| "Minimum wage does not imply improperly priced labor" even if it's not a living wage? If it's not a living wage, it's not proper, is it? What are you saying? Have you read anything about the McDonalds and other franchises paying their employees in cards which carry transaction and withdrawal fees ON TOP OF the fact they're already making min wage? Even if you make $10/hr which isn't min wage, and you're fully employed, you're still probably not breaking even with rent/food/car/insurance/medical, you'll be sharing a duplex with some other miserable bastard or living at home, or getting a subsidy from the government because apparently it's someone other than your employers job to see that you can afford to pay your rent! Do you know that 40% of workers in America earn under $20K/yr? If your rent is $900/mo, then over half your income (haha we didn't even consider taxes yet) goes to rent, and you still haven't payed for power or food or anything. You keep telling yourself it's fine not to pay people a fair wage, or that we should be struggling to lower prices or to employ people for more hours -- whatever you have to do to dance around the fact that we should be paying people a fair wage. Every job I ever had before I started serious software as a freelancer paid fuck all ($10/hr or less, after 2000) regardless of how much the owner made. Many jobs, many different industries, same story -- and that's not anecdotal, this is happening to the entire country, see again the stat of how many Americans earn under 20K. It's not like it's impossible to pay a living wage. I could go on and on with statistics about profit margins and wealth concentrating and everything -- we as a society are choosing to damn ourselves and our neighbors JUST IN CASE we ever happen to get rich ourselves, or we are already rich. We're greedy. |
Also, what is the total income of those who work min. wage? (So what are the other sources of income, or the monetary equivalent of regular support they receive?)
It's also fine to pay just a security guard and rent a machine that can make burgers and pay the franchise mothership delivery service a tiny bit more to not just unload the cargo but to load it into the burgermachine.
Yes, we ought to pay people a fair wage. People should look after people a lot better than we do today.
And please do, show us that the majority of those making under 20K/year work somewhere where the company is making huge profits _and_ that the work they do is AI-hard.
And of course we're greedy, just look how many people are still clinging to concepts such as nation, fate, hard work and so on.