Unintended workplace safety consequences of minimum wages

Re:Unintended workplace safety consequences of minimum wages by ndileas on Thursday January 30, 2025 @02:22PM (#42881181)

I think a lot of the confusion here comes from a conflict between people talking in personal mode and societal modes. As an individual, you absolutely want minimum wage to be temporary, and if you are smart and lucky you can usually make this happen.

You're taking more a societal point of view. At this level, I think you're missing the point of minimum wage. It doesn't provide a family with a living wage; it's just a limit on the monetary abuse that an above board company can dish out, just like we have labor laws that limit other types of abuse (like excessive hours for example). Whether and how our society should be ensuring living wages is kind of another discussion, much more complex. As they currently stand, minimum wages are probably a net good.

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Re:Unintended workplace safety consequences of minimum wages by rjp0008 on Thursday January 30, 2025 @02:30PM (#42881271)

>>It's not intended to provide a family with a living wage;

Maybe not family but definitely the individual, FDR on minimum wage:

Ultimately, he hoped to mandate that all workers would be paid "living wages" as described in his 1933 speech on the National Industrial Recovery Act, "It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By 'business' I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white-collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living."

From: https://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/blog/posts/what-did-fdr-...

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Re:Unintended workplace safety consequences of minimum wages by ndileas on Thursday January 30, 2025 @02:37PM (#42881346)

I don't see any particular reason to pay attention to century-old rhetoric. I think "intended " was a poor word choice; see my other response. Also, I could live on minimum wage today but I'd hate it.

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Re:Unintended workplace safety consequences of minimum wages by quantified on Thursday January 30, 2025 @03:15PM (#42881729)

We pay lip-service attention to the two-century-old rhetoric of Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and others who drafted the first constitution.

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Re:Unintended workplace safety consequences of minimum wages by ndileas on Friday January 31, 2025 @08:36AM (#42887492)

I mean, maybe you do. I'm just a dog on the internet.

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Re:Unintended workplace safety consequences of minimum wages by pydry on Friday January 31, 2025 @03:24AM (#42885678)

So you'd toss out the constitition?

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Re:Unintended workplace safety consequences of minimum wages by ndileas on Friday January 31, 2025 @08:36AM (#42887490)

Rhetoric != Law

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Re:Unintended workplace safety consequences of minimum wages by nemomarx on Thursday January 30, 2025 @02:24PM (#42881195)

not intended by who? when the minimum wage was introduced it was talked about as a living wage intended to be enough to raise a family on.

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Re:Unintended workplace safety consequences of minimum wages by ndileas on Thursday January 30, 2025 @02:28PM (#42881245)

I'm just making an observation in the sense of "the purpose of system is what it does", not writing a treatise on the history of rhetoric around minimum wage. Maybe "intended" was a poor word choice on my part. Minimum wage can't easily feed and house 3 dependents in many places as it stands today.

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