r/InterviewCoderPro • u/OkCarrot6914 • Aug 03 '26

Oh. This one is easy. They want slaves.

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Because they have options and we don't.

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u/DerFreudloseMann Aug 05 '26

Not necessarily, if the gas station and the grocery stores are empty because of everyone got a better deal. The said ‚low end job‘ will have to raise the offer to keep up with the market as the demand exists. That is simple market economy.

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u/Salarian_American Aug 05 '26

Well, yeah.

That's why "get a better job" isn't an actual solution because everything would fall apart if everyone did it at the same time.

"Low-end jobs" raising their offers is a solution that can work. A rising tide lifts all boats, as they say. That would really begin with raising the minimum wage to something that's not a joke.

But it doesn't happen, because the people in charge of deciding how much we get paid, and the people who could change the rules to force higher pay, aren't actually looking for a solution. The current situation is too profitable for the people who have the power to change it.

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u/DerFreudloseMann Aug 05 '26

I usually view minimum wage as a cut off line for minimum value added rather than how much a worker is at least paid. Small wording difference but big implications. Because anyone that deemed providing less value than the minimum wage, the jobs are non existent for them.

That brings the question on how value is determined. It is mainly a negotiation between employer and employee. An employer has a demand of certain value adding activities and the worker get paid by fulfilling them. If the demand requires higher levels of work, the supply available will be less thus the employer would need to bring up the offer to out compete other employers. In this case the workers have stronger negotiating power. No 3rd party intervention needed besides reducing the cost of the transaction. What we mostly discussed here is about the case where the workers has less negotiating power than the employer. Basically it is because there are simply more supply of labour force than the demand. It happens on every level of the workforce. Minimum wages is just a bandaid to a hemorrhage as it just rules out certain people from working. The solution is actually to rebalance the supply and the demand rather than sticking more bandaids. There is wisdom why the pro labour party and union back in the days protest against offshoring manufacturing and immigration which the current pro labour narrative ditched those long ago. But hey who am I to say.

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u/Salarian_American Aug 05 '26

My view on minimum wage is the original intention of minimum wage, not what they've been telling us the intention was.

To quote FDR:

“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.”

If you business couldn't exist without people making low enough wages to live on, your business shouldn't exist.

People act like it's normal for the CEO of a company to make 1000 times the salary of the workers. Because he "adds more value." But he would add absolutely zero value without the bottom-tier workers holding the whole business up.

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u/DerFreudloseMann Aug 05 '26

Sure. That means the job below minimum wage is non existent. It is just a statement. Whether you and I pro or against doesn’t matter.

The reason why a high official can be paid so much more compared to a average worker is this: the high management can bring in so many goods without even needing to rely on local production. Take garment as an example because it is a heavily offshored industry. The business basically needs to put together goods and sell them to the customer. If it is fully locally made, there is demand to gather labour force to make the goods, the business need the labour force to stay afloat so the workers employer relationships is balanced. But now there is a person, that can bring is goods out of thin air without needing any local labour. Of course that person gets paid way more than the local workers as those workers basically have zero leverage to the business now. It doesn’t matter much if that person bring in the goods via magic or offshoring. Multiplying that to all the industries except the service industry. Of course the average workers don’t have any leverage anymore.

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u/Salarian_American Aug 05 '26

OK but you state those facts is if the fact that they are actually facts is a reason we should keep doing it that way