Yes, ALL Jobs, or What Price Lives?

[seawasp]

This one's fairly short, so I'm not hiding it behind a cut.


One of the standard arguments about minimum wage is "it's just for teenagers and people trying to make a little money on the side" versus "all jobs should provide a living wage". 

There is argument about whether FDR and his people intended the minimum wage to be a true living wage. It's absolutely certain that he DID say that no company should exist that didn't pay the "wages of a decent living", but he said that in context of a DIFFERENT set of laws, not the minimum wage. The sentiment was certainly there, but the practical question of his actual intent remains. 

And depending on WHICH minimum wage you take, when, and project it to today, you can get radically different answers for what it OUGHT to be now. The original minimum wage in 1938 was 25 cents an hour, which maps to about $5.60 an hour today. One year later it was 0.30 and that is the equivalent of $7.60 today. In 1956 it was a dollar an hour -- or 11.60 in today's dollars. In 1974 it was up to $2 -- which is $12.80. And so on. 

So I'd rather just ignore that particular issue entirely, and focus on what SHOULD be done -- on what's the RIGHT thing to do.

My position: any job that's required for a business to operate -- janitor, waitstaff, back office, whatever -- should pay enough for the person to have a decent living on if they work reasonable hours. 40 hours a week is as far as "reasonable" goes; we should be working far less than that per week by now, given increases in output per worker hour. 

If you can't pay that much, you're demanding that people sacrifice themselves, in one way or another, for the sake of your business -- in grinding extra hours, in holding multiple jobs, or in requiring external help from the government (food stamps, supplemental income assistance, etc) which amounts to demanding the government subsidize your business' payroll. That's not being a savvy business, it's just being exploitative. 

I believe human beings, in this modern era, ALL deserve reasonably comfortable lives BY VIRTUE OF BEING HUMAN BEINGS. The value of my children, or yours, or anyone else's, is NOT dependent on what jobs they get later in life. It's in them being decent people. That includes people who can't work at all, or can only do certain kinds of work, or only a few hours a week -- and that includes them having remaining time, effort, and mental resources to do things they WANT to do. 

People should not be dragging themselves out of bed to go to a job and then grab a meal and then go to another job in order to keep themselves in a shitty apartment so they can drag themselves out of bed tomorrow and do it again. 

Human beings should all have the opportunity to LIVE -- in reasonable comfort BY THE STANDARDS OF MODERN SOCIETY (to avert anyone waving their hands trying to distract you by saying how we're all rich compared to medieval kings), with enough leisure time to keep them mentally, as well as physically, healthy. 

And no company  should exist that requires people to do that in order for the company to survive.

Comments

[dewline]

Amen to all of this.

[kengr]

Likewise, having the requirements to be *considered* for the job be ridiculous is way out of line.

Requiring a college degree to work at a burger joint (as staff, not manager) is silly at best.

And then there's the bit where they try *really* hard to prevent workers from being *able* to get 40 hours a week (so they don't have to give them benefits).

Grrr.

[djonn]

I don't disagree with the underlying principle, but as a practical matter it seems to me that this still leaves some of the variables out of the essential equation.

One of the major questions is "How many people should a living wage support?" I'm a one-person household in a suburban setting. My brother and his wife have raised two kids in a large urban center (and the four adults are still one household, because one-person households in that area mostly aren't financially realistic even if one has a full-time union-shop job). There are many other possible cases, including households with one adult and multiple kids, several adults and no kids, etc.

So suppose we define "living wage" as supporting an average household, that's probably an average of three to five people (not counting fractions, and considering "household" and "family" as separate concepts). By that standard, a family of four with a single wage-earner should get along well enough...but I, as a lone wolf, will be unreasonably wealthy by comparison. On the flip side, if we define "living wage" as supporting one person, I'll be perfectly okay, but a three- or four-person household with only one earner is going to be in serious trouble. And on the third hand, we can't very well pay people differently based on household size without opening several other very large cans of worms.

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Also: wholly apart from the question of what wage is appropriate, there are practical questions about how the job market handles first-time, part-time, seasonal, and student workers - many of whom may be there explicitly for training of one kind or another, such that the wage is not necessarily the only compensation being received. If we decide that all jobs must be paid at living-wage rates, where does that leave the teen looking for date-night money or trying to save up for a car...or the retiree who just wants to sell books at a museum gift shop on weekends...or the graduate student whose loans get suddenly larger because the university now has to pay market wages for their required teaching duties? I agree that all these folks should be appropriately compensated, but I also think that there should be room in the marketplace for people and jobs that don't fit the full-time formulae.

(That said, I am boggled by the very large number of people who fail to understand the connection between greatly increased minimum wages and the rapid across-the-board price increases at fast-food and quick-casual restaurants. Yes, McDonald's and Subway food now costs a lot more than it used to...and the reason for that is that their labor costs have gone way the heck up. This is not rocket science....)

[claidheamhmor]

Agreed.