universal basic income (UBI)

[The Romulan Republic]

Reducing working hours is a much better idea, I feel. A much fairer one, to the working class, at least.

While I suppose that their may be something I am missing here, wouldn't UBI allow people to work fewer hours if they wished to do so, since they would have a certain amount of income guaranteed? While ensuring that those who simply couldn't find work would be supported as well?

[K. A. Pital]

Reducing working hours is a much better idea, I feel. A much fairer one, to the working class, at least.

With a concomitant increase in minimum wages, surely? Because otherwise people just get shafted.

Yes, with a corresponding rise in compensation per hour. After all, this would result in similar incomes, but earned with much less working time - an overall rise in the quality of life.

While I suppose that their may be something I am missing here, wouldn't UBI allow people to work fewer hours if they wished to do so...

In theory, yes - if you treat working time as divisible and negotiable. It is normally neither divisble nor negotiable, except for the elite non-supervisory specialists and supervisory workers. In practice, most work contracts - at least here - require from you to make your 39-40 hours of work time a week. So how is it helping the person to work less if contracts with a lesser amount of hours worked simply are not available, because it is the standard?

[Simon_Jester]

Why? 'CoL > 20k/year, therefore economic activity that pays less than that is meaningless' is a bit of logic I don't follow.

From the individual's point of view, if their work nets a total yearly salary of less than twenty thousand a year, they're dead anyway. Unless someone else is subsidizing them.

At the moment, the very existence of such jobs is effectively a massive subsidy paid by society at large, to the people who employ all that cheap labor. For every person whose only job is working at Wal-Mart for thirty hours a week and fifteen thousand dollars a year... that represents society basically handing that person over to Wal-Mart and saying "Here, you can have this person's services for much less than the cost it requires to keep them alive. And someone else will pay for the balance of the cost of actually keeping them alive!"

The point of a minimum wage and things like employer-funded health insurance is to force employers to actually acknowledge the value of a human being's time, and pay an appropriate rate for that time. If they can't stay in business while paying a living wage to the workers they need in order to stay in business, they shouldn't stay in business.

However, modern business has bypassed the minimum wage's effectiveness (at least in the US) by hiring huge numbers of part-time workers, creating a plague of underemployment and of people who have to work two jobs to support themselves, even as other people go with no job whatsoever. The 'creation' of such jobs is not doing the public much of a service... and yet it continues, and society continues to eat the unpaid cost of supporting all these people who aren't making enough money to live on.

So there are basically two ways out of this:
1) Mandate that all employers hire their workers for a fixed number of hours, OR
2) Formalize the system by which the society agrees to support the people private industry isn't willing to pay enough to keep alive.

My response to you has more to do with (2), but first a word for Stas Bush, whose question has to do with (1).

Yes, with a corresponding rise in compensation per hour. After all, this would result in similar incomes, but earned with much less working time - an overall rise in the quality of life.

While I suppose that their may be something I am missing here, wouldn't UBI allow people to work fewer hours if they wished to do so...

In theory, yes - if you treat working time as divisible and negotiable. It is normally neither divisble nor negotiable, except for the elite non-supervisory specialists and supervisory workers. In practice, most work contracts - at least here - require from you to make your 39-40 hours of work time a week. So how is it helping the person to work less if contracts with a lesser amount of hours worked simply are not available, because it is the standard?

In the US, the rules are quite different. Most employees do not have a contract of the kind which is so common in Europe. For employees working at an hourly wage, the norm is for there to be no guarantee that they'll work for a full week. Working time is very much divisible and negotiable in the US, at least for the lower class. In fact, it is to employers' advantage to subdivide workers' time and employ (for example) twelve people working thirty hours a week rather than nine people working forty hours a week.

[SLIGHTLY SIMPLIFIED EXPLANATION FOLLOWS]

This is because the US attempted to create a more capitalist-friendly social safety net in the mid-20th century, compared to the ones being created in Europe. Therefore, many things like health insurance are associated with mandatory benefits the employer is required to pay for, instead of being provided directly by the state. However, these legal requirements apply only to full-time workers, because at the time it was normative for nearly all workers to be full-time.

Meanwhile, the US does not regulate labor contracts, and certainly does not mandate them.

This has created a legal loophole, permitting companies to hire larger numbers of part-time workers. The company will then not pay them benefits (leaving them uninsured and in many cases with less secure retirement savings), and still get the same total number of hours of labor performed, at a lower price.

As noted above, this tends to subvert the intention of things like minimum wage laws. It creates a perverse system where many American workers actively wish for more hours, not because of a Japan-esque obsession with working harder, but because they're simply not making enough to live on unless they either work two jobs, or get unusually many hours at the job they have.

The only real limiting factor on the system is the difficulty of finding and coordinating a large mass of part-time workers- it may be possible to go from nine 40-hour employees to twelve 30s, but it's rather harder to go to eighteen 20s and functionally impossible to go to thirty-six 10s.

[Simon_Jester]

Now, to expand on what I was going to say to Kingmaker:

Basically, the problem is that the entire category of "jobs paying much less than a living wage" is deeply suspect. There are very few people who should have to be working such jobs. It is debatable whether we actually want to create incentives for people to sign on for jobs that don't pay a living wage, unless the job is something voluntary that they would do for free. Because remember, pushing the incentive to work is based on the assumption that society needs people working in order to function. If a given person doesn't make enough money to stay alive, that means the market price of the labor they're doing is less than the market price of the cost of one person's survival.

Even under the logic of pure market capitalism, that doesn't make a lot of sense.

So if we just wrote everyone making less than $20000 a $20000 tax-free check every year, the real effect would be to force employers to think very seriously about which jobs are worth having someone do... because it isn't even worth someone's time to show up for work at all unless they're making $30000 a year or whatever.

The thing is, this is basically just us admitting what the rising cost of living has been telling us all along: that the fair market price of an American citizen's yearly labor is a lot less like $15000/year and a lot more like $30000/year. The only reason that people get away with having employees who make ten or fifteen thousand a year right now is because we've already got a perverse incentive structure in place. Specifically, it's because society has (implicitly) made the decision to subsidize business by supplying it with cheap labor.

We didn't really recognize that we were doing that in the US, but that's the cumulative effect of our minimum wage laws, the way we (don't) handle labor contracts, the way we tax businesses, and so on.

[Elheru Aran]

The only real limiting factor on the system is the difficulty of finding and coordinating a large mass of part-time workers- it may be possible to go from nine 40-hour employees to twelve 30s, but it's rather harder to go to eighteen 20s and functionally impossible to go to thirty-six 10s.

Unless you're deliberately geared towards using such a system in order to avoid having to pay benefits to full-time employees as much as possible. Think Walmart, fast-food, general retail-hell. Hours for as many employees as possible will be withheld artificially below whatever the local cutoff for 'full time' is, coverage will be guaranteed by using full-time supervisory employees to fill in wherever needed, and even part-timers will be limited in number except during peak season when a number of temp employees get hired and then let go once the peak is over.

Food service, wait-staff jobs in particular, get a serious shafting.

Now in a more white-collar job, sure, you'll see more 'full time' employees, but even those will occasionally see their hours restricted to a certain degree, depending on what the job entails.

[Simon_Jester]

The only real limiting factor on the system is the difficulty of finding and coordinating a large mass of part-time workers- it may be possible to go from nine 40-hour employees to twelve 30s, but it's rather harder to go to eighteen 20s and functionally impossible to go to thirty-six 10s.

Unless you're deliberately geared towards using such a system in order to avoid having to pay benefits to full-time employees as much as possible. Think Walmart, fast-food, general retail-hell. Hours for as many employees as possible will be withheld artificially below whatever the local cutoff for 'full time' is, coverage will be guaranteed by using full-time supervisory employees to fill in wherever needed, and even part-timers will be limited in number except during peak season when a number of temp employees get hired and then let go once the peak is over.

Food service, wait-staff jobs in particular, get a serious shafting.

Now in a more white-collar job, sure, you'll see more 'full time' employees, but even those will occasionally see their hours restricted to a certain degree, depending on what the job entails.

My post was about exactly this process, so yes.

But in the specific part you quoted, I was pointing out that even for places like Wal-Mart, it's impractical (and pointless) to hire thirty-six people who work ten hours a week instead of eighteen people who work twenty.

[Stormin]

Since UBI is unlikely, I wonder if the government becoming an employer of last resort might become a thing. Not digging and filling pointless holes but maybe people getting paid survival rates to attend community college classes, just being non-disruptive being the requirement and actually putting in the work and getting the credits would be for the person's additional benefit.

It would be better than a lot of current bottom end jobs with a bonus that some of the people will actually gain skills and such that they can eventually move upward and becoming an actual tax paying benefit to society.

[General Zod]

Since UBI is unlikely, I wonder if the government becoming an employer of last resort might become a thing. Not digging and filling pointless holes but maybe people getting paid survival rates to attend community college classes, just being non-disruptive being the requirement and actually putting in the work and getting the credits would be for the person's additional benefit.

It would be better than a lot of current bottom end jobs with a bonus that some of the people will actually gain skills and such that they can eventually move upward and becoming an actual tax paying benefit to society.

As long as the military industrial complex remains a profitable entity for private business interests they're not going to do anything to jeopardize their biggest recruitment tool.

[K. A. Pital]

Yes, with a corresponding rise in compensation per hour. After all, this would result in similar incomes, but earned with much less working time - an overall rise in the quality of life.

While I suppose that their may be something I am missing here, wouldn't UBI allow people to work fewer hours if they wished to do so...

In theory, yes - if you treat working time as divisible and negotiable. It is normally neither divisble nor negotiable, except for the elite non-supervisory specialists and supervisory workers. In practice, most work contracts - at least here - require from you to make your 39-40 hours of work time a week. So how is it helping the person to work less if contracts with a lesser amount of hours worked simply are not available, because it is the standard?

In the US, the rules are quite different. Most employees do not have a contract of the kind which is so common in Europe. For employees working at an hourly wage, the norm is for there to be no guarantee that they'll work for a full week. Working time is very much divisible and negotiable in the US, at least for the lower class. In fact, it is to employers' advantage to subdivide workers' time and employ (for example) twelve people working thirty hours a week rather than nine people working forty hours a week.

[SLIGHTLY SIMPLIFIED EXPLANATION FOLLOWS]

This is because the US attempted to create a more capitalist-friendly social safety net in the mid-20th century, compared to the ones being created in Europe. Therefore, many things like health insurance are associated with mandatory benefits the employer is required to pay for, instead of being provided directly by the state. However, these legal requirements apply only to full-time workers, because at the time it was normative for nearly all workers to be full-time.

Meanwhile, the US does not regulate labor contracts, and certainly does not mandate them.

This has created a legal loophole, permitting companies to hire larger numbers of part-time workers. The company will then not pay them benefits (leaving them uninsured and in many cases with less secure retirement savings), and still get the same total number of hours of labor performed, at a lower price.

As noted above, this tends to subvert the intention of things like minimum wage laws. It creates a perverse system where many American workers actively wish for more hours, not because of a Japan-esque obsession with working harder, but because they're simply not making enough to live on unless they either work two jobs, or get unusually many hours at the job they have.

The only real limiting factor on the system is the difficulty of finding and coordinating a large mass of part-time workers- it may be possible to go from nine 40-hour employees to twelve 30s, but it's rather harder to go to eighteen 20s and functionally impossible to go to thirty-six 10s.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, Simon. Based on my rather limited guest worker experience in the US, the pay rates were calculated per hour, but the bosses were quite keen on making the hours worked-out in a given week. Then again, maybe it was just me and the job peculiarities... I mean, working for 7 bucks an hour must have been rock bottom pay, so maybe this is why they were eager to make everyone work out the time.

[Sea Skimmer]

Meanwhile, the US does not regulate labor contracts, and certainly does not mandate them.

Yeah it does, what do you think a minimal wage law is? If it did not OSHA would not exist and a lot of other things...in fact the supreme court long battled against allowing any form of contract regulation, but all that liberty of contract stuff went out the door when they surrendered to FDR's proposed court packing plan in the 1930s.

[Simon_Jester]

Skimmer, there's a misunderstanding. To be a bit more clear, labor contracts as Stas Bush would understand them, the kind that are common in Europe, are basically nonexistent in the US, at least for the average employee.

That is why Stas was talking about "most work contracts - at least here - require from you to make your 39-40 hours of work time a week," which is totally foreign to US experience.

Now, on my end, it was not correct for me to say "the US does not regulate labor contracts," though it is true that the US "does not mandate them."

...

The US regulates labor. But at the same time, workers in the US don't necessarily have written contracts with their employers. There is no requirement to have such a contract, and many employers prefer not to because it avoids certain legal obligations they would otherwise be subject to.

Conversely, it's illegal to pay someone less than the minimum wage. And that's true whether they signed any contracts or not. It's treated as a serious offense to withhold wages, regardless of what contracts were signed. Ask Broomstick about what happened to one of her former employers if you like.

So it is entirely true that the US regulates labor. However, this regulation does not center so heavily around the all-importance of written contracts between the employee and the employer.

Granted, labor contracts are regulated in that you can't sign an employment contract in which the employee agrees to terms that violate state and federal labor law (such as a sub-minimum wage). But the main labor laws exist independently of the contracts, many American employees don't even have contracts, and the usual function of a labor contract in the US is to establish extra terms and conditions that are not automatically addressed under the existing labor law.

[Simon_Jester]

Skimmer, there's a misunderstanding. To be a bit more clear, labor contracts as Stas Bush would understand them, the kind that are common in Europe, are basically nonexistent in the US, at least for the average employee.

That is why Stas was talking about "most work contracts - at least here - require from you to make your 39-40 hours of work time a week," which is totally foreign to US experience.

Now, on my end, it was not correct for me to say "the US does not regulate labor contracts," though it is true that the US "does not mandate them."

...

The US regulates labor. But at the same time, workers in the US don't necessarily have written contracts with their employers. There is no requirement to have such a contract, and many employers prefer not to because it avoids certain legal obligations they would otherwise be subject to.

Conversely, it's illegal to pay someone less than the minimum wage. And that's true whether they signed any contracts or not. It's treated as a serious offense to withhold wages, regardless of what contracts were signed. Ask Broomstick about what happened to one of her former employers if you like.

So it is entirely true that the US regulates labor. However, this regulation does not center so heavily around the all-importance of written contracts between the employee and the employer.

Granted, labor contracts are regulated in that you can't sign an employment contract in which the employee agrees to terms that violate state and federal labor law (such as a sub-minimum wage). But the main labor laws exist independently of the contracts, many American employees don't even have contracts, and the usual function of a labor contract in the US is to establish extra terms and conditions that are not automatically addressed under the existing labor law.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, Simon. Based on my rather limited guest worker experience in the US, the pay rates were calculated per hour, but the bosses were quite keen on making the hours worked-out in a given week. Then again, maybe it was just me and the job peculiarities... I mean, working for 7 bucks an hour must have been rock bottom pay, so maybe this is why they were eager to make everyone work out the time.

https://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/chart.htm

I don't know precisely when you were in the US, but... From 1997 to 2007 the minimum wage was $5.15 an hour. In 2007 it was raised to $5.85, in 2008 to $6.55, and in 2009 to the current value of $7.25. The same table covers years prior to 1997, but I figured it was relatively unlikely that you were here and employed as a guest worker that long ago, since I gather you're not that much older than me.

I'm not precisely sure what you mean by "making the hours worked-out," do you mean that the employer had you 'budgeted' to work a certain number of hours and wanted you to work for that many hours? Because yes, a lot of employers will want to make sure that their employees work for the full number of hours they planned for that employee. If nothing else, because the alternative is to have fewer man-hours of labor get done than they'd otherwise desire.

The catch is that in the US there is a strong incentive not to have any one person work more hours than allocated (because of overtime laws)... and that many American employers have an incentive to allocate less than forty hours of work per person, sometimes much less. This trend has been increasing in strength over time. It may well be that things are worse now (in terms of the part-time labor market) than they were when you were in the US, depending on exactly when you were here.

And US law does not really prevent this, in part because there is no prototypical framework for what a labor contract looks like in the US- just a collection of laws that govern specific parts of the employee-employer relationship.

[K. A. Pital]

I was there in 2005. So $7 was not rock bottom after all... huh. Good to know. I think most of the workers had 40 hours of working time per week they had to work. Could have easily gotten worse since that time though, you are right. I haven't seen the effects of the Great Bust of 2008 first-hand.

[darkjedi521]

I was there in 2005. So $7 was not rock bottom after all... huh. Good to know. I think most of the workers had 40 hours of working time per week they had to work. Could have easily gotten worse since that time though, you are right. I haven't seen the effects of the Great Bust of 2008 first-hand.

Due to many states having higher minimums than the federal level, $7 may or may not have been rock bottom where you were. A chart of US minimums over time: https://www.dol.gov/whd/state/stateMinWageHis.htm Washington state had a $7.35 rate back then, and tipped positions are exempt from minimums. Employers are supposed to supposed to make up the deficit if base wage + tips doesn't equal the minimum, but good luck with that one.

[Beowulf]

Beowulf, if the system worked as you described, there would also be no incentive to pay anyone less than the guaranteed minimum income. Because that is the amount of money you receive for doing nothing. Why would I expect you to work for me, in exchange for the same reward you could get for doing nothing?
<snip>

Also, there's really no reason the system should work that way in the first place. <snip>

I agree, there's no reason the system should work that way, but Alyrium posited exactly that system. It's a stupid system. And he continued to do calculations later in this thread based on exactly that system.

Yes, I agree with much of the above that reform of medical insurance is probably also required, though that might be achieved by regulating down the required number of hours to be considered full time without changing the number required to start hitting overtime. I'm not sure. But if you make it pointless to try to have a horde of part-time workers, then businesses won't try that dodge.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Beowulf, if the system worked as you described, there would also be no incentive to pay anyone less than the guaranteed minimum income. Because that is the amount of money you receive for doing nothing. Why would I expect you to work for me, in exchange for the same reward you could get for doing nothing?
<snip>

Also, there's really no reason the system should work that way in the first place. <snip>

I agree, there's no reason the system should work that way, but Alyrium posited exactly that system. It's a stupid system. And he continued to do calculations later in this thread based on exactly that system.

Yes, I agree with much of the above that reform of medical insurance is probably also required, though that might be achieved by regulating down the required number of hours to be considered full time without changing the number required to start hitting overtime. I'm not sure. But if you make it pointless to try to have a horde of part-time workers, then businesses won't try that dodge.

Indeed. As a first approximation of both the concept of a GBI (as opposed to UBI) for explanatory purposes, and subsequently a first approximation of the budget required on account of limited data. In order to perform calculations for a budget in accordance with Simon's math, I would need to have far more granular income data than I actually had available to me. Even the BLS does not have income data that fine grained that I was able to dig up (they do in an SQL database somewhere, I just dont know where it is)