This is a common type of formulation in journalism that often reveals the bias of the journalist.
1. Walmart pays SOME workers with PAST experience UP TO $25/hr
2. Amazon's average STARTING pay for NEW hires is $18/hr
Whatever one's opinion on Amazon, when you see the two statements next to each other, it's very obvious that this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. Whatever the future of journalism/information-sharing, I hope we leave tactics like this behind, as it does not lead to improved shared understanding.
You may be convinced of your interpretation, but it's also likely that the journalist isn't rigorous enough to notice the distinction themselves, didn't have access to perfectly comparable figures, or had a deadline to meet and cut corners because they needed to pick up their kid from school.
Never attribute to malice that which blah blah blah...
Regardless of the awareness/intent of the given journalist, I do hope that we can find leaders (whether people/orgs/software) that can help improve our information environment to improve shared sensemaking.
In an ideal world, non-rigorous journalists, arbitrary deadlines, and corner cutting because of school pickups shouldn't impact the clarity of information being shared. That's the world of today, and it leads to a very muddied/confused information environment, but I don't believe it's the only possibility for us.
But it's not.
You were correct to call out their bias and tactics, as journalists have written hit pieces on various companies in the past and have earned scrutiny over how they present data.
I don't feel like you should need to backpedal on your astute observation just because someone points out a bs excuse scenario like they might have kids to pick up from school.
It is literally a journalist's job to gather and present accurate data, hopefully without bias. I don't think it is too much to ask of them, no matter the circumstances.
The deadlines of those poor journalists—and their kids!—is hardly the main problem with the Media. But you probably already know that.
Formulation: MAX(Group A) > MIN(Group B) . I often notice that some types of groups/entities always find themselves having the MIN function applied to their case, and others always have the MAX function applied to theirs.
You are also right that deadlines/school pickups aren't the main problem with media. I don't believe that to be true, I was just using that as an example because the poster I was replying to did. When we think about what a better version of the media could look like, those shouldn't be excuses.
That little “rule” sounds so smart, huh? That people are just dumb and there is no pattern to anything. It’s all random and people are just fumbling about, doing “stupid” or “random” shit. Their mind is distracted because they need to pick up their child froms school.
But it’s not even about malice or intent. It’s about patterns and analysis of how the media operates. You observe if things are slanted in a certain way. If they give one side the benefit of the doubt while the other not so much.
It’s not about finding evidence of the inner workings/mind of some run of the mill journalist. It’s about seeing what kind of output certain outlets put out. On aggregate.
This has been done before. It can be done.
And how do you disregard such good work? By half-quoting—it’s so cliche that you won’t lower yourself to finish the pseudo-quote—some smarter-than-thou, above the fray nonsense which fundamentally confuses individual intent (i.e. “conspiracy”) with aggregate analysis, all because you got hung up on the particular-sounding “bias of the journalist”, which could originally have been meant to be illustrative[1] and could have been taken as such in a charitable reading, especially since it’s not like any of us even remember the byline of this article.
[1] Although note that the original poster totally folded in a sibling comment, so whatever…
I think we need to hold journalists to higher standard than "complete idiot".
I've noticed the same pattern, and I can't believe it's not intentional.
Maybe the blame should fall more on Vox and their work environment rather than the journalist, but we do have to draw a line somewhere on the basic standards for journalism. We don't excuse a bridge falling down or a web service failing because the engineers had to pick up their kids from school..
Journalists have to work with the information they get; they can’t force two employers to give them perfectly comparable figures. Their job is to accurately report the info they do get.
These wages aren't some super secret data point. Referencing a 2021 Reuters article as the source for Amazon wage data is an interesting choice, when you can find better comparable data by spending 5 minutes on Google.
We're dealing with uncertainty in all regards. My position is that it's best to be transparent with our uncertainty.
If the article had said "We didn't have good wage data to directly compare Walmart & Amazon warehouse compensation against each other", I would have loved it, because it'd show transparency/honesty/authenticity. Or if they did an analysis using data from job postings or wage sites and were very transparent on their methodology and admitted what you stated "These figures were taken from job postings on X.com, which can often have ranges. Consider there to be some degree of imprecision."
I totally get that it's not a norm in the media today to do that, and there are a lot of structural incentives that create that situation. I can empathize with each actor/individual within the broader system, and that they're doing their best within the world they live in.
You can't. That's why the article says "An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour" - rather than stating as fact that "in 2021 the company bumped the average starting wage...".
The greater point is about source/data selection. MAX(Walmart) > MIN(Amazon) is a weird comparison to make. And choosing to quote two completely different sources for both the MAX(Walmart) data point [resolves to $25] and the MIN(Amazon) data point [resolves to $18] is strange, and I feel should have been explained if they're going to use quotes to communicate what might be happening in objective reality.
How was Sheheryar Kaoosji, of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, able to communicate what the max wage for a Walmart worker was, but unable to provide any comparable data point for Amazon (or it was provided, and an editor/journalist excluded it)?
Why is it best? I'm not interested in reading a bunch of gibberish disclaimer that I already know, and that all readers should know when consuming media. People can be wrong, facts are not black and white, and truth is a spectrum. It's not the job of a journalist on a deadline to spoon feed you critical thinking.
I don't know whether they teach that in journalism school. My guess is that they do, and that this type of bias only leaks out now due to the overwhelming amount of citizen journalism that social media allows.
I think the other replies to you who won't consider this possibility are influenced by trying to take down Amazon, which in my opinion they will do to themselves if it is warranted. No media push is necessary.
We still haven't found our way back to trusted sources. Some day, we will.
Turnover is the subject of the story, those two statements seem directly relevant.
Shared understanding is not and never has been the goal of journalism, possibly excluding the business press. Stories are more interesting with heroes and villains so journalists create them if necessary.
Isn’t that a good thing? What’s your complaint?
1) Working for Amazon is no fun. For the same income, employees would prefer an employer where they have more time to relax and have less extreme workloads. If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go?
2) Worker productivity is higher, so Amazon can afford to pay more while being competitive with other businesses.
This is a pure economic point. I am not trying to make a veiled moral argument (although I understand how many such arguments could be read into what I wrote).
Let's not forget that each of us the people are more similar to the employee than we're to Amazon. Though I suppose a lot of people who never have had to be an employee anywhere (e.g. due to being born into enough wealth) wouldn't see this as clearly as a more typical person; compound this into the fact that most law makers (specially senators) are from very wealthy backgrounds already...
look, I don't want to work for Amazon, but, I don't think it is exploitation to expect productivity concomitant with wage. I think Amazon has offered poor working conditions.
All that said, the market will solve this. I've been told recently by a company providing outsourced help desk services that they were struggling to compete for talent because target was paying more than they were. I told them that they were not paying enough. they responded that their clients wouldn't agree to price increases in the service...The answer is that either you will get underqualified people, declining service quality, or you will pay more.
People like to say, "if you do X like me, youll get ahead or be your own boss or ___". It may be true for some people, but it comes almost directly at the cost of putting someone else in the bad place you were trying to get out of. So with respect to trying to improve the overall system, shuffling people around isnt going to help.
Secondly, that very strongly suggests survivor bias. You almost never hear about all the people who did X and didn't make it. And the one time you do, those were unlucky, or didn't really do X (true scottsman fallacy).
I generally agree with this and if the leaked memo is true, then the market is basically solving this now.
In essence, let's say the pool of applicants for warehouse jobs is 1,000,000 million people. Amazon needs 250k of them to operate their biz and the average retention is 1 year. In 4 years, the people who left previously are now looking for jobs and the only option is Amazon. If a warehouse job conditions are that poor, then they will collectively argue for higher pay.
Said another way - Amazon's presumably poor work conditions eventually catches up with them and the market will respond.
If all of this is true, then the underlying issue is the more controversial one (and moral one), which is that the mental/physical damage to workers mind/bodies can't be repossessed.
how you feel about it is up to you, but the more it sucks for the worker the less they'll like it.
it's important that for most people, "voluntary" in this situation involves the threat of fairly immediate homelessness, hunger, and family separation.
maybe the market will solve this, but i think the market might have a larger appetite for hellish consequences than many of us would like, and we all have to live with them.
It's exploitation if Amazon is tricking workers into working for less than their time is worth, or if Amazon is breaking labor laws.
"Voluntary" means that out of the incredible number of open job postings these days, workers picked Amazon's. Acting like the alternative to Amazon is homelessness and hunger is hilariously wrong.
but you are underestimating how immediate and real the threat of homelessness appears to the class of people who work warehouse jobs.
>It's exploitation if Amazon is tricking workers into working for less than their time is worth, or if Amazon is breaking labor laws.
these are both literally happening.
if Amazon wasn't getting more utility and value out of their resources than they spent, Amazon would not be profitable. it is okay to call that exploitation. it doesn't require tricking anyone.
as for labor laws, that's still under litigation, but the NLRB agrees.
A shockingly large chunk of people making six figures live paycheck-to-paycheck. The perceived threat of homelessness is useless compared to actual homelessness statistics, which tell a different story.
> if Amazon wasn't getting more utility and value out of their resources than they spent, Amazon would not be profitable. it is okay to call that exploitation. it doesn't require tricking anyone.
It's not exploitation, and it's not OK to call it exploitation. All trades must create value for both parties, or else they wouldn't happen. It's the reason why civilization is able to exist at all.
Yes, Amazon gets more out of their workers than they pay them. Workers get paid more for their labor than they would get out of it themselves.
That's a pretty simplistic argument. For one thing, it assumes a zero-sum game. But in economic theory both sides need to gain something in order for a transaction to occur. Walmart is not exploiting its customers just because it gets more from the customer than it cost (i.e. profit). Both sides are benefiting: the customer gets thousands of products in one location at pretty much the lowest possible price. Likewise, Target is not exploiting its customers just because it has higher prices than Walmart; customers get thousands of products in one location with somewhat higher quality than Walmart and a good deal better style. Target has a fairly loyal following, in fact, indicating that customers derive value from Target, even though Target is turning a profit; they could always go to Walmart if they were unhappy.
My employer is (hopefully) getting more value from me than they are paying for. I do not see it as exploitative at all: I could be in business for myself, but I already tried it and I discovered I did not want to bother with a lot of the business stuff, and people were not interested in paying for my product. So I switched the (internally perceived) product I am selling: now I am selling my software engineering services. In return I get some money. I'm a lot happier now than when I felt like I was an employee.
The problem is not that Amazon is getting more perceived value from the worker than the perceived value that they are paying the worker. The problem is that Amazon is abusive; people work for them either because they pay enough to make up for the abuse (at least the initial perception), or the worker does not feel like they have other options. The latter is not a problem of companies making a "profit" on workers, though; that is required for any employment to take place. It is a problem, but it is a different problem.
I think you're just factually wrong about this particular part. If I understand you correctly, you're claiming that the definition of "exploit" is "derive net profit from", but I've never seen any definition like that. Generally, I think there are two definitions:
1) use / utilize
2) use unfairly
The first is typical when describing resource exploitation. The second is typical when describing relationships between humans. In neither case does net profit come into it.
That's both my personal understanding of the word (but who cares what I think), and also what I see in three different online dictionaries that I just checked. So I ask you: where are you getting your definition from?
Individualization is heavily pushed because capitalism requires fungible labour. But if you band together then capitalism breaks down, because pure ideology runs into the brick wall of reality.
This is problematic for employers like Amazon that ruthlessly optimize their workforce, and, is why structures like unions emerge to allow employees to push back.
No. It's exploitative because of the power imbalance between employers and employees - and market competition means that companies that don't exploit as much as they can lose to those that do.
Thus, the two obvious solutions are to get rid of the market, or to get rid of the power imbalance. The first one has a lot of undesirable side effects, though, so why don't we try the second?
I can make academic statements like this one: From the perspective of capitalist ideology, income in an efficient, frictionless market would be proportional to contribution. If Amazon can drive a worker to move twice as many boxes, they ought to be paid double. However, I've never seen a perfectly frictionless, efficient market.
I don't believe there is a "typical" employee whose perspective I could take either -- a lot of this is incredibly context-dependent. Most of us see the world around us, and tend to underestimate the difference to which situations differ, both in other regions, and on the individual. More money=better is obvious, but whether:
- Minimum wage labor sitting in a Domino's idle most of the time; or
- Double minimum wage labor doing back-breaking hard labor
depends on financial needs, age, health, and a whole slew of other things.
1. Free food costs the company less to provide in bulk than it does for individual employees to acquire on the open market. The benefit to the employee is higher than the cost to the employer. The employee values this perk in their comp package against what it would cost him to acquire it if it weren't provided.
2. The marginal value of an employee's time is nonlinear and asymmetric. My weekly hours 0-40 are less valuable to me than hours 120-160, and the inverse is true for the company - my weekly hours 0-40 are more valuable to them than hours 120-160. The lazy cafe is again getting more value for its money than the sweat shop.
3. Hiring two people to work 40 hours/week instead of 1 person to work 80 reduces the labor supply for your competitors.
4. Hiring people so you can extract as much value as possible for them gets your a bad reputation and a company full for rubes.
You can really close to really identifying the issue but there’s more to build off of this point. Amazon does offer a (somewhat) comparable wage to “a lazy cafe job at the beach” but the catch is that Amazon has a warehouse or two in every major metro area, and each of those requires thousands of full-time employees while there are only handful of beach-side jobs to be had.
Previously, that meant that Amazon didn’t have to raise wages (much) beyond that (poor) benchmark because people need jobs and after all the easy, low-paying ones are taken then the hard, low-paying ones get filled. But with everyone hiring nonstop, everyone paying comparable-enough salaries, that’s not going to cut it, especially when you purposely don’t make employee retention a goal and treat all two-armed human beings as being fungible.
The only bad news is that the layoffs are coming and this historically-low unemployment we’re seeing is coming to an end, meaning Amazon may still get get their way.
If I were a teenager, I'd take that job over Amazon's nightmarish warehouses.
That calculus changes with rent and family. 30k per year is probably the minimum needed to raise a family for a homeowner in a lower cost-of-living part of the country, which translates to around $15/hour. Someone with rent / mortgage needs a bit more.
30K per year is about poverty level in most of the United States for a family of four. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...
But if both parents work at 15/hour, they could rent, though childcare would take a big bite out of their budget even at 60K per year.
Most places with lower cost of living in the USA have jobs closer to federal minimum wage work rather than 15/hour as well.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/how-much-money-a-family-of-4...
In most cases, the scenario described involves families who have been in the US for several generations, who are poorly-educated, but own homes and land. One parent takes care of kids. One works.
It's not uncommon.
Wealth and income aren't as strongly correlated as people assume. A lot of immigrants are low-wealth, high-income, while a lot of American families have generational wealth, but little income. There are plenty of families with >$1M homes with $30k incomes where I live. And there are plenty of families with >$100k incomes, who can't afford to buy homes here too.
When you read that quote carefully it doesn't say that Amazon employees get paid less. It's saying MAX pay at Walmart is $25/hr and MIN pay at Amazon is $18 an hour.
Apples and oranges. Meaningless clickbait.
That's the whole point of the "leaked" information articles. Getting media outlets to publish whatever insiders told them, ideally verbatim.
If you want a fun thought experiment, what if minimum wage was tied to local cost of housing? In the Bay Area you might need minimum wage >= $50/hour to offset the prices caused by gross artificial housing scarcity. That would force a lot of businesses to close, and would push jobs out of to lower COL areas where the jobs are sorely needed. It would also punish the NIMBYs by taking away their dog walkers and hamburger joints, which might finally change the politics to actually permit affordable housing to be built.
Why? It just sounds to me that the federal minimum is age isn’t needed; employers will set the wages necessary to attract the employees that they need and are willing to pay for.
It goes deeper than that. There was a documentary that leaked a new Walmart employee going through their initial first day orientation. If you were a new hire and were married and/or had children, you got extra "orientation" on all the government benefits you now qualified for (welfare, food stamps, medicaid, etc) since you were now considered below the USA poverty line.
I am fine with letting the market regulate itself, but it is not ok that a company can pay employees low because the government will pick up the other half. That is not "self regulation".
There are lots of government benefits that are restricted to people below a certain income. That doesn't mean that it is unconscionable to pay people at that income level or to educate employees on what they are eligible for so that they can take advantage of it.
If that income level is the poverty line: Yes, it is.
Assuming you mean a flexible spending account (for healthcare out of pocket), you're certainly not capped at $130K/year in the US. Your broader point is of course true.
e.g. my employer had a session about their benefits package: If I was on welfare, this would be a change in how everything works. It would have been nice if they had a session on our national pension scheme since I was now obligated to start paying into that.
I don't think this is a situation that applies to the idea of self-regulation. In this case, a distortion of the market is first created by the government subsidy. So the natural behavior of a business would be to leverage it. Just as the natural behavior of the IRS is to go after things like your company's paying for your cell phone and calling it taxable income.
I would suggest that the idea of self-regulation is best applied where there are no market distortions from the government that have already warped the context.
And everyone arguing that a company doesn’t deserve to exist if it can’t profitably pay more, is posting on a site funding money losing companies that couldn’t exist if they actually had to make a profit.
For me, the bottom line is that spending 40 hours a week doing something that requires no skill should still entitle the employee to be able to live a basic life. Further, that it should require only one person in a family to do that work in order for the family do live a basic life. If the person wishes to earn more then they will need to acquire more skills one way or another.
I do not believe there can be any moral justification for somebody receiving 40 hours of someone's effort (even an unskilled effort) and not giving that person enough for a basic life. I don't care what the age of the person doing the work is, and yep, if the company cannot do that, it doesn't deserve to exist - it doesn't do anything valuable enough to pay its employees adequately, so it can disappear and nobody except the owners will care.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/San-Francisco
Should the minimum wage there be $48/hour after taxes?
That’s $60/hour before taxes according to this gross up calculator
https://www.paycheckcity.com/calculator/grossup/california/r...
Portland Oregon is #25 on the list of the 50 largest metro areas in the US. A living wage there is about $44/hour for a family of four. Should that be the minimum wage in Portland?
> Should the minimum wage there be $48/hour after taxes?
Yes.
> A living wage there is about $44/hour for a family of four. Should that be the minimum wage in Portland?
Yes.
What's your alternative? "Oh sorry, your job is requires so little skill that even though you could just spend 40 hours a week doing it, you will need to find at least another 20 hours a week doing something else to be able to afford a basic life"
I find that morally unsupportable.
You want to raise the minimum wage of everyone in Portland to $91K year?
Let’s say the average grocery store has 6 people working every hour for 16 hours a day and 355 days a year. Their labor cost would be $1.465 million. Grocery stores already operate on thin margins (https://www.biz2credit.com/blog/2020/05/22/grocery-store-pro...) are you prepared to pay enough for the labor cost of the entire food chain to quadruple? From the people in the field, delivery truck drivers, etc?
Yes, I believe we should be paying much, much more for most of the things in our lives. Right now, those of us who make about 80% of median income and above are essentially riding on the backs who make less. I think this is immoral, although I recognize that changing it is a millenia long project that faces staunch opposition.
I want to see GDP distributed more evenly. In reality, the likely end game is not that everyone in Portland makes $91k a year or more, but that there is massively more redistribution within the economy, high end incomes fall, overall highest:lowest income ratios drop, housing prices drop (because more housing is built, and housing ceases to be an investment), and lots more good stuff that
I wonder, how do you personally justify millions of people working for less than a living wage? Do you feel that there just has be a bunch of people who lose out in life, and that's just the way it is? What makes it all seem OK to you?
How do you propose we restructure our economy so that everyone get a wage that supports a family of four?
How many people do you think will “lose out” if inflation sky rockets where food isn’t affordable? You can look at places like Venezuela to see what happens.
Do you personally give away enough of your income to bring your compensation down to the median household wage of $65K a year?
I assure you that I’m not a conservative by any means. I’m card carrying member of the F*## the police (and have been since the 90s), BLM, keep religion out of policy, pro-choice brigade.
But I’m also a student of economics and an MBA drop out with one course remaining (CS undergrad)
At its crudest, the US GDP is $23T. Divided among 350M people that's about $66k, for every living American. The working age population is about 215M, so that would be about $107k per working age American (not per household, per working age individual).
There's no need for money creation, we just need to spread the wealth around more evenly.
And note, I'm not actually advocating precisely equal income for everyone, or even every working age person. I suspect that some range of incomes is probably a good thing for society overall, but I'm fairly sure that it doesn't need to be anything like it is today. The point is that redistribution is how we get there, not injecting money into the economy.
You might care to listen to someone who knows a lot more about this stuff than me. Thomas Piketty was on the Ezra Klein Show a couple of weeks ago, and talked about several "radical" schemes to alter the levels of inequality in western societies.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
(there's a transcript there too, so you can read rather than listen if that's your preference).
I give away 5% of my income. That's not enough to bring it down to median levels. My work is relatively charitable in some sense though: I develop libre audio software, and convince people to pay me for it anyway.
So let’s say we redistribute the entire economy to each working age person (even though you are personally not willing to), how do we fund health care, infrastructure, education, people who need more than that from the government, etc? Who is going to invest in business? Do you suggest we tax everyone so that they have equal income? Should the fry cook make as much as the brain surgeon? Who is going to pay for the education needed for the more skilled jobs and what motivation does the doctor have to put in 8 additional years of school if they could make just as much money as the fry cook?
My children are grown, should my wife and I get the same income that someone with two special needs children get?
My parents are retired and doing pretty well for themselves with two pensions and two social security checks. Should we also tax them enough to make things more equal and tell them that they don’t deserve to keep their income after working 30 years?
That $66K might be enough for someone living in the MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska. But it won’t be enough for someone living in Seattle. Do we also redistribute people across the United States to make the cost of living equal?
What’s to stop me from just moving overseas where I can take my talents and make more money and then you have a brain drain?
It could mean that, but in all likelihood it means that some YC funded companies make huge amounts of money for YC that sufficiently balances the losses that they keep doing it.
Ya know, like most investment (that works).
Joe Bob’s Burgers don’t have the luxury of losing money hoping they can survive long enough to find the “greater fool” either via acquisition or IPO.
It doesn't matter. The only question for YC is whether they make money or not. They make money on some of their investments, and lose it on others. It's fairly clear that on average, that is, summed across all winners and losers, they make money overall.
On the other hand, Andy's Average Appetizers is of no particular interest to VC money, or any other money really, and so yep, they're going to go under because they don't anything that attracts enough money to make them viable (possibly at a higher living wage standard, possibly at current minimum wage standards).
Given people's natural inclination towards reproduction, at some point in the future, there will once again be more people than jobs, and minimum wage will once again become a flashpoint as quality of life begins to shrink. That's not even accounting for inflationary effects on the bottom 75% of wage earners.
This has been going on for a very long time now, which is why we’re all so wildly rich compared to 100 years ago.
My grandparents remembered a time when completely emptying a jar of peanut butter was essential and lavatory paper was counted by the individual sheet. Today I have homeless people refusing my gifts of food.
Well, we have historical proof that nearly all companies do pay with real money in the total absence of such government mandates. We definitely don't have proof of the proposition you claim, which is immediately falsified by the most cursory examination of history.
Note also that scrip is denominated in currency and accepted at par. The problem was generally not that you had a lot of scrip and couldn't spend it; the problem was that the company store charged high prices. But the store charged the same prices whether you were spending company scrip or currency.
Government regulations can be good and they can be bad. In enlightened countries enough good ones are in place to prevent a minimum wage of 0.
Slavery cannot occur in the absence of governmental and societal regulations, because in that case there's nothing stopping the slaves from leaving. Any such obstacle would be a governmental or societal regulation.
> and thus the “market” minimum wage is 0.
Slaves are paid much more than zero wages. In every culture, a slave in a good position is much better off economically than a freeman in a bad position.
Obviously this is false and you can find examples of people being enslaved in countries where it is outlawed. There are plenty of examples of an enslaved person being prevented from escaping even in the presence of laws prohibiting slavery. It’s as if you don’t understand human behavior.
You have a fanciful notion of slavery and what it entails. In another thread you bring up cases where the enslaved had it “good” and act as if this is normative in such circumstances. I am thankful views such are yours are no longer acceptable to most people. Within in your views on this topic one will not find common sense or decency.
That you find it worth your time to try to convince people of the benefits of slavery says much about you and nothing about slavery.
Or perhaps it's as if I'm labeling that prevention a "societal regulation". Go look at my comment again.
Regulating a broken system is an exercise in futility. We need a system in which the feedback loops produce the desired outcomes in the first place.
There are lots of instances where regulations fixed a broken system. Government regulations fixed the broke system of using child labor and fixed the broken system of slavery.
You are free to desire to live in a world where a wage of 0 is a reasonable thing for an employer to pay. Fortunately for me people like you have little chance of seeing this desire come to fruition. There is no point in responding further but I will read and contemplate whatever response you decide to make.
Then you should have said that to begin with. It shouldn't be incumbent on me to account for whimsy botching one's meaning.
> Some person/company will be willing to enslave people if they can get away with it.
Enslavement doesn't require a coherent political or economic philosophy. Hobbes has already proven that. Even governments have and continue to enslave people. I don't see how regulations solve that as governments have no higher power to answer to, except perhaps for atom bombs.
That some company may violate an individual's rights in a laissez-faire system does not itself prove that enslavement is an inevitable outcome of such a system. That is a false induction.
> Clearly volunteering is not what people mean by “working for $0 per hour”. This is obvious to anyone who reads what I wrote without being disingenuous.
What difference is there between volunteering and working for $0 an hour exactly? If one volunteers for an organization, that does not mean that one lacks a de facto or de jure employer. One may still need to sign a contract and still be required to perform tasks to a certain standard. Volunteer work is not required to be accepted indiscriminately.
> Equally obvious is that a laissez-faire system is neither possible, desirable, or scalable. I won’t convince you of this and you won’t convince me otherwise.
You and I benefit from one of the great successes of laissez-faire capitalism: the commercial Internet. It's obviously possible (in fact, it has already succeeded for the past 30 years), desirable, and nearly infinitely scalable.
> You are free to desire to live in a world where a wage of 0 is a reasonable thing for an employer to pay. Fortunately for me people like you have little chance of seeing this desire come to fruition. There is no point in responding further but I will read and contemplate whatever response you decide to make.
A wage of zero is a reasonable wage for the employer and employee to agree upon. What is not reasonable is forcing someone to accept a wage of zero under duress or threat of force.
Slaves are paid much more than that.
No, they aren’t.
Slaves have a higher total cost to employ than that, but none of it is wages.
If those are in the form of earned compensation to which the slave is entitled (which, sure, along with actual wages is common in some historical forms of slavery, but not really the norm in chattel slavery), they are benefits, not wages. If they are (as is typically the case with chattel slavery) discretionary items given at the pleasure of the employer based on the perceived future value to the employer of the worker having them now, they are just maintenance costs of the slave as an industrial machine.
Pure sophistry. There is no reason to call the same thing by two different names. Ask the IRS whether the food and housing your employer gives you count as wages.
> If they are (as is typically the case with chattel slavery) discretionary items given at the pleasure of the employer based on the perceived future value to the employer of the worker having them now, they are just maintenance costs of the slave as an industrial machine.
Not much better. The transfer of valuable goods to a slave is a maintenance cost in exactly the same way that the transfer of valuable goods to an employee is a maintenance cost. Nobody's paying salaries out of the goodness of their hearts; they pay salaries because that's what it costs to have work done.
Ok, but, that works against you, because it is never counted as wages.
If it is provided to attract or retain employees it is treated as a taxable fringe benefit.
If it is provided on the employer’s business premises, for the employer’s convenience, as a condition of employment, it is not taxed for the employee at all.
Traditional African American foods, like hog jowls and chitterlings, were based on the discards that White slave owners would not eat.
This is fairly thoughtless modern propaganda, not a description of the historical Deep South.
Some quotes from Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery:
> "Marriage is to be encouraged," wrote James H. Hammond to his overseer, "as it adds to the comfort, happiness, and health of those entering upon it, besides insuring a greater increase." The economic inducements for marriage generally included a house, a private plot of land which the family could work on its own, and, frequently, a bounty either in cash or in household goods.
> about 6 percent of slaves worked in towns, and 20 percent of those living on plantations were employed as artisans and semiskilled workers of various sorts.
> The belief that the typical slave was poorly fed is without foundation in fact.
> More careful reading of plantation documents shows that the slave diet included many foods in addition to corn and pork. Among the other plantation products which slaves consumed were beef, mutton, chickens, milk, turnips, peas, squashes, sweet potatoes, apples, plums, oranges, pumpkins, and peaches. Certain foods not produced on most plantations were frequently purchased for slave consumption, including salt, sugar, and molasses. Less frequent, but not uncommon, purchases for slaves included fish, coffee, and whiskey.
> the average daily diet of slaves was quite substantial. The energy value of their diet exceeded that of free men in 1879 by more than 10 percent. There was no deficiency in the amount of meat allotted to slaves. On average, they consumed six ounces of meat per day, just an ounce lower than the average quantity of meat consumed by the free population.
> The high slave consumption of meat, sweet potatoes, and peas goes a long way toward explaining the astounding results shown in figure 34. The slave diet was not only adequate, it actually exceeded modern (1964) recommended daily levels of the chief nutrients.
> The most systematic housing information comes from the census of 1860, which included a count of slave houses. These census data show that on average there were 5.2 slaves per house on large plantations. The number of persons per free household in 1860 was 5.3. Thus, like free men, most slaves lived in single-family households.
> Descriptions in plantation records and travelers' accounts are fragmentary. They suggest a considerable range in the quality of housing. The best were three- or four-room cottages, of wood frame, brick, or stone construction, with up to eight hundred square feet of space on the inside, and large porches on the outside. Such cottages had brick or stone chimneys and glazed windows. At the other pole were single-room log cabins without windows. Chimneys were constructed of twigs and clay; floors were either earthen or made of planks resting directly on the earth.
> the houses of slaves compared well with the housing of free workers in the antebellum era. It must be remembered that much of rural America still lived in log cabins in the 1850s. And urban workers lived in crowded, filthy tenements.
> When slaves worked at times normally set aside for rest, they received extra pay -- usually in cash and at the rate prevailing in the region for hired labor. Slaves who were performing well were permitted to work on their own account after normal hours at such tasks as making shingles or weaving baskets, articles which they could sell either to their masters or to farmers in the neighborhood.
> Year-end bonuses, given either in goods or cash, were frequently quite substantial. Bennet Barrow, for example, distributed gifts averaging between $15 and $20 per slave family in both 1839 and 1840. The amounts received by particular slaves were proportional to their performance. It should be noted that $20 was about a fifth of national per capita income in 1840.
> Masters also rewarded slaves who performed well with patches of land ranging up to a few acres for each family. Slaves grew marketable crops on these lands, the proceeds of which accrued to them. On the Texas plantation of Julian S. Devereux, slaves operating such land produced as much as two bales of cotton per patch. Devereux marketed their crop along with his own. In a good year some of the slaves earned in excess of $100 per annum for their families. Devereux set up accounts to which he credited the proceeds of the sales. Slaves drew on these accounts when they wanted cash or when they wanted Devereux to purchase clothing, pots, pans, tobacco, or similar goods for them.
I know there was a historical uprising someplace where slaves objected to plans to set them free. I'm unfamiliar with the details.
There is also the fact in some of the Caribbean islands, slavery was so harsh that average life expectancy was 3 years at one point, IIRC. They outlawed the importation of slaves well before they outlawed slavery and during that period the slave population shrank. They were not reproducing fast enough to hit replacement levels.
I read two or three books on the situation in the island or islands in question. Scholars speculate that slaves must have been using some means of herbal birth control as a protest to bringing children into such harsh conditions.
It did, and I readily admit that I’m not either.
As I understand it, with a few exceptions, the further south an enslaved person lived the worse off they generally were. Further south meant a more agriculture-based economy, with higher labor demands and less “civilization”. More isolation means more opportunity for enslavers to literally work their slaves to death.
I think not recognizing this does a disservice to the people that actually lived through that era.
The market "determined" this "natural minimum wage" because a patchwork of laws dictated (somewhere around) a $15 minimum wage in a lot of locations and as a policy for many state/city/county contracts.
If we raise min wage then they'll just fire people to make up the cost, not sure it's going to help
Dropping employment due to higher (minimum) wages has mixed-data in empirical studies:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Empirical_studies
So what actually ends up happening in reality is, in order to not be forced to shutdown, the employer needs to increase the amount of per-employee revenue, which can happen in a number of ways:
- Raising prices (Easiest move, and even easier when labor costs increase for your competitors simultaneously)
- Negotiate lower supply costs (the threat of losing a big customer entirely can motivate a supplier to give up some percent of their profits)
- Increasing employee efficiency (improved processes, additional training, etc). Theoretically the company should have been doing these already but an existential threat is an even larger motivator than marginal profits. This could result in layoffs depending on how the efficiency is realized.
Really what ends up happening in reality is increased costs just get passed along. Yes, consumers probably end up spending more, but less in taxes are spent on benefits programs, making it a wash in overall cost to society. In fact, people who believe that government spending is inherently inefficient should theoretically love the idea of raising minimum wage as it allows us as a society to move resources from government spending into the free market.
If the employer could raise prices and still be in business, then they would already be doing it. Same thing with lowering costs. As for employee efficiency, yes, if you're forced to pay someone $9 then you will want to get at least $9 out of them. That means you won't hire anyone that's not experienced enough.
> Really what ends up happening in reality is increased costs just get passed along
Not if the employer wants to remain competitive. There are plenty of bigger companies with greater economies of scale that will happily run them out of business.
This isn't a nuanced problem. If you raise the price of something, demand drops. Whether the price in question is for things or labor is irrelevant.
There's a little nuance.
Some anecdata: When I tried charging $0 to get my feet wet in consulting I had zero takers. Raising my hourly rate to $100 drastically improved my success rate (nothing else changed, I was still just some kid in high school with a knack for programming at the time).
The real world doesn't have perfect information and is more than happy to use imperfect signals to save time and effort (in any constant-bounded time that's provably required to hit any fixed desired epsilon of error). The price somebody is asking for is often enough a useful signal that demand need not be monotonic.
https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm
In fact, very few people earn minimum wage past early adulthood. I don't remember where I got this figure but it was something like 93% of people over the age of 24 make higher than minimum wage. In any case, income is highly correlated with age until retirement ages.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/233184/median-household-...
The motivation to earn skills to make more money is there regardless of minimum wage laws.
You're presuming it's a binary choice; consider the systemic effect might not make it a binary choice.
Let's accept that it is a binary choice, then no, it's not necessarily better to be making a low wage, because that presumes a value for your time that is effectively zero. In truth, with your own time, you can find ways to feed yourself, provide yourself with shelter, etc., and when you are working you can't do that stuff. Let's assume though that one wouldn't take a wage that was a net direct loss like this, there's still the possibility that a low wage might be tactically beneficial, but strategically & systemically quite harmful.
You still have the option to quit your job if you're employed and don't find it worth your while.
> strategically & systemically quite harmful
How?
Yes.
> > strategically & systemically quite harmful > How?
If that's more than rhetorical, I suggest you do some reading.
If it is rhetorical, I'll just assume you think everything would work great if we had a minimum prevailing wage of one penny for a lifetime's worth of labour. You know, because less than that would be slavery.
just some generic advice to read a book? yeah me not so learnded me go read keynes so me agree with you
> If it is rhetorical, I'll just assume you think everything would work great if we had a minimum prevailing wage of one penny for a lifetime's worth of labour. You know, because less than that would be slavery.
Imagine thinking that slavery is about not being paid rather than not having a choice of who to work for. Slaves receive food and housing, technically a salary. The problem is of not being free to leave and work elsewhere. Anyone making a penny for a lifetime can just go work elsewhere if they don't like it.
One of the many fallacies here that hasn't already been pointed out is that it's impossible to determine the exact amount of revenue a single employee is responsible for in any real world employment situation.
Sure. But if it costs $100/hr in labor to run a McDonalds (split between cashier, burger flipper, fry guy), $100/hr in ingredients, and the store only produces $150/hr in revenue, it's not hard to figure out that those wages are unsustainable.
Blah blah, businesses don't deserve to exist if they can't pay whatever wage. Sure, but I'm not saying McDonalds deserves to exist--I'm saying those people won't have jobs when it becomes very obvious that the store is losing money.
Just because you can't pinpoint the exact contribution of every worker does not mean that you can't have a pretty good estimate of the contribution from retail workers in practice.
But sales people have a pretty directly attributable profit contribution.
This is most obvious when you take the extreme case of looking at the department level - sales and marketing are "responsible" for 100% of the revenue, but if you delete legal, support, R&D, HR, and finance, your revenue goes to zero pretty quickly.
It's like that old joke about marketing budgets: half is wasted, but it's impossible to tell which half. The same can be true for employees, maybe half your employees lose money, but the other half make enough that you're profitable, but you can't attribute every dollar that comes into your company to the specific employee that generated that dollar.
If there literally are not enough jobs that can pay sustainable wages to everyone in need, then we need to rethink how our economy works on a fundamental level.
A system that requires some portion of the population to go hungry or even homeless is ethically indefensible.
And I am not advocating for any specific solution, just saying that the current system does not work. I don't believe in false dichotomies. Being unhappy with capitalism does not automatically make one a communist.
What is the alternative? You can't pay someone more than they earn in revenue and minimum wage laws create an artificial price floor that causes everyone who would otherwise earn between above zero and the minimum to instead make zero.
The idea of a "living wage" is an worthless notion that assumes that the distribution of income by age and experience is not the one from the real world. In the real world, the more experience you have, the more money you make. The majority of low earners are simply young or at an early point in their careers. To rob them of entry level jobs by setting artificial price floors is what's unethical. Let them get low wage jobs while they still live at home or have roommates or don't live downtown SF instead of dictating that the world should be one of magical bounty and abundance where everyone can somehow work for "high" wages without price inflation for everything else making them effectively poor.
Being unhappy with capitalism is being in denial about the world having scarce resources.
Food and shelter are not scarce resources. In the United States, we have more empty homes than homeless people. Every day we throw away an obscene amount of food.
So again, I say any system that requires the existence of a class of people who cannot afford these things in order to function is morally untenable. Similar shitty arguments were made in defense of slavery 200 years ago.
Communism isn't the only possible answer. Welfare programs are a common solution. The way I see it though, welfare is just the taxpayer subsidizing unlivable wages. So why not cut out the tax middleman and make the employers pay livable wages to begin with? Either way, that money has to get moved from the top to the bottom.
As they say in game of thrones: "what kind of god would do that? - the one we've got"
If we're talking historically, it's not poverty that's out of place, it's wealth.
Paying "livable" wages, as subjective a definition as it is, means some people will be unemployed. Unless those wages are subsidized, that is, but then how is the wealth created and acquired for that? And how do you know that it wouldn't be put to better use elsewhere?
I worked for much less than the US minimum wage as a young adult and I managed to make it work until I was able to gain the skills to earn more. Had the minimum wage been what it is in many American cities today, I wouldn't have been able to work until I was 23, assuming I could've somehow gained useful experience without burdening myself with student debt. It's not like that option wasn't there, but I preferred to work for low wages and I do not regret it. I really don't see any good argument for preventing me from making that choice for myself. But that's what minimum wage laws do.
In the US, it depends on the programs that are available to you. For some people, a small part time job sabotages some existing subsidies. This is a critical component of the institutional poverty, that is now generational, in the US.
Unless they are a tech company funded by VCs…
One part of the company raises wages the other fires to increase profitability and reduce headcount. Both groups get a bonus and the group in charge of productivity get culled. Welcome to 2022
Isolated the decisions make sense.
>Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour, attributing the decision to intense competition among employers.
People used to work for Amazon warehouses in the 2010s because $15/hr was a much better wage than they could find elsewhere in their geographic location.
After the pandemic and ongoing inflation, it's not difficult to find easier work which pays better. Amazon responded with a token raise that doesn't even cover CoL adjustments, but history shows that they need to pay well above market rates to hire the quantity of people that they need.
It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr.