salm wrote:I do care that there are so many companies that underpay their employees, because even if this Talia person did not have to take the job there are other people who might have had to take them. And simply stating that they should all just get a second job is absurd. A job is supposed to house and feed people. You´re not supposed to need two jobs.
It's not unreasonable
as such for a given individual to work two jobs.
What is unreasonable is when this becomes a normative, common expectation for the lower class in our whole society. There are three problems with that...
1) This can pose literally impossible problems of the "cannot serve two masters" kind. For instance, Yelp runs its call center 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Some of their employees no doubt work unusual hours. This may make it difficult if not impossible to find a second employer willing to hire them in a schedule that is compatible
both with the existing Yelp job
and with getting regular sleep.
2) Done on a large scale, the practice of taking two jobs destroys the vaunted 'job creation' of a modern economy. If you create five million jobs, but force five million members of the lower classes to work two jobs each, you haven't actually created any jobs or done anything about unemployment.
3) This becomes a stealthy way to ask the lower class to work longer hours than the law would allow. People who work seventy hours a week at one job get paid major overtime, and rightly so- because seventy hours a week is a punishing schedule that allows no time for anything other than work, sleep, and personal maintenance. It is not just 7/4 times as burdensome as working a mere forty hours.
But people who work seventy hours at two or three jobs make no overtime. They hit diminishing returns at some point, in that they have to neglect themselves physically or mentally in order to work another hour of work... and another... and another. This is very prejudicial to the well-being of the lower class.
If we expect the poor to work sixty or seventy hours a week
as a routine condition of their existence, the way we did in the Gilded Age, then we should at least have the decency to say so openly.
Broomstick wrote:Funny, isn't it - when a wealthy person or business rejects something that would result in a net loss they're hailed as wise and making a good fiscal decision. If a poor person does the same they're a horrible loathsome scumbug or something.
My paranoid side thinks this has been done deliberately to provide an exploitable underclass for cheap labor and sucking off money/profits but I don't really think there's a cabal of evil businessmen making these decisions, not really. That's just a nightmare I have when worried about how to pay the bills.
There's a cabal of evil businessmen quietly encouraging it, but they didn't invent it and it doesn't take much effort to push it. Because it ties into fairly basic human tendencies. Monkeys like to fling poo at designated outcast pariah monkeys. And our evolution into modern humans did nothing to discourage that habit. And in a society where only 10-20% of the community is dirt poor, the dirt poor will become the outcast pariah primates.
biostem wrote:There's a fundamental disconnect here - I personally do not feel that a person, working at an entry level job outside of their are of expertise/education, should be making enough to live alone in an expensive area.
So only people with five years' experience, working
inside their area of expertise, should be able to live in such areas?
Who's going to clean toilets in those areas? Who staffs the grocery stores? When people graduate from college in such areas, they should not be able to live independently? Is Ms. Jane's mistake that she should have rushed into a marriage with a nice man who was willing to support her, like she would have needed to do to make ends meet back in the '50s?
Moreover, there's a separate problem, which is that empirically, the minimum wage jobs are NOT occupied solely by people "just starting" their lives. They are occupied by thirtysomethings and fortysomethings in considerable numbers. They are occupied by sixtysomethings who can't afford to retire. If "the plan" is for minimum wage jobs to be stepping-stones for people who can still afford to live on ramen noodles in an unventilated garret somewhere, the plan isn't working.
In which case we cannot set a (low) minimum wage on the assumption that the plan
is working.
biostem wrote:Yes - but with only 1/3rd the employees, (or less employees, anyway). Higher pay to the workers means higher prices to the customer, which means fewer customers - so you lay off some people to compensate and to keep your prices down. The CEO may be making a lot of money, but I can assure you that the supervisors and managers only make a little more than the regular employees, and you MUST have at least one or both of those per shift. Heck, many business take to having one of them fill in for employees that are either absent or had to be let go due to budgetary reasons.
When one business does this, that's a supply-demand issue, and you do indeed get situations where tripling the workers' pay means you have to raise prices and cut staff dramatically.
That's because no individual merchant can significantly change the supply-demand curve for labor in an entire economy.
When the local or national government steps in and legislates changes in the price of labor (that is to say, changes the minimum wage), this
can alter supply-demand curves. A significant fraction of all workers in the area have just become significantly wealthier, increasing demand for goods. People who were already making considerably more money than that will comparatively be worse off as a direct result- but there can be indirect benefits to this anyway.
I mean, that is literally the entire story of the Industrial Revolution and its twentieth century aftermath. Rising economic productivity permitted wider consumption of goods, which in turn
motivated production of goods.
There's very little market for goods other than subsistence items in an economy where everyone except the aristocrats is dirt poor. Conversely, a thriving economy will necessarily be one that supplies the great bulk of its citizens with a living wage.
Civil War Man wrote:It's why you see poor people who speak up have their expenses audited with a fine tooth comb, with every penny spent that went towards something that could be defined as a luxury used as evidence that they are not really poor, or that their poverty is entirely their fault. Much in the same way that someone who claims to have been raped has their entire sexual past dredged up so people can point at a past consensual act and try to use it as evidence that they are lying. In extreme cases, you have instances like a Fox News talking head that claimed the poor were not poor because most of them had a refrigerator or a microwave.
Huh. That analogy occurred to me too...
biostem wrote:Much in the same way that someone who claims to have been raped has their entire sexual past dredged up so people can point at a past consensual act and try to use it as evidence that they are lying.
Four words - "Innocent until proven guilty" - I have no doubt that there are many rapes that go unreported, or that there are instances where a rapist gets away scot-free. It sucks, but unless you can prove that a rape occurred, then there's nothing you can do. It is the defense's job to provide the best case for their client, and sometimes that means tearing down the accuser's credibility. Unless, of course, you'd prefer we start treating people as guilty until proven innocent...
...Because this argument is disingenuous.
The problem here isn't just that
lawyers do this
in court. It's when the same thing is being done in the court of public opinion.
The only purpose served by taking the plaintiffs in rape cases and trying to slut-shame them in public is to deter women from reporting rapes, and to discourage listeners from taking such reports seriously.
The only purpose served by taking people who complain about their sub-living wages and trying to WELFAREQUEEN-shame them in public is
to deter people from complaining about being poor. And to discourage listeners from taking such complaints seriously.
It does not serve the long-term interests of American civilization to deter the poor from complaining about their lot in life. And it certainly doesn't serve the long-term interests of American civilization to discourage the rest of Americans from hearing what the poor have to say about their lot in life.
And the most insidious line of argument is the one where people go "B-but what about the poor company's profits?" Because in that case, the working poor are not even people. They are resources to be used at the company's whim. And in today's disposable economy, that means labor is like a toaster. You buy it cheap, use it until it can no longer function, and then throw it in the trash.
You understand that "labor" is a commodity, right? It's not dehumanizing to realize that people provide skills, and the more common those skills, the less they are worth to a company. You have to be objective here. Companies do not function under good will and happy thoughts - if they don't earn money, then they shut down, and everyone loses their job. You, as a worker, have to prove that you are worth more than what the company is paying you, if you want that raise.
Labor is a commodity, but labor is a unique commodity in that it represents the livelihood of actual humans.
Melting down steel that no longer serves your needs is called recycling.
Melting down a corporate structure that no longer serves your needs is called good financial sense.
Melting down laborers that no longer serve your needs is an atrocity.
Commodities that reflect on the basic quality of life for all humans (clean air and water, the protection of organized military and police forces, and yes,
labor) are different than commodities which some humans can choose not to use, or can choose to use differently. It can be fully appropriate to regulate these 'markets' for the public good, in ways that other markets are not regulated.