were on offer. I doubt Linked-in will go in this direction - it would piss off recruiters. It'll happen though.
Since when did a living wage for a day's work
become a controversial issue ?
A politician who made these arguments in I'm putting is remarkable to survive at all, and definitely hated for life - Thatcher is the obvious example. The last change of power in Australia was caused by exactly these issues. Chile is lining up to have it out on these lines in the next year and will be interesting to watch.
The caricature of the right wing leader who's out to screw the workers to help the big end of town is like honey to the mindset of people who see themselves as victims, and who don't recognise that they are in control of their own fate.
There's always a labour movement party (run by teachers, lawyers and party workers) in there reminding people that they are victims, pushing those images, and suckling on the milk of votes that this easy play delivers.
Except in American - a country where labour flexibility and entreprenerialism are central to the culture.
Another evil I forgot to mention about minimum wage earier is the trap effect. Imagine your effective wage is worth less than minimum wage, but you've managed to land a dead-end job making minimum wage. Now you have a disincentive to refocus on something that would make you more valuable than minimum wage.
That pattern repeats at other levels of the economy. You sometimes see areas of government, banks or protected "national champion" businesses dominated by people who don't do much but also don't make trouble. They're keeping a low profile because the employer is able to pay too much because of the luxury of its legislative protections. Left unchecked, the good staff (who care about what they do) gradually leave for other gigs, and you get overrun by pretenders.
There are plenty of incentives to make better than minimum wage. Minimum wage doesn't exactly net you a luxurious quality of life. On one hand, it makes sense that if you allow the purchase of labour to be completely subject to the rules of supply and demand, information about what is needed where and most efficiently will spread through the network of economic activities. But labour has several disadvantages when compared to other commodities. Focusing on just one, it is expensive and time consuming for a person to upgrade the kind of labour they can provide. Education isn't cheap, and you have to support yourself while you obtain it. Being able to earn minimum wage while going through school helps to open up the opportunity to learn more valuable skills for many people. Unless your intention is to leave people from disadvantaged economic backgrounds out in the cold and allow their difficulties to propagate from generation to generation, there needs to be some mechanism to level the playing field, if only a little. My own tendencies would be towards even more socialist measures than just the minimum wage, but at least it puts a floor on how bad things can get.
Being able to earn minimum wage while going through
school helps to open up the opportunity to learn more
valuable skills for many people.
No, but that's how serfdom started - through voluntary servitude.
The point isn't to equate 21st century Europe or US with pre-19th century Russia. The point is that serfdom is a form of voluntary servitude which people entered into out of desperation. Likewise, nobody works for free (outside of charitable work) unless they are desperate (or they are rich kids, and don't need to care). Companies exploit this through unpaid internships - assuming they can get away with it.
Saying "you're free to walk away" is not a moral argument; if the only way a young person can find work is through doing voluntary servitude then they are stuck in that position until they do so.
Minimum wage laws exist for a number of reasons. If people don't get enough from employers, who pays ? The welfare system, i.e. the rest of us. So employers can exploit the system to boost their profits. Second, how does it fail to protect people ? Since when did a living wage for a day's work become a controversial issue ?