> We expect a girl making minimum wage at Kroger to accept that she is an essential worker. Why do we not expect the same from school staff?
I wish that as a society we could decide that anyone we're going to call an "essential worker" and draft to the biohazardous front lines should bloody well be paid at least as much as the rest of us who can be gone for a week with little ill effect to society at large.
Not just during an emergency either - they're essential the rest of the time too.
And there we have it. "I don't view your work as being valuable enough to justify you being able to obtain basic needs for yourself (like food and shelter), let alone a family. Now give me my frappe."
Funny how we will still call such employees "essential" when it's time to force them to work in shitty and potentially dangerous conditions.
You might be willing to work for less than minimum wage, but in reality minimum wages exist because without them they create a race-to-the-bottom for workers, and it's very hard to write a policy that's something like "you can pay a person less if they are enjoying it and are reading a book and not really doing that much".
Waiting time is a regular part of jobs and we pay for it in other career paths - can you imagine if everyone only had to pay security guards for the time spent apprehending thief's and they got no pay for all the waiting around reading newspapers they do?
> There do exist people so useless that their labor doesn't even rate minimum wage.
People who can't do a job should be replaced with someone who can. If a company still has to hire a warm body to do that job, those employees are automatically not useless. Every person who puts in 40 hours, no matter what their purpose, is entitled to a living wage. That doesn't make all labor equal. Highly skilled workers will always demand more money than what they'd need to live comfortably. With lower skilled jobs companies pay much less for labor, but in either case businesses still have to compensate employees for their time. Our time is very finite and extremely valuable. Honestly, our current 40 hour work week is demanding too much as it is. However useless you think someone's job is, if their company could get by without someone doing that work they probably would, but as long as somebody is doing the job and putting in the hours that employee deserves a living wage.
> Nobody is being forced into anything. They're choosing this because it's the best opportunity.
That is such a lazy take. Of course people are forced to take whatever job is available: humans need food, shelter and healthcare. If society doesn't collectively agree about a minimum standard of what a job entails, you inevitably ends up with the "bottom of the barrel" living in inhumane conditions. As a society, it is our duty to lift up the standards, not lower them and trample on the already destitute.
> doesn’t make sense that people would choose no job at all over a job that doesn’t pay the wage they want.
I don't agree. The pandemic is still very much happening and low-paid workers are expected to be on the front lines. If this had all happened when I was working retail, I probably would have made the decision to not go to work and catch covid while making 8/hr.
>>So you have a big supply of recently unemployed people ready to replace any of these essential workers if they started organizing for more pay or what have you
Maybe, but I doubt. These job pay less than a living wage so any increase sure isn't gonna make up for the fact that you will probably get the virus--with all its uncertainties.
Want me to work so people eat lettuce, pork and beef? Sure, pay up and spend on safety
What follows isn't necessarily right, but I believe It's why they're paid little.
Because they're all easily replaceable, companies doesn't have to invest more than maybe a week of salary into replacing them if they ask for higher pay. At my company we're having a hard time finding people, so sometimes even questionable talent gets hired and trained because we need people. But in low-skill work people will always be paid what is regulated. If we increase their salary enough, then I wouldn't want my job, even though I enjoy what I do, because of the mental burden of never having my head to myself.
The best job I've ever had was when backpacking Australia, was taking care of gardens, hedges and stairwells. It paid shit, but every day I felt gratification because I worked with my body and actually finished something (even though It had to be done again in a week or 2 since things grow like crazy in Brisbane).
What I do now is an endless struggle of never being finished, so my brain keeps computing solutions to these problems even once I'm off the clock, so if a bus driver all of a sudden has my salary, why on earth would I want a job that requires more of me. As in, I'm not just the current meatbag at this place.
I bet we could even stretch this into that it would reduce output of society greatly, since people that otherwise would pursue "high skill" work (Idk, somehow i feel like anyone could be taught my job in a week, but this is more Imposter Syndrome than anything i guess) could be just as happy or happier doing something that doesn't increase human efficency.
I will argue for this "to death" (since It's really one of my core beliefs), but i would also love someone to be able to change my mind as it could potentially increase my mental well-being. I'm sadly looking "down" on "simple work", I think as a means to justify wtf I'm doing.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> I think it's helpful sometimes to think of the minimum wage not as a prescribed payment, but as a ban on employment below some level. We've decided that it's better to be unemployed than to be paid less than X.
Which is kind of the point. You help people by giving them options, not by taking them away.
Comparisons to workplace safety rules are inapt because the worthwhile ones are anti-stupidity rules. It doesn't help anybody to have unsafe working conditions, which means every instance of it is a mistake. When someone gets hurt they're harmed and the company is liable, which is worse for all parties than preventing the harm to begin with. When designed properly, the law is only prohibiting something that nobody has any legitimate reason to ever do.
Whereas there are legitimate reasons to pay someone $10/hour -- you derive $11/hour worth of value from it and their second best alternative was to make $9/hour (or, when that's prohibited too, to be unemployed).
>There are very few people that would dispute that, yet for everything outside of sports there's a subsection of the population that has convinced themselves that hard work somehow doesn't equal success.
I have worked for Kroger for a little over a year now.
I make 7.55 an hour handling dangerous chemicals; before that, I bagged people's groceries for 7.45. As a bagger, I not only worked hard, I constantly told my supervisor that I was willing to work 40 hours, that I wanted to work a register. They didn't promote me until I gave two weeks notice; my parents convinced me to stay.
Now I get paid ten cents extra to clean floors and cover for absentee cashiers (and, mind you, I'm not actually trained; I had to learn it all myself). Oh, and one of the other janitors cannot figure out basic chemical safety. She is paid just as much as I am, and continues to work as a janitor.
It's not that hard work never pays off. It's that I have a concrete example of hard work not paying off that I see every day.
> The point of minimum wage is to outlaw jobs that cannot reasonably feed people doing them. (Subject to societal norms.)
OK, how does a society put a dollar figure on what a reasonable minimum wage should be, subject to societal norms, as you put it?
Keep in mind that what an unskilled worker 'll end up with at the end of any given week will be:
- agreed hourly rate x hours worked
If the unskilled worker ends up with pneumonia for that week, s/he essentially gets nothing since no hours were worked, so a minimum wage doesn't really insure against inability to work due to circumstances beyond one's control. That's a separate issue on its own.
> If they were not needed in the first place, then the management who hired them in the first place should be also fired for incompetence and letting them all go in middle of a pandemic.
It is unreasonable to expect management to have a crystal ball into the future.
The role of serving as a safety net can only be accomplished by society as a whole, not individual business. Businesses should be able to purchase labor and not purchase labor as they see fit, just like they purchase other supplies for the operation of the business. The role of providing basic income should fall to the government.
>> I agree with you re: the bottom point about EMT's salaries. It's the same with teachers; they're one of the most essential parts of society, and they're paid so little.
See also:
- Truckers
- Farmers (though some do pretty well) and farmhands
Everything following this line seems to point in the other direction. Just because a smaller percentage of higher-ups received more doesn't mean you / we are not obscenely overpaid, it just means "they" are phenomenally obscenely overpaid and at the top of the exponential scale of "what's wrong with shit these days".
Teachers and nurses, as the pandemic demonstrated, are essential to the daily functioning of society. I couldn't do what they do day-to-day, dealing with the full range of the bell curve - and their children - and their ailments and inability to see / relate to the world. Holy hell.
The annual inspection of the foundations of the ivory tower have been sub-sub-contracted to the lowest bidder, which is a company at the end of a series of shell corporations for whose ownership can only be determined with the cooperation of a string of people that have no legal obligation to cooperate.
> people feel like they should have a job they love that pays well first thing in life
I think the notion is that people should have a job that pays a livable wage, meaning you should be able to pay for rent, utilities and food.
Sure, the market in a lot of unskilled jobs mean employers can basically blackmail you into accepting an unlivable wage because otherwise you'll just starve to death or live on the street. I still think it's ok for people to speak up against it. The only thing that keeps most such low-paying jobs staffed is the threat of homelessness.
A fun, vibrant work culture, 401k matching or even "free" health insurance are kind of ridiculous luxuries when you're struggling to feed yourself.
In the end I think a business that relies on unlivable wages to operate is a business that ought not to exist (or at least not to exist in its current form).
> I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them.
Motivating them is the key word. Right now we depend on people being forced into stressful, precarious or life threatening situations in order to coerce them into doing jobs those of us in more stable circumstances would never do voluntarily. As a result, desperate people are paid far less than the work is actually worth. Personally I find the approach morally repugnant, we should instead guarantee a decent standard of living and allow wages for undesirable jobs to rise to their correct price. The crowd that thinks they're above cleaning their own toilet might be a bit put out but fuck them.
> If it was accurate, everybody would be working for minimum wage.
A lot of people actually are working for (close to) minimum wage.
> BTW, if you're unemployed because of the pandemic, the best use of your time is to level up your skills
I am not, but your recommendation only highlights the inequality I was referring to. In your conception the entire burden is placed on individuals. Companies seem to have no responsibility to train people at all, that's smth you have to do on your own time for free.
I wish that as a society we could decide that anyone we're going to call an "essential worker" and draft to the biohazardous front lines should bloody well be paid at least as much as the rest of us who can be gone for a week with little ill effect to society at large.
Not just during an emergency either - they're essential the rest of the time too.
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