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by pixelbash 2049 days ago
Sorry, are you saying that working a 40 hour week shouldn't earn a living wage if it's a non-specialised skill?
3 comments

I'm saying that if there is not enough demand for that work to support a wage that will provide a living wage on 40 hours/week, that you can't legislate up enough excess demand to make the equation solve the way you might like it to.

In most (maybe all) markets, there is not enough consumer demand at the prices that would be required to support a living wage for everyone for whom flexible ride-share driving is the most lucrative work readily available. Now, iff that's true, what should the legislature do? Prevent that work from being done at all? Ration the supply (medallions or companies refusing to let drivers choose when/if to work)? The people said no, including a lot of current ride-share drivers.

I think you need to give the parent poster a little more credit. People have all kinds of preferences for employment that go into determining a market-clearing wage.

e.g. it is probably the case that loading garbage onto a truck doesn't require more skill/specialization than driving a car for hire

However, the overwhelmingly vast amount of people prefer to do the job that they can do while sitting down, in an air-conditioned vehicle, vs. the one they have to do surrounded by stinking detritus, outside in all weathers.

Based on my own prejudices, driving a car for hire sits in a relative sweet-spot of low skill, low physical demand, low discomfort. I agree there are undoubtedly personal safety factors that you're more exposed to than, say, flipping burgers at McDonalds.

wages are a market. "should" or "shouldn't" is irrelevant
To be fair to @pixelbash, I was the one who sloppily used "should". I meant it to imply that there's a market/economy effect that dominates, but it was sloppy/possibly ambiguous. I'm going to leave my comment unedited, but I wish I'd used "would" instead of "should" there to suggest that it's an outcome of economic inputs rather than a personal value judgment.
Thanks for the clarification, this is essentially what I was querying!