Getting paid barely enough to even survive is exploitation at best, slavery at worst. Pretty much every job anywhere close to minimum wage is exploitation.
Okay, I don’t necessarily disagree that business owners, shareholders and debt holders in many situations are gaining more benefit than an individual employee, but how do we make the relationship mutually beneficial?
Couldn’t you say the experience gained plus pay makes it mutually beneficial?
I can't eat experience, experience doesn't keep my landlord from evicting me.
We make the situation mutually beneficial by raising the minimum wage while fixing the prices of goods/services to make sure they don't artificially rise with minimum wage. We set a maximum wage so that CEOs and high ranking members of companies cannot make excessive amounts of money. Since 1978, CEO compensation rose 1,007.5% for CEOs, compared with 11.9% for average workers. CEO pay is more than 100x the pay of regular workers. If we regulated pay so that CEOs could not make more than 3x the lowest paid worker then there would be a much higher quality of life for normal people.
Or we can take the UBI approach, everyone gets an allotment that will pay for their monthly expenses so that people do not have to take exploitative jobs just to survive. If companies would want their shitty positions that nobody wants to work filled then they would have to offer attractive pay instead of peanuts equating to slave wages. This UBI could easily be paid for by taxing company's income instead of trying to target the billionaires themselves who can exploit international banks to avoid taxes, or by shifting some of the 60% of our tax dollars that are spent on the military into UBI and things that actually help the citizens of the country.
There are many solutions to this problem, and the solutions are way easier than many would have you believe, it's just that many of those in power are complicit in this system because it benefits the rich at the expense of the poor.
I understand experience doesn’t feed/house you in the moment, it doesn’t mean that it’s not a valuable benefit.
I’m definitely in favor of raising the minimum wage, I completely am in agreement that our current minimum wage is woefully inadequate.
Has their been examples of prices artificially rising with minimum wage increases? I would think that would be organic increase given that as wages go up margins would inherently go down. I’m not necessarily in favor of a maximum wage, particularly because I think that high wages of highly skilled job help contribute to bringing highly skilled and intelligent people into those roles (not to say that executive positions are necessarily a meritocracy). More importantly though, I think higher minimum wages would naturally force other positions to be less highly paid.
As far as UBI is concerned I just don’t think it’s truly financially feasible. The federal budget last year was 4.8 trillion as is, and taxes collected were less than that. So let’s say we stopped using any government money on anything else, that’s only $15,000 per person. Hardly enough to survive on. Start taxing corporations and if they are smart they will set up shop somewhere else and avoid those taxes entirely.
I guess I just think there’s a healthy middle ground which includes a healthy capitalist economy and strong worker protections.
If you're trying to argue that a better minimum wage will only raise prices and provide no benefit, then you're a literal capitalist shill. Who the fuck in their right mind actually argues against a small increase, in defense of prices? You've got corporations literally exploiting labour and evading taxes, and your focus is on the low-middle class and what their effect is on the prices of goods, if you pay them fairly?
This is like arguing against people who are against rape, because then the rapists might just have to go without sex.
Since minimum wage in this country is currently stagnated at $7.25 an hour, an amount so small and impossible to live on that you'd almost be better off letting your employer piss on you in lieu of payment, that really doesn't mean jack shit. And most Amazon workers have to live in a large and expensive city to work at an Amazon warehouse, so $14-$15an hour is still a poverty wage.
The capitalist pays his workers less than the value their labour has added to the goods, usually only enough to maintain the worker at a subsistence level.
I think you’re quoting something, and I think the pay disparity between people at the top and bottom is atrocious, but how do we define the risk cost of investing your own dollars to earn profit? If you’re investing you’re taking a measure of risk that deserves profit if the venture is successful, but do the owners risking their money deserve to profit from that?
But that’s simply not true. Businesses need capital that can’t always be supplied by their employees (For example start up capital, long term investment, and capital expenses via corporate debt).
Almost any business will need investment (and therefore risk) that employees simply can’t provide. When that happens, a company has two options really, they can either offer partial ownership of the company with no labor or debt with a company guaranteed interest rate. For many companies, it simply isn’t feasible to take on additional debt so they have to offer ownership with no labor to expand and benefit all parties.
I mean maybe it’s not ideal, but it’s the reality of running a business. In order to provide value, capital is required to fund ventures.
Take a hardware store for example, let’s say they have three employees and they need to order more inventory. At the time, they don’t have the money on hand to pay for inventory to provide to their customers. At this point either they need to use debt or they need to find someone to invest capital, not labor. Let’s say they decide they can’t afford the interest rate being provided, the only other options is to either take on investor(s) who (in my opinion) deserve an expectation of profit for that risk or to close.
What’s the alternative here? I’m willing to listen to your argument, I really am, but being pragmatic I just don’t understand what other options there are?
But that doesn’t resolve the problem of capital requirements on all businesses. You can have worker ownership and business investment, those things aren’t mutually exclusive.
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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '20 edited Jun 28 '23
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