> And I'm dismayed by the cavalier dismissal of lost jobs for teenagers.
The way Geneva handles their minimum wage (almost $27/hr) is to have exceptions for apprentices and au-pairs under 18. That au-pairs will eventually become older than 18 is obvious; what is less obvious is that companies taking apprentices share responsibility for their education, so I believe if too many of their apprentices fail the final exams, the company loses the ability to take new ones.
If you can only afford to hire someone if they're being subsidized by their parents, then the job position you're offering should either not exist or the subsidy should be made explicit. If our civilization's entry-level positions require five years of internships then we should, as a civilization, figure out a way for people to hold internships for five years and expect every single human alive to go through that process.
> And I'm dismayed by the cavalier dismissal of lost jobs for teenagers. Getting that first job is hard enough already
And almost all of these "starter jobs" are filled with abusive and exploitative working conditions, made possible by the (literal!) kids not knowing that they don't have to mop up feces in a toilet without proper training and equipment or that they aren't supposed to work late night hours (at least in some jurisdiction). Good f...ing riddance, I'd say.
I held a number of low-paid jobs while in high school and college. I can't say that dealing with cooking grease was enjoyable, but in no case can I say that the working conditions were abusive.
Teenage labor participation is at some of the lowest levels ever. Most teenagers who would have otherwise gotten jobs, are now trying to do things to pad out their college applications. My suspicion is that you would have a hard time paying low wages to teeneagers at the moment.
Even a few percentage points extra would be a big positive to society, since presumably the teenagers will learn real world lessons at a faster rate than padding out college applications.
Obviously there's a mismatch between "first job for teenagers" and "job I need to pay my rent and maybe provide for my kids". This would be less of a problem if more of the jobs paid better. But you can only scoop ice cream or bag groceries for people who have enough money to pay for them.
> The bottom line for workers: Higher wage floors ultimately raise the earnings of low-income workers and young workers most likely to be impacted by the policies by thousands of dollars annually. Further, on average, these workers are no less likely to be employed following the minimum wage increases.
But that's not the bottomline. The bottomline is to ask: After a year, do these workers have more disposable income, or does - for example - local housing cost raise and eat up the higher wages?
The U.K. has massively increased minimum wage over he last decade or so, but this has meant people who used to be on 50-100% more than minimum wage are now finding themselves on the same wage as shelf stackers.
They are of course now questioning why they bothered to do so much training, incurring debt and lost opportunity, to find everyone on the same wage.
Yes, well, many young programmers today are finding it increasingly difficult to find a good job out of school, what with all the new AI tools and general diffusion of the skill across the global population.
The skills required to be a "shelf stacker" are generally taught in public schools. What did you think would happen when they started teaching all these kids to program as well? There is a good reason why these giant tech companies kept lobbying for, and creating school programs centered around code-education, and I hope you realize it wasn't purely philanthropic.
Exactly. It's an economic *system*. Change X and there is impact not only on W and Y but perhaps also V and Z. So to say, "Look! We raised the min wage and people earned more money. That's the bottomline", is naive at best.
Furthermore (re: California), increasing the min wage is not a fix for the housing supply and associated failed policies.
Marx always emphasised the general law of capitalist accumulation: no matter what temporary victories a local population might win (wage increases, stable housing, free education and healthcare, etc.), as long as Capital continues to dominate the social world, people will always be enslaved to the conditions of the market, and every effort will be made to extract as much surplus value as possible, since its what produces the most productivity and profit in the capitalist system.
Seems like they need to organize/unionize then, no? Their failure to do so isn’t the “shelf stackers’” fault. If anything, this gives them leverage to get paid more. But they have to use it, because capitalists will never pay someone fairly if they don’t fight for it.
They really should turn their ire towards their employers, not resent shelf stackers for making the same wage. They have all this training, debt, and lost opportunity, and their employers still pay them minimum wage? That doesn't seem acceptable to me. And it doesn't have anything to do with the shelf stackers.
Market value has to be considered though, can't blame a car mechanic for being pissed that regulations force a shelf stocker, a lower value/difficulty job, to be paid the same (above fair market value).
Car mechanic should be pissed: at his employer, not at the government. His employer is the one choosing to pay him the same as a shelf stocker.
In a functioning labor market with empowered workers, all wages would rise to reflect the skill/scarcity gap between minimum wage work and skilled work.
If all wages rise, than inflations rises along with it… to cancel out the wage rises in practice (unless productivity improves). As the last few years have shown.
So what you're saying is, under this theory, increases in productivity create real improvements in people's purchasing power?
In that case, how do you explain the last 40+ years, where productivity has been skyrocketing, but most peoples purchasing power has remained mostly flat?
Or is it your contention that there is nothing we can do that can increase the purchasing power of regular people under the current system? Because if that's the case, that would be a pretty massive indictment of the system as a whole.
My point is that you can cherry-pick specific examples all you like, but the data clearly shows that the purchasing power (real wages, whatever term you prefer) of average Americans has stayed (nearly) flat for the past 40+ years.
But even that isn't the true bottom line. If you want the true bottom line, you have to ask: What is the net effect on utility for the entire population?
You can zoom out even more to, "What's the effect on all of future humanity?" Though that's much more difficult to answer, why should we discount them for the only inconvenience of not being born yet?
You can, but which timeline? Predicting the future is very difficult, so I prefer to stick with actually existing people. Expectant parents should probably take a different point of view, though!
Again you have to specify specific timelines, otherwise it would be an infinite number of potential futures, with an infinite responsibility in the abstract.
This doesn’t make sense, it’s not dependent on quality. You literally would have to spend an infinite amount of time pondering an infinite number of possible futures to accomplish anything, at even the lowest possible amount of ‘good’.
Hence it’s physically impossible to advance a single nanometer on this line of reasoning.
I’m really not sure how else to put this… there are 8 billion plus people, each with their own, not entirely identical, desires. Just as complex as your own, some so much more complex that you literally can not keep up with them (assuming there are some bonafide super geniuses out there).
How could you possibly extend this to all of them without running into an even more intractable problem?
Yes that’s my point, and because you want to ‘extend’ to ‘n>1’, this is doubly impossible without picking.
i.e. you literally cannot accomplish this otherwise, even for the simplest case of n=2, with certainty. Since there’s always a non zero possibility of any chosen person becoming much smarter and wiser than you in the future.
Via ignoring the infinite number of futures where they do.
The infinities have the same cardinality. Any consideration of a finite subset still ignores an infinite number of unconsidered possibilities whether n=1 or not.
Besides, any choice you make for yourself has an impact on others in the second order. Ignoring it makes the problem worse. No one is a isolated system, no man an island.
There's always the possibility of going back, re-reading and changing your mind. What's the worst that could happen if you believed that you could make decisions while keeping in mind other people?
The government's job is to pass laws that benefit the population at large. They could pass a law saying "skybrian gets $100,000,000/yr" and it would be awesome for you. It would be a stupid law.
The government’s job is to pass laws that the people asked for. While it is reasonable to think that the population will act in its own self-interest, that is not a requirement.
Most likely the people have lost their way. It is pretty clear the vast majority of people standing amongst us have never even talked to the government to say what laws they want – or what laws they don't want – even just once in their life, let alone on an ongoing basis as is required for government to know what to do as time marches forward. For better or worse, government is not made of mind readers. So, government has to go on what the small few people who do voice their position have to say.
Government is merely the term that identifies a group of employees who work for the people. If said employees are not doing their job well, that's not on the employees, that's on bad management at the top. A fish rots from the head down, as they say.
Yes, of course. But which population? Most of us aren't national politicians. A mayor, for example, might be more interested in what the effect is for their city.
The bottomline is to ask: After a year, do these workers have more disposable income, or does - for example - local housing cost raise and eat up the higher wages?
What if that was the point of this study - be a submarine for increasing the minimum wage? If has been said that Silicon Valley is a conduit to move VC money to landowners, and here is just more of it.
It seems like the best course of action is to tie minimum wage to housing costs (on a per-county or city basis), this would help ensure the ownership class has to balance the costs of assets and labor.
If you want cheap labor, housing costs must go down. If you want expensive real estate, labor costs must go up.
Interesting idea, that actually could work. The biggest issue I could see though is that the people paying labor costs are not necessarily the same people paying wages so putting pressure on one doesn't necessarily get a result from the other.
Just look at Walmart. They don't offer a living wage, so they fix their employees up with every last social program the locality offers. And as a citizen you don't even get to opt out of that. Ordinarily, when you disagree with any business, the first step would be to boycott it, but you can't, you cannot opt out of your taxes going to food stamps and housing subsidies for those working at Walmart under the living-wage threshold.
Especially insidious: work requirement for people on food stamps.
Likely means some type of purchase power parity calculation.
Now to how big area should the minimum wage apply to is more complicated question. And should it be based on where the job is or where the employee lives.
Would be great if there was a non-profit that kept track of inflation per country and suggested the appropriate yearly wage increase for all workers. Or at least let people know how much their relative salary is decreasing when it stays the same.
This way less people would get screwed by inflation, or at least keep track of reality
You could link it to congressional/senate salaries. Whenever they want a pay raise because of 'rising cost of living' or whatever - minimum wage goes up the same amount.
And I'm dismayed by the cavalier dismissal of lost jobs for teenagers. Getting that first job is hard enough already
(https://econjwatch.org/File+download/1296/GreenHandMar2024.p...)