Paying employees a living wage is part of operating costs. If a business cant afford to pay its employees a living wage, then it has failed as a business and should no longer operate.
Walmart and just about every single company out there is a failed business to you.
#liberal logic.
Believing doing the minimum job that 6 billion people can do should give you enough to live on means you failed as a human and should no longer live.
If it’s evil to tell a person what they must work for then it’s evil to tell a person what they must pay.
If two people agree to wage for labor you do not have moral right to tell them they are wrong.
Corporations and individuals fundamentally can not negotiate wages on a level playing field.
But hey, you want to talk about # Liberal Logic (Ha), you’re the one saying that anyone who works for less than a living wage deserves to DIE, and that this is a moral situation.
How can they not do it on level playing field?
Do you believe people are forced to work against their will and that labor isn’t a commodity that has be bid on? I have to take whatever wage my boss offers? I can’t walk away and find another job?
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you’re the one saying that anyone who works for less than a living wage deserves to DIE
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That is not what I said. I said believing doing the minimum amount of labor that anyone else can do deserves to die.
Life cost labor to keep sustained. If you are not willing to put in the labor that other people are willing to trade for to keep yourself alive, then yes, you should die.
If I fish for 1 hour and catch 1 fish for a corporation I should be paid a living wage (which you have stated previously to be around $4k/mo)?
I think that if you are an individual, you can not bargain with a massive corporation because YOU need that job far more than the company needs YOU. An individual employee is at real risk of homelessness and starvation is they go unemployed. A corporation is not at risk of dissolving if they do not hire that one employee.
This is like, why labor unions became a thing in the first place? The ability to collectively bargain.
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If you are not willing to put in the labor that other people are willing to trade for to keep yourself alive, then yes, you should die. “ Did….Did you just argue that people who can’t work (the elderly, the disabled, children, new mothers, full time students) should die?
And your time itself is worthy of a living wage. I dont care if a corporation employs you to sit in an empty broom closet and watch paint dry. If you do that for 40 hours a week, you should be paid a living wage to do so. Full time wage for full time work.
“Corporations and individuals fundamentally can not negotiate wages on a level playing field. “
“I think that if you are an individual, you can not bargain with a massive corporation because YOU need that job far more than the company needs YOU“
Changing the goalposts. OK.
Your flawed premises is here. A large employer does not dictate it’s salary by what it needs. It dictates it’s salary based on what someone else will do the job for.
Your problem isn’t actually with the
employer. It’s with free will of others. Just because you want $15/hr and someone else is willing to work for $7.25/hr you believe the
employer
is in the wrong.
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This is like, why labor unions became a thing in the first place? The ability to collectively bargain.
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And that is fine and dandy. Have at them.
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Did….Did you just argue that people who can’t work (the elderly, the disabled, children, new mothers, full time students) should die?
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No I did not. Those are not part of the working class, you are being intellectually dishonest. Those people need to be supported by their families and charity of others. Not taking from other people against their will. You can not support a family flipping burgers. If you believe you should, then you are immoral.
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And your time itself is worthy of a living wage. “
No, it’s not. Your time is worth what someone else will do the same job for.
“I dont care if a corporation employs you to sit in an empty broom closet and watch paint dry. If you do that for 40 hours a week, you should be paid a living wage to do so. Full time wage for full time work.
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I agree, full time wage for full time work. But if someone else will do that same work for less than you, how is that the employers fault? You are arguing that we should take away free will of the workers.
I am trying to hire someone for $75k/year and can’t find anyone. I am going to have to up my offer because no one is willing to do that job for that salary.
Wages have nothing to do with how long or how much you work. They have to do with how much someone else will do the same job for.
It’s because employers HAVE TO BID ON LABOR. Laborers have as much power to say no as employers do.
Have you, like, never done any research into the history of the labor movement? Ever?
Employers do not big on labor, especially not big corporations. No one is walking in and telling the general manager of a Starbucks that they won’t work for anything less than $15 and having a negotiation over it. For a very very large portion of the workforce- you take what is offered or you don’t get the job.
And when you are at the immediate risk of homelessness and starvation, that leads to exploitation. And without safeguards like a minimum wage (which, for the record, was always intended to be a living wage from the beginning), those corporations would hire only the most desperate people and pay them as little as they could.
And when you are forced to give your labor at starvation wages under implicit threat of starvation- that is coercion and it is a problem inherent to the economic system itself.
We are talking about minimum vs living wage levels here. Not your $75,000 salary job. Get on the same page.
I can’t add anything new to this, but I feel a very strong urge to just reiterate, for emphasis:
That hypothetical person who is “willing” to work for 7.25 an hour didn’t walk in and ask to be paid that they were given the choice between $7.25 an hour, or no job. And when you’re only making $7.25 an hour its nearly impossible to accumulate the kinds of savings that would let you remain jobless and hunt for better opportunities for any length of time.
And the idea that that can be approached in the same way as the negotiations that occur for higher paid, often specialist, salaried position is either extremely silly or arguing in bad faith.
There’s also this fundamental idiocy of believing you can just find a better job at the drop of a hat. I have a great degree from a good school in a lucrative field with loads of experience in all kinds of positions, with glowing rec letters from pretty much everyone who knew me in college. It took me a year and a half to find a job in my field, and in the meantime, I was forced to take a minimum wage job at a mall. Even getting that job took me half a year, because even though I sent out countless applications, even places like Target and Panera didn’t want me. The job market is unbalanced in that there are not enough jobs to go around, and every hiring manager has to deal with minimum 30 applications for even the most menial of positions, because people are desperate to eat. Go figure. Getting a better job isn’t that easy. You have no leverage. You have too much competition. You can be replaced in a heartbeat because even minimum wage is better than nothing, and that’s why you stay on your feet for 14 hours on Black Friday, bleeding through your socks and praying to God someone is able to take over soon.
Also… what the fuck is this whole mentality of “I can do your job, so that means your job is worthless”???? Look, you demand a service, like Taco Bell at four in the morning, or Walmart DVDs for cheap. You do not get to tell those people providing you that service that they deserve death if they choose to stay here and continue providing you that service. We need people working every single menial job you can think of, and we need them to stay there. High employee turnover is a bad sign, remember? It doesn’t mean the employees are leaving for greener pastures, it means the company picks you up and throws you away once you’ve outlived your usefulness.
The onus of morality is not on the worker who’s just trying to survive – it’s on the corporation all too willing to exploit its workers to the grave and back in the name of their bottom line.
Fuck this guy, man.
“You do not get to tell those people providing you that service that they deserve death if they choose to stay here and continue providing you that service.”
How many people are currently dying each year because they have a job at Taco Bell or Walmart making the current minimum wage?
(Excuse my formatting, im on mobile) Well, we know poverty reduces life expectancy. https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/04/18/the-richer-you-are-the-older-youll-get/
A lot of those workers are kept just below full time hours, so they cant get insurance http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/12/28/up-75-without-medicaid-working-poor-who-cant-job-related-insurance/75657202/
It’s estimated there are between 20,000 and 45,000 deaths a year due to lack of health insurance. https://obamacarefacts.com/facts-on-deaths-due-to-lack-of-health-insurance-in-us/
For example, a new study found that if $15 had been New York City’s minimum wage from 2008 to 2012, 2,800 to 5,500 premature deaths could have been averted, with the bulk of such avoided deaths occurring in low-income communities. http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303188
Another study looking at minimum wage and indant mortality found, If all states in 2014 had increased their minimum wages by 1 dollar, there would likely have been 2790 fewer low birth weight births and 518 fewer postneonatal deaths for the year. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4940666/
So how many people? Thousands upon thousands.
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