> human life and human labor has intrinsic value and any company's bill of materials ought to include labor.
Human life has intrinsic value, it could be argued from a moral standpoint, but human labor does not. What matters is what that labor is used for. I could have you spend all day making mud pies. That does not mean your labor is worth anything. The only thing that can determine the true value of your labor is what someone else is willing to pay for i.e. the market.
> Companies have been allowed to undercut worker's value for centuries under the threat of homelessness and starvation.
More people than ever before have been lifted out of homelessness and serfdom because of the free market. Companies working under a free market is a pretty new and novel idea.
> Companies are the only entities we allow to just take, setting their own prices, without quarrel
This is wrong on several takes. First and foremost, you're implying that workers in general should have the ability to unilaterally determine the value of their own labor a market. This is in direct conflict with the realities of the free market i.e. spending all day making mud pies. You can moan and groan all you want, but yes, if all your work requires is the basic use of your prefrontal cortex, your labor is less valuable than if you were a doctor. That's not the fault of the employer.
> Oppositionally, I believe in human dignity - I think a worker should be able to bargain.
They DO have the ability to bargain. Their ability to walk away is one of their most powerful things they can do. If you truly believe you're getting a raw deal and that your labor is worth more than whatever compensation company X is offering, then you should simply walk away and apply for company Y. In a free market, the role of the buyers and sellers are inverted because it is the companies that are the buyers; specifically they buy the commodities that are your labor.
And this is not even touching on the basic principles of supply and demand in context to minimum wage. The fact of the matter is, a minimum wage does not lift people out of poverty - it removes rungs from the bottom half of the ladder. Precious rungs to low skilled employees that use them to climb up out of poverty. Companies will not just eat the cost - they do not want to go out of business. They make a cost-benefit analysis and compensate for this minimum wage by firing their low-performing staff to make the remaining higher-performer workers work overtime. Now it's harder for new people with little job experience to find employment. Congratulations - you've just hurt the very people you've intended to protect. And this isn't even touching on the impact of dead weight loss caused by minimum wage. You need to study the basic concepts of microeconomics before formulating your philosophical principles, because as of right now, I can tell you that they are a little insane.
I wonder if you'd agree with the statement if one would replace "human labour" with "the human's time". Therefore the labour itself can be meaningless (though I bet that for building mud houses, they can be pretty useful[1]), but the time the person spends on it has intrinsic value and should be rewarded accordingly.
I can't speak for how raising minimal wage in the US would help the 13% of poor people, but I am pretty sure that:
> Precious rungs to low skilled employees that use them to climb up out of poverty.
is thoroughly disproved by the current state of the income divide in the country. There are plenty of people under the poverty threshold that are unable to climb out and that's mostly due to the discrepancy between their possible income and their day to day expenses. Raising the minimal wage seems like the facile solution to close that gap. You can of course continue to argue the microeconomics angle, but I haven't heard of any solution proposed by the people that have a handle on it that could be an option. Have you? Could you tell us about it?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D59v74k5flU < Primitive Technology creating mud bricks
The problem is that many types of labor don't generate enough market value to earn a living. The one thing markets are really good for is establishing price signals that reflect how much one thing is valued relative to another thing. (This, however, does require a healthy, competitive market which often does not exist. For example: in "company towns", individual employers have so much market power that they don't have to pay wages that reflect the theoretical economic value of labor. When an industry is dominated by a few large players, collusion happens. Etc.)
When pay is low because the labor just isn't that valuable, artificially propping up wage prices will cause substantial distortions and side effects downstream. After all, those wage prices get bundled into a lot of other pricing signals in the economy, all of which are interacting in a complex system. A far, far better approach is to simply supplement those workers' pay directly from the government, to bring them up to an appropriate income level. This isn't free of side effects either, but I would argue they are greatly reduced.
That would explicitly make it extrinsically valuable, not intrinsically. The value is assigned subjectively from outside rather than an inherent property of the time itself.
But then all value is really extrinsic, assigned by people to goods and not a property of the goods themselves. "Intrinsic value" does not exist.
> For example: in "company towns", individual employers have so much market power that they don't have to pay wages that reflect the theoretical economic value of labor.
They are paying wages which "reflect the theoretical economic value of labor". In particular, they are paying wages which exceed the perceived value (opportunity cost) of the labor to the employees. Even in a company town one is not compelled to work for the dominant employer—one can leave, or attempt to become self-sufficient, or start a competing company. There just isn't much demand-side competition for labor in that environment, so more of the surplus value accrues to the buyer rather than the sellers. Those who sympathize more with the employees would prefer the opposite, but that's just favoring one side over the other in negotiations. There's no sense attacking the employer here. If you want to improve the lives of those living in the company town, give them better options: more productive employment, for example, and loans to cover the cost of relocation.
> A far, far better approach is to simply supplement those workers' pay directly from the government, to bring them up to an appropriate income level.
Because paying people to remain in unproductive jobs always turns out so well… If a job can't pay "an appropriate income level" (i.e. an income level the employee—not some third party—considers worthwhile, and which covers their actual living expenses) without subsidies then it isn't worth doing. The existence of that job is a net loss to society. Not to mention that this is effectively a subsidy for cheapskate employers, who no longer need to pay market wages since someone else (mostly the middle class) is committed to making up the difference.
The “fact of the matter” is that despite decades of study, economists have come up with countless studies indicating both that minimum wages help and harm people in poverty. There is no definitive study one way or the other.
What I'm saying is that fundamentally, a human livelihood has an upfront cost and that's the cost it takes to keep a human alive. I'm not talking about what work you as a hypothetical manager end up making this hypothetical person do, or how good at it they hypothetically are, I'm talking about living human beings as they are, baseline, whether or not you consider their labor valuable or potentially valuable.
The rest of your argument hinges on this misunderstanding, willful or otherwise. You've torn apart nothing but your own strawmen. Pragmatically, I'm not even sure minimum wage is the right choice to rectify this indignity, other options range from nothing to UBI to free housing programs to guaranteed jobs to communism. I'm not commenting on which one is best, I'm commenting on the moral framework from which these ideas come from.
Humans do have upfront costs too, but those are on individuals to pay. Generally the manufacturers of those parents (parents). It is not the responsibility of an employer or others to reimburse for those costs. Humans also have maintenance costs and personal desires, but those are not the responsibility of the employer either. The only responsibility is to pay an agreed upon price.
People are entitled to nothing from others beyond being free from direct harm.
I understand that we want people not to starve, but surely paying them their labor value is better than them not working at all.
If the main issue is the difference between what their labor is worth and the necessities to survive, why is it the employer who should subsidize them?
The reason we prevent companies from selling below cost is because it is an unfair advantage to those companies-a very different concern than workers below cost.
This is beside the fact that the threshold for 'below cost' is not an economic reality, but an entirely arbitrary and unrelated moral position.
Also you seem to have the idea that working a job is somehow inherently good. Some of them just are not and are a waste that are actively preventing people from working on what is necessary.
Example, a store clerk paid more than a teacher despite shortage of teachers. Garbage disposal specialists being notoriously underpaid because we feel like it. Research being underfunded compared to development compared to management.
Finding a place that's paid actual labor value is almost impossible in fact, as if the system based on maximizing profit is not optimizing for that but for lowest possible salary... You can compute a rough estimate of a labor value by an input-output model. Note that more things being produced is an actual negative value if they're not needed or sold.
Suppose having a line manager makes an employee 5% more efficient than not, but the gain falls the more employees each manager has to manage, even potentially becoming negative in some cases. Yet, "market forces" which is other managers set themselves a high salary.
I dont think the work is underpaid. If the price is low due to supply and demand, it is not underpaid, it is just low value labor. If we want people to have more money than their labor is worth, then the people who want them to have money should give it to them, or help them increase the value of their labor.
>Also you seem to have the idea that working a job is somehow inherently good.
Not at all. I think that self sufficiency and people taking care of themselves is good. Working and making money is good in that it reduces the need for others to subsidize and pay for their lives.
>Some of them just are not and are a waste that are actively preventing people from working on what is necessary.
I think this is a inaccurate and paternalistic view. low paid jobs are not a barrier. People can and do find better jobs. Destroying a job does not create a better job.
>Examples
Nobody in the examples underpaid. These are just examples of labor that has low value (supply and demand). If garbage specialists are underpaid, it isn't because "we feel like it", it is because it is low skill and anyone can do it. If teachers are underpaid, it is because we don't want to pay more for higher quality teachers.
You seem to be coming at things from a Marxist theory of labor value, which isn't workable.
Because it's a government policy. If the government wants everyone to earn $25 an hour, the government should pay for it by providing a universal basic income, rather than forcing a third party to pay for it. This would also ensure that people that can't do work worth $25/hour can still survive.
The government should also be the one paying for universal healthcare, rather than (again) foisting the responsibility onto employers and forcing people to choose between being exploited in a job and losing health care for their family.
You state this as though it is an absolute fact. In reality, it's completely arbitrary, vague and reflects only your personal values. What is direct harm? Why am I entitled to not being caused it? Why am I not entitled to being free from indirect harm? If I poke at you, not directly, but using a stick, is that indirect harm? Is not paying you the agreed upon price dorect harm? Why is there a responsibility to honor agreements, but nothing else?
Even given a generous interpretation of "direct harm" it doesn't reflect society as it is: in reality, people cooperate, compete, create hierarchies, cause and accept harm, lead and are led and assign and divide responsibilities amongst themselves according to a wide range of value systems...so I guess yours is just some kind of prescriptive wishful thinking? Sort of like the libertarian version of the ten commandments?
That's the basic failure of a capitalist. They want to shift the risk onto the worker without sharing the reward.
A human hour is worth precisely that - an hour. What is done with the hour is at the risk of those buying the hour, not those selling it.
It's for the capitalists to obtain the productivity. That is, after all, where their share of the pie comes from. If they can't do that, then it is the capitalist that starves, not the worker.
"They DO have the ability to bargain. Their ability to walk away is one of their most powerful things they can do"
Except that the power asymmetry stops that from working. Workers have to get work to eat, businesses only need to hire if there is a chance to profit. The time horizons are mismatched.
Therefore with the system we have, where there are systemically fewer jobs than people who want them, the bargaining power is with capital, not labour.
To fix it requires a default job, and a wide based tax to support that. That way if capitalists fail to hire everybody they pay anyway.
I fundamentally disagree with your premise. Your rhetoric mimics that of a libertarian. I'll tear apart your philosophical rhetoric one part at a time.
> The only thing that can determine the true value of your labor is what someone else is willing to pay for i.e. the market.
Right, because capital is always virtuous and would never use its market power to suppress wages...
> You can moan and groan all you want, but yes, if all your work requires is the basic use of your prefrontal cortex, your labor is less valuable than if you were a doctor.
You are conflating value and price. Society would collapse much faster if the low paid servant class collectively stopped working than the high paid knowledge workers (hence we had to make them "essential" and coerce them into working during the pandemic). At least the servant class actually does work of material value. Many if not most knowledge workers are producing little actual value and it is notoriously difficult to determine who actually is producing the value and that isn't even getting into externalities that aren't correctly priced by the market. Do you really think that most companies correctly pay people in proportion to the actual value of their work? That certainly has not been my experience.
> They DO have the ability to bargain. Their ability to walk away is one of their most powerful things they can do.
Not everyone is a well paid computer programmer. Not everyone has the ability to miss a single paycheck and not suffer potentially dire consequences. Employers exploit this power differential all the time. There is a reason why the labor movement emerged and why capital has done all they can to hollow it out over the last 50 years. (Of course organized labor has its own problems. Sadly the world isn't black and white).
> Precious rungs to low skilled employees that use them to climb up out of poverty.
Citation needed. We have long been enamored with the Horatio Alger myth in American life but there are very, very few people bootstrap their way up to the middle class, let alone upper class, starting from poverty and a minimum wage job (there are many middle class people who work low wage jobs for pocket money and experience when they are teenagers or college age but that doesn't count).
> You need to study the basic concepts of microeconomics before formulating your philosophical principles, because as of right now, I can tell you that they are a little insane.
Economics is a branch of philosophy. It is neither the beginning nor end of knowledge. Just because someone's philosophical arguments are not rooted in economic theory does not mean they are wrong. Economists are terrible at making concrete predictions compared to those who practice almost any other field that calls itself a science. Even when they are right, they tend to be so only in a qualitative way (e.g. they might correctly predict inflation goes up or down in certain scenarios but are unlikely to get even a digit correct). The entire field of economics could use a healthy dose of humility.
Companies are the only entities we allow to just take, setting their own prices, without quarrel, because laborers don't have bargaining power when selling their labor. Hell, the interview process should be proof enough of that. Oppositionally, I believe in human dignity - I think a worker should be able to bargain. Frankly, since us regular people can't just go up to the store and say "well, I don't wanna pay full price for this item, so I'll just pay less for it - what're you gonna do about it anyway?" (we'd get arrested) I don't think a company should be able to either. When you frame it in terms of an open market, the current labor situation sounds obviously and patently absurd.