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.