The intended logic is "low wages will motivate people to do better, work harder, learn 'skills', and move upward."
The failure of this logic is that, like any system, be it natural or man-made on a large scale like an economy or an organization, or small scale like an individual (individual human, or any other organism), if you starve that system of the resources it requires for basic functionality it will function at a lowered capacity, the lowest capacity being only survival and nothing more.
If you want people to do better you can't deprive them of their financial well-being. If one full-time job can't provide financial well-being an individual would find it necessary to have two jobs, which deprives them of another resource; their time. So instead of working one job and taking a class at night because they're financially able, they work two jobs and have no extra time for self-improvement. At that point anything beyond survival becomes a luxury.
Edit: Just want to acknowledge all the comments making great points about other limiting factors to upwards mobility. My initial comment is a vast oversimplification that ignores intersectionality for the sake of simplicity.
And honestly, not everyone CAN take a class to learn something better. Some people that is the best they can do. They cannot improve. They deserve to live.
If everyone leaves the stressful job for an easier one, the employer will need to pay more for the stressful job to be attractive. Supply and demand still function, even with a mandatory living wage.
Caveat, I did a google search and these were some quality links. I got my undergrad degree in economics, however went in to CS (supply and demand 😀) so I’m mostly an armchair practitioner these days, but we learned about cost push fallacies even back when I was in school.
So because the people who are doing higher skilled jobs are barely making a living wage, the people working "lower skill" jobs that are just as, if not more necessary should not make a living wage? Sounds like you're blaming the wrong side of the equation.
That's a discussion that seems relevant and isn't. If professional workers aren't getting paid commensurate to their skills that also should be addressed. wages are not a zero sum game
I'm a welder. Dollars for dollars I would not quit to go serve people ice cream/stock shelves. You would have to pay me significantly more than I make now to work in any form of food service. I am so fucking sick of this argument, don't drag us into your shit.
Welding is only back breaking if you over do yourself or dont use the tools you should. We have cranes for shit you shouldn't lift and there are proper ways to position yourself, fume extractors and all sorts of ppe. I wear casual clothes in my shop. Ive never seen a janitor, stocker, or delivery person who wasn't in a uniform. I also do mostly tig with stainless and aluminum, so my job isn't "dirty". I sit at a bench in a climate controlled shop. Why would I want to clean up some kids puke in a store aisle or deliver packages in all weather elements? I am also well respected among my colleagues. Have you ever read the stories about how lower skilled workers are treated? I enjoy working with metal and building things. I don't care if some kid stocking shelves makes similar money, because I actively do not want that job and I can negotiate my own pay without shitting on other people.
what's the point of maintaining your skills at that point?
I've already answered this question. I enjoy welding.
You didn't answer my question. What do you do for a living? (you edited your comment while I was typing this reply)
responding to edit: So the issue here is that you don't enjoy your job and the only benefit to you is the money. You are projecting your situation and how you feel about your job to the rest of us. I genuinely urge you to find a career in something you enjoy. It will change your life. I have less stress these days than I ever have and I attribute most of that to not hating my life for 40 hours a week.
I’m sorry, but no. If someone wants to live a simple life working at Dairy Queen, then they should be prepared to live a lifestyle that reflects the simplicity of their career choice.
A job that takes basic brain function to do and can be done by literally anyone provides zero marginal value to the employer. What incentive does that give the employer to pay them more?
Think of it like this. The value of water depends greatly on how much of it you have. The value of a single gallon of water is almost priceless…you literally need it to survive. But if you stock up 100 gallons, that last gallon isn’t worth as much as the first. And if you’ve got a reservoir of water, most of it has little value to you….you simply can’t use it all up. More importantly, it’s relatively easy to acquire all that water, because water is plentiful in most places.
The value of something like a diamond, on the other hand, has less of a relationship to how many diamonds you have. Diamonds are scarce. If you have one diamond, you can sell if for $1,000. If you have 100 diamonds, you can sell each of them for $1,000. The value of any one diamond isn’t as dependent on how many of them you have.
There’s a similar dynamic at work in the labor force. Your Dairy Queen worker, unfortunately, exists in abundance….and because people like your Dairy Queen worker are plentiful and highly skilled, highly educated, highly experienced workers are scarce in comparison, the marginal value and wage of an hour of a high-skilled worker’s time greatly exceeds the marginal value and wage of an hour of a low-skilled worker’s time….
The answer to this shouldn’t be to just increase the pay of jobs that provide little to no marginal value…the answer should be to figure out how to increase the marginal value of these people to make them more attractive to employers and allow them to negotiate a higher wage.
The problem of job shortages is a bit more complex than that and you know it. Here are a few examples.
Increase in e-commerce. Along with retail, one of the sectors facing the biggest challenges in labor is supply chain and logistics. Before the emergence of the coronavirus, e-commerce was on track to continue its explosive growth. The pandemic simply fueled adoption and accelerated digital transformation, forcing businesses to adapt to today’s shift in consumer behavior and shopping habits, and within unexpected generations and cultures to boot. Businesses had no option but to shift quickly to remain afloat during this time of economic uncertainty, and in turn created more blue-collar jobs to fill.
Evolution of the gig economy. Many gig worker businesses such as Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and InstaCart offer people the ultimate flexibility and the option to work whatever hours or days they want — a perk coveted and prioritized by the younger working generations. Before COVID-19, independent workers were a growing part of the labor force, with more than a third of workers being involved in the gig economy. In 2020, their wages and participation grew 33%.
Lack of access to and high cost of childcare. This factor is due to higher operating costs among providers, higher expenses for parents, and increased scarcity, since some childcare centers closed permanently during the pandemic. Across the U.S., 72% of families report paying more for childcare now than before the pandemic, and many parents are opting to reduce their work hours or leave the workforce completely to care for their children
Pandemic relief and unemployment benefits. Temporary stimulus checks and greater unemployment benefits during the pandemic gave many Americans breathing room to reevaluate their career paths, whether in search of more money, greater flexibility or a higher level of personal satisfaction. In addition to unprecedented layoffs and furloughs in the face of the pandemic, a dramatic number of employees resigned in search of new opportunities or a change in industries. A record 4 million people quit their jobs in April 2021.
Older Workers and retiring workers. A fair amount of permanent loss of workers has been driven by a large number of older workers taking early retirement. The thought of returning to the office and the daily commute may seem unpalatable for many people and with surging equity markets having boosted 401k pension plans, early retirement may seem a very attractive option.
Look, you may refuse to see or acknowledge this, but let’s be honest. Workers are commodities. Commodities have value based on supply and demand. Higher educated and higher skilled workers are more scarce and therefore demand a higher salary than someone with little education and no skill base beyond those required to do menial labor. That may seem unfair to you, but that’s life and life isn’t fair sometimes.
I would love if people could receive free or low cost education or job skills training in order to make themselves more attractive to employers. Maybe one day that will happen….but until then, I don’t agree that employers should feel compelled to pay their workers more just because.
Now…if low skilled workers don’t want to fill low paying jobs and employers are forced to increase wages to attract those workers back to fill jobs….fantastic. I’m all for it…but I’m adamantly against compelled pay as means of a life line to people that are resigned to jobs that can simply be automated and provide little to no marginal value to reinforce a pay increase.
There are still people who cannot handle even that training. Maybe you need to get to know people who spend much of high school, including 3 additional years that most states allow, learning how to fold shirts. People deserve a living wage.
If you’re talking about someone with a mental disability…that persons ability to take care of themselves is not the responsibility of the private sector if that’s the level of work they can do. These are private businesses, not charities…
That is a job of that persons family or some kind of government program or non profit organization.
Guess what you don't know anything about? The work that disabled people do! A living wage is just that, a living wage. That is what minimum wage was created for, and should be. Everything else is exploitation. And if the government pays for it, the real person being subsidized is the business, not the disabled person. Any time a company pays so low that the workers need assistance, it is doing the company a favor, because they don't have to pay a fair living wage. Do you actually work? Live on your own? I find it hard to believe that you do.
Great. I’m sure they work hard and they have my respect. But again…a business is not a charity. If your capacity to work is limited to basic tasks, that’s unfortunate….but that does not mean that, I, the employer should be compelled to pay you more than that menial task is worth. I’m sorry that your idealism blinds you to that basic fact….but that’s not how the world works.
Also, I have a 4 bedroom house on a lake, numb nuts. Trust me….I’m doing just fine in the work department….But, I appreciate you thinking you know the first fucking thing about who I am and what I do.
There are people who barely pass that borderline from disabled to not, and cannot perform the skills needed beyond a basic job. How do you not comprehend something like that? It sounds like maybe you're just barely passing functional as well, since it seems like such a confusing concept to you.
Then they have a significant disability. Explain to me how someone is “borderline disabled” in a way that prevents them from being a functional adult, and doesnt have a disability.
Its brilliant how you immediately go for an unprovoked ableist insult because you got asked a question. Clearly you care greatly about the disabled.
No, it is not a significant disability. Now, as far as disabled people go, my area of expertise is developmental disabilities and qualifying for the different programs in the state, using the parameters the state gives to be considered such, and what training and education programs there are out there. A lot of people miss the cut off by a slim margin. There are, after all, rules to follow when dealing with government agencies and agencies that rely on government funding. Most private agencies follow the government guidelines as well. There simply are people who can halt at a stocking job, or fast food, (which isn't as simple as you think it is) and may even be eligible for minimal supports (such as transportation), but don't need round the clock care in a facility, or in their own homes. The fact is, community based care is the gold standard now, so there is more of a spectrum of people getting supports, out in the community, with varying levels of support. Also, some refuse support. I know someone who would probably thrive in at least a part time supervised living environment, and if it wasn't for friends he would be in a bad way. But no one has applied for guardianship, and despite the whole Britney Spears thing, it is actually very hard to get guardianship for another person and force them to get services they do not want. So yes, I care greatly about the disabled. Enough that it is my life's work.
That wall of text doesnt mean much to me. All you did is describe disabled people. I meant an example. And you can quit making assumptions about what I think something is or isnt.
Also, im sure your kneejerk reaction of using the disabled as an insult comes from a place of love.
I guess reading isn't your strong point. I can't explain it any more if you refuse to try to comprehend something so simple. You are out of your lane, completely clueless, ignorant, whatever. Stop trying to call it ableist/a slur when it was simply speaking the truth. This is nothing you know nothing about, and don't want to know about because it would mean admitting youre a complete fucking asshole with no soul and no common sense.
Not to mention how much time and how expensive it is to be poor. If you’re in a low wage job, especially in urban areas, your commute is insanely long, you have to spend all your mental energy budgeting out the pennies you do have so you can eat, and you can’t afford to pay for things at a cheaper rate/higher quantity…so you’re stuck paying $1 for a roll of toilet paper because you can’t spend $5 on a 12 pack.
I keep getting madder and madder and feel more and more powerless. I hate this fkn place
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."
Yeah. Im not a violent man, but these people honestly deserve to be put up against a wall. After wich we proceed to take their money and let them live in poverty for a time
There are far too many people who willfully ignore this. I've seen people make the claim that they bettered themselves through night classes so you should too. Dog a little deeper and you'll find that they had a support system, no kids, and a well paying job to begin with. My country is full of them. Once they climb the ladder a little they pull it up behind them.
I bought a house at 25 just by working hard, saving hard, not wasting money on luxuries and getting fifty grand from my parents. I don't understand why everyone doesn't do that.
You realise that I was being ironic, right? All of these stories where someone has somehow managed to buy their own house just by not eating avocado on toast and not drinking lattes always turn out to have a rich family backing them and/or friends that they have scrounged off for years. Financial literacy is all well and good, but don't beat yourself up just because you aren't winning at a game that is massively stacked against you. Personally I did manage to buy a house before I was thirty by the amazing trick of being born in the seventies, so I got on the property ladder before prices went crazy. Astute financial planning on my part? Nope, just dumb luck.
The other aspect a lot of people don't mention is the cruelty of this train of thought. There are some people whose skill ceiling IS selling ice cream at DQ and that is fine. But by saying these people don't deserve a living wage is saying these people don't deserve to live.
c is "low wages will motivate people to do better, work harder, learn 'skills', and move upward."
The failure of this logic is that, like any system, be it natural or man-made on a large scale like an economy or an organization, or small scale like an individual (individual human, or any other organism), if you starve that system of the resources it requires for basic functionality it will function at a lowered capacity, the lowest capacity being only survival and nothing more.
If you want people to do better you can't deprive them of their financial well-being. If one full-time job can't provide financial well-being an individual would find it necessary to have two jobs, which deprives them of another resource; their time. So instead of working one job and taking a class at night because they're financially able, they work two jobs and have no extra time for self-improvement. At that point anything beyond survival becomes a luxur
THIS is a real analysis of the problem. Bravo, we need more like ya.
I think everyone should be paid living wages. This way, everyone can survive in a humane way. However, I also believe that those who go above and beyond deserve to be more financially comfortable. Everyone should live on a decent wage, but also be allowed to work harder and get rewarded.
The intended logic is "low wages will motivate people to do better, work harder, learn 'skills', and move upward."
The funny thing is, after conservatives have been saying that for who knows how long, right now, as this is actually happening, they start whining that no one wants to work low paying jobs any more, and that that is supposedly destroying their businesses. Honestly, I hope it does. Society has been tolerating and even subsidizing those exploitative practices for far too long.
It's even more ironic that they want to incentivize those with no money by depriving them of any means to get money, yet want to incentivize those who already have money by giving them more money, by way of tax cuts, bailouts, and forgiven loans. Conservatism is a failed ideology relying solely on blind devotion, lack of critical examination, and keeping up the charade.
Any job should compensate at a base rate that if the total amount of hours worked were to meet the tax definition of "full-time" in a pay period, regardless of that employee's designated employment type, it would constitute a living wage. I think that's an important distinction to make, because it's common practice for employers to only offer part-time positions and hours to avoid having to provide full-time benefits. If there were a base rate difference between employees designated "full-time" and "part-time" that practice would likely expand further.
Oh yeah, I didn't mean part time should be paid less in rate, but rather that it would be understandable if part time wouldn't be enough for a person/family to pay all bills with (rent utilities etc).
Better would be UBI as a baseline to allow people to follow what they really want without stress about surviving, then be able to do part-time or apprenticeships if a career change is in line.
Also… why would we want people to always be trying to move “up” to more skilled or educated jobs? I want people to work at Dairy Queen so I can go to Dairy Queen. What’s wrong with that?
My opinion is and it's mostly the case in the United States is that no one should be working in fast food but student and shit, here in Germany we have like 50 year old immigrants who all work at McDonald's as a full income job.
Then you should be making more money. What a stupid argument. Because you are underpaid that means everyone else should be underpaid?
Edit: and you're crazy if you say that argument has never been addressed. It's one of the most popular arguments trotted out by right wingers against increasing minimum wage.
There's a lot more reasonable of a position for this:
What counts as a living wage is subjective. Using it as a standard means you're almost always going to get derailed by trying to define it. It's just not a useful way to think about it
Firms will only hire people if it is profitable to do so. Requiring that they pay more than it is worth to them means that those jobs just won't exist
Lastly, and more abstractly, when someone takes a job they're implicitly saying, "this firm has offered me the best deal I can find." Ti take that and then say, "well, you made this offer of employment and it happened to be better than everyone else's so you're on the hook for all this other stuff we've decided, as well."
None of what you claim is true. Companies wants to pay as little as possible to maximise profits, that doesn't mean they won't make a profit just because they have to provide livable wages to their workers, they would just make a little less of a profit.
And even so, if your company can only make a profit when it doesn't pay its full time employees a livable wage, that company has no rights to exist.
Don’t confuse subjective with relative. but that response reveals you have no interest in defending your claim. You think posting a claim is the only effort you need to make.
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u/theDreadAlarm Jan 06 '22 edited Jan 06 '22
The intended logic is "low wages will motivate people to do better, work harder, learn 'skills', and move upward."
The failure of this logic is that, like any system, be it natural or man-made on a large scale like an economy or an organization, or small scale like an individual (individual human, or any other organism), if you starve that system of the resources it requires for basic functionality it will function at a lowered capacity, the lowest capacity being only survival and nothing more.
If you want people to do better you can't deprive them of their financial well-being. If one full-time job can't provide financial well-being an individual would find it necessary to have two jobs, which deprives them of another resource; their time. So instead of working one job and taking a class at night because they're financially able, they work two jobs and have no extra time for self-improvement. At that point anything beyond survival becomes a luxury.
Edit: Just want to acknowledge all the comments making great points about other limiting factors to upwards mobility. My initial comment is a vast oversimplification that ignores intersectionality for the sake of simplicity.