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by whiddershins 2108 days ago
That’s observably false. I have commented before that I choose not to hire an assistant any more because I am intimidated and overwhelmed by labor regulation compliance. There are many, many, marginal jobs like this. Jobs that could serve as an entry point to an industry for a person, and a business owner might happily hire someone and give them a chance to learn on the job, but if faced with too many hurdles, will simply do the work themselves.

This has the effect of making people even more dependent on college, btw. And can effectively make certain types of career paths disappear entirely.

Thing of a greeter at Walmart. How easily can Walmart just do away with greeters?

2 comments

This is fair point. Adding a little bit to it

1. There exist jobs that are not worth paying someone X/hour, but are worth it at some number less than X. For the purposes of this discussion, X is "a livable wage".

2. There exist people who work, but do not need to X to survive; retirees who just want to be out of the house, mentally handicapped individuals for whom being out doing work and meeting people is helpful, etc.

Those two points are facts.

Requiring that every job pay a livable wage means that the combination of the above two will no longer be available. Those jobs just will not exist if they need to pay that much. As a result, some subset of group 2 will no longer be able to work (this part is opinion, but seems a reasonable conclusion).

So, the tradeoff is being made to make live worse for some of those people in group 2... in order to make life better for people in a different group. That may or may not be a good tradeoffs. But just the fact that it exists as a tradeoff means that "no job may pay less than a living wage" is not a black and white topic; there's a grey area.

What's the career path of a Walmart greeter?
it's not set in stone, and that's part of the beauty of it. Who are you to say whether or not another person may take such a job at a wage they find agreeable?