damnedfurry

If they were actually good products/services, they wouldn't need to advertise

How do they get their first customers without advertising?

Couldn't have said any of this better myself.

Absolutely, it's absurd for that guy to assume this is a racist act.

But that's what happens when victim mentality is drilled into one so deeply that it becomes the primary component of one's identity.

womens

Really?

Someone's mad that their idealism was confronted with inconvenient truths, lol.

I hope one day you'll mature enough not to react so childishly to being contradicted.

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).

The fact that your response to the dilemma of a particular job position creating less value than the minimum wage you intend to force upon it with "fix your business model" reveals a massive ignorance of what goes into starting a business, and of how thin profit margins are in the majority of small businesses.

You're unwittingly advocating for there to be insurmountable hurdles for starting new small businesses, which will inevitably result in megacorporations with deep enough pockets to eat those inflated costs (and having a lack of competition to the degree that they can easily mark up their product far beyond where they normally could without being punished for it, to more easily eat said costs) being the only ones employing anyone, because only they can afford it.

And then, invariably, the same 'advocates' will come along and complain about monopoly and lack of competition, oblivious to their own facilitation of that end result.

In short, your 'solution' is objectively foolish, and merits no serious consideration.

College tuition has massively outpaced inflation, much less wage growth.

The policies (chiefly the change that made student loans no longer dischargeable in bankruptcy) that rocketed college tuition up are a MUCH more significant factor in college affordability, that's just a fact.

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.

TL;DR: The EPI graph isn’t measuring productivity vs. pay, even for "typical workers"; it’s measuring wage inequality, and images like these are the visual equivalent of out-of-context half-truth soundbites:

https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/6rtoh4/productivity_pay_gap_in_epi_we_trust/

My rule of thumb is "the less I'd like to do a job, the more the person doing it should be paid."

That does already put upward pressure on the wage. Same reason that graveyard shifts tend to pay more than first or second shift positions of the same job, and that more dangerous jobs tend to pay more than safer ones of equal overall difficulty.

so-called unskilled jobs

"Unskilled" is not an insult when talking about jobs, it's just terminology/jargon. In this context, it describes a certain category of job: one that requires no prior special certification or schooling to be qualified for, and that the typical person can be trained to do to a satisfactory level within a month or so.

jobs that get routinely exploited.

The fact that many people are qualified to do those jobs (due to their low requirements) is the primary thing driving the wage down for them. As long as there is someone willing to do the job for X amount less than you're willing to, they'll get hired over you, because the job is such that individual excellence doesn't make nearly as much difference. You can't really blame the company for hiring the cheapest adequate labor they have access to, they're doing no different than the workers trying to find the highest paying job they can. To criticize one without criticizing the other is a double standard.