this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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If the value a person's labor creates doesn't support their basic necessities even though they work full time, either things cost too much or that labor is undervalued. Anyone who does a job full time deserves to be able to cover their basic necessities.
Okay, but I'd add also that no one should be forced to hire someone at a literal loss. After all, it's a business, not a charity.
And the fact is that there exist jobs that don't create enough value that it's possible to satisfy both of the above conditions. So what's the solution? This isn't such a simple problem to solve.
If you say 'fuck the employers, they have to pay a living wage, no matter how valuable the labor is', then new small business creation will be smothered to a standstill--no one is going to want to start a new small business if they're unable to attain the same 'living wage' they're forced to pay every employee, regardless of what they bring to the business.
And if you say 'fuck the workers, low/no minimum wage', it becomes much easier to exploit/intimidate individual workers into accepting unfairly low wages.
That's why I think the most effective system is something I heard of in a few countries, I forget which, where there is no minimum wage, BUT there is a lot of strong codified protection for things like unionization and collective bargaining, which enables the best possible compromises possible, in every industry (and for certain, compromise will be necessary to a degree, for the reason stated above). The result in those countries, as I recall, is that the median wage tends to be higher than what the 'baseline' minimum wage set by law would end up being. Another advantage is that it's much better finely-tuned to each individual industry/job, and also much better at reacting to changing circumstances, than the beauraucracy of legislation could ever hope to realistically match.
Yeah it's not an easy problem to solve. Encouraging unionizing would certainly help, or if you wanna get even more radical, a supplemental UBI. Ultimately though, until those things are more attainable, if an employer hires someone to do a job, and the value created by the person doing that job doesn't justify paying them* a living wage, I think it's on the employer to reevaluate the job they're asking someone to do for them. Maybe that means exploring automation options to help that worker generate more value, or maybe explicitly stating that the job is a part-time job that won't provide a living wage, or maybe reorganizing/adding job responsibilities such that the hired worker can generate more value.
Fine points, though I think automation is much more likely (as we've already seen it begin to happen) to phase out the human being entirely, rather than make their labor more productive, by simple virtue of the fact that it costs less.
Plus, it only becomes easier for it to cost less, the higher wage the human beings are demanding (and/or forcing via legislation).
Fine by me, at least in the long run. I look forward to advancing to the utopia where robots do all the work, every human receives a UBI (or money is just done away with entirely), and we're all free to pursue whatever hobbies we want, instead of toiling away to increase stock value for the shareholders. We're probably a long (long) way off from that, but I welcome any progress towards it.