[SoftTalker]

Shows that a true minimum wage is not something the government can mandate. There is a natural minimum wage that the market determines. It depends on (at least) the nature of the work and the supply of potential employees. For warehouse work, it's apparently over 2x what the government says it should be.

[kzrdude]

The purpose of minimum wage is a floor, not that someone has to make that level. If everyone makes more, good.

[esaym]

>The purpose of minimum wage is a floor,

It goes deeper than that. There was a documentary that leaked a new Walmart employee going through their initial first day orientation. If you were a new hire and were married and/or had children, you got extra "orientation" on all the government benefits you now qualified for (welfare, food stamps, medicaid, etc) since you were now considered below the USA poverty line.

I am fine with letting the market regulate itself, but it is not ok that a company can pay employees low because the government will pick up the other half. That is not "self regulation".

[cbsmith]

If you're earning less than $130,000 a year, you are eligible for an FSA, which the HR team will discuss during almost any company's new-hire orientation...

There are lots of government benefits that are restricted to people below a certain income. That doesn't mean that it is unconscionable to pay people at that income level or to educate employees on what they are eligible for so that they can take advantage of it.

[sgift]

> That doesn't mean that it is unconscionable to pay people at that income level

If that income level is the poverty line: Yes, it is.

[cbsmith]

So then your problem is with the income level, not educating people about benefits they are eligible for.

[ghaff]

>If you're earning less than $130,000 a year, you are eligible for an FSA

Assuming you mean a flexible spending account (for healthcare out of pocket), you're certainly not capped at $130K/year in the US. Your broader point is of course true.

[cbsmith]

If you are single, the limit is 130,000/yr. After that you can have an HSA, but FSA.

[Scoundreller]

It makes sense, kinda. When your public and private social programs are numerous and disconnected, getting a job can mean losing a lot of benefits while qualifying for others.

e.g. my employer had a session about their benefits package: If I was on welfare, this would be a change in how everything works. It would have been nice if they had a session on our national pension scheme since I was now obligated to start paying into that.

[mbostleman]

>>but it is not ok that a company can pay employees low because the government will pick up the other half>>

I don't think this is a situation that applies to the idea of self-regulation. In this case, a distortion of the market is first created by the government subsidy. So the natural behavior of a business would be to leverage it. Just as the natural behavior of the IRS is to go after things like your company's paying for your cell phone and calling it taxable income.

I would suggest that the idea of self-regulation is best applied where there are no market distortions from the government that have already warped the context.

[Aunche]

That's not how economics works. Walmart is paying their employees low despite welfare, not because of it. Without welfare, people would be more desperate for work and would be willing to work for lower wages.

[abfan1127]

would you prefer they not tell those people about the available benefits?

[mirker]

I think the point is Walmart is able to pay at a low enough rate that it must be effectively subsidized by the government. Walmart then plays into it as a further benefit “they” provide.

[zdragnar]

The government is setting the price floor for wages. If that price floor falls below the point at which the government will offer benefits to people, then it isn't Walmart that is being subsidized.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I would prefer that nobody who works 40 hours a week (tops! I'd be happy if the number was less) earns less than the US poverty level for a family with 1 or 2 children (undecided over which). As a matter of law.

[scarface74]

I’m sure my 16 year old son would have loved that.

And everyone arguing that a company doesn’t deserve to exist if it can’t profitably pay more, is posting on a site funding money losing companies that couldn’t exist if they actually had to make a profit.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

If you want to advocate the position that there's some age where the correlation between work and income can or should be looser, be my guest.

For me, the bottom line is that spending 40 hours a week doing something that requires no skill should still entitle the employee to be able to live a basic life. Further, that it should require only one person in a family to do that work in order for the family do live a basic life. If the person wishes to earn more then they will need to acquire more skills one way or another.

I do not believe there can be any moral justification for somebody receiving 40 hours of someone's effort (even an unskilled effort) and not giving that person enough for a basic life. I don't care what the age of the person doing the work is, and yep, if the company cannot do that, it doesn't deserve to exist - it doesn't do anything valuable enough to pay its employees adequately, so it can disappear and nobody except the owners will care.

[sudosysgen]

Well not quite. They exist because they are profitable on average.

[mbostleman]

>>The purpose of minimum wage is a floor>> There's the purpose and then there's the outcome. I have always found it useful to also keep in mind the perspective on minimum wage that recognizes that from a practical perspective, it makes it illegal for workers that create a certain level of economic value to work. Of course that's not the perspective that a proponent of minimum wage would use to pitch it because that certainly is not the purpose. But it's hard to argue that this other perspective is not to some extent, the outcome in terms of economic mechanics.

[hadlock]

Minimum wage is important when you have more people wanting to work, than jobs. Right now 1 in 300 people just died, a bunch retired, and 3-5% of the remaining workforce is out with covid and/or post-covid syndrome. So right now there are more jobs than workers.

Given people's natural inclination towards reproduction, at some point in the future, there will once again be more people than jobs, and minimum wage will once again become a flashpoint as quality of life begins to shrink. That's not even accounting for inflationary effects on the bottom 75% of wage earners.

[FredPret]

As long as people are even mildly productive, economic growth will handily outpace population growth.

This has been going on for a very long time now, which is why we’re all so wildly rich compared to 100 years ago.

My grandparents remembered a time when completely emptying a jar of peanut butter was essential and lavatory paper was counted by the individual sheet. Today I have homeless people refusing my gifts of food.

[suture]

The natural minimum wage that the market determines (absent all regulations) is $0 per hour and is called slavery. Enlightened people have moved passed the idea that the “market” alone should determine the minimum wage.

[LambdaComplex]

Exactly. Ever heard of scrip[0]? We have historical proof that companies won't even pay their employees with real money unless the government mandates that they do so.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip#Company_scrip

[thaumasiotes]

> We have historical proof that companies won't even pay their employees with real money unless the government mandates that they do so.

Well, we have historical proof that nearly all companies do pay with real money in the total absence of such government mandates. We definitely don't have proof of the proposition you claim, which is immediately falsified by the most cursory examination of history.

Note also that scrip is denominated in currency and accepted at par. The problem was generally not that you had a lot of scrip and couldn't spend it; the problem was that the company store charged high prices. But the store charged the same prices whether you were spending company scrip or currency.

[suture]

Someone will want to enslave people. This has been so for almost all of history for sufficiently large civilizations. In general humans exploit one another when they can get away with it. In the absence of government/societal regulations slavery will occur and thus the “market” minimum wage is 0.

Government regulations can be good and they can be bad. In enlightened countries enough good ones are in place to prevent a minimum wage of 0.

[thaumasiotes]

> In the absence of government/societal regulations slavery will occur

Slavery cannot occur in the absence of governmental and societal regulations, because in that case there's nothing stopping the slaves from leaving. Any such obstacle would be a governmental or societal regulation.

> and thus the “market” minimum wage is 0.

Slaves are paid much more than zero wages. In every culture, a slave in a good position is much better off economically than a freeman in a bad position.

[suture]

… because in that case there's nothing stopping the slaves from leaving

Obviously this is false and you can find examples of people being enslaved in countries where it is outlawed. There are plenty of examples of an enslaved person being prevented from escaping even in the presence of laws prohibiting slavery. It’s as if you don’t understand human behavior.

You have a fanciful notion of slavery and what it entails. In another thread you bring up cases where the enslaved had it “good” and act as if this is normative in such circumstances. I am thankful views such are yours are no longer acceptable to most people. Within in your views on this topic one will not find common sense or decency.

That you find it worth your time to try to convince people of the benefits of slavery says much about you and nothing about slavery.

[int_19h]

There are countries in Europe which do not have a minimum wage mandated by the law - rather, it's the unions that negotiate them - and they still end up with more than people get in US. I guess you could term such negotiations "regulation", but it'd be really stretching it.

Regulating a broken system is an exercise in futility. We need a system in which the feedback loops produce the desired outcomes in the first place.

[suture]

I’m pretty sure slavery is outlawed in all European countries so that alone prevents a 0 minimum wage. That itself is a regulation. There are lots of “regulations” (government interventions) that prevent a zero minimum wage. Indeed the legal protections and regulations regarding unions, social programs for the unemployed, universal healthcare, etc. all contribute to an environment where the lowest wage isn’t zero. It is not a stretch at all to say that the legal infrastructure surrounding unions and requirements surrounding dealing with them count as “regulation”.

There are lots of instances where regulations fixed a broken system. Government regulations fixed the broke system of using child labor and fixed the broken system of slavery.

[Dracophoenix]

Does that mean open source work should count as slavery? You're right that the natural minimum wage is zero, but there's more to slavery than simply being paid nothing. I would think the enlightened you speak of would also know the difference between volition and compulsion.

[suture]

I do not at all understand the reason for your response. Do you really think that I was saying that doing something for free is always a form of slavery? I think it’s obvious the meaning and intent of what I wrote and only a disingenuous interpretation could have led you to respond as you did.

[Dracophoenix]

Please stop with the motte and bailey. I interpreted what you wrote and what you wrote was itself disingenuous. You stated that a zero-dollar income in a laissez faire market is sufficient to render anyone earning that amount a slave. You made no exceptions. As to the claim that the "more enlightened" are those who would reject the laissez-faire system, you've presented no credible evidence to that either.

[suture]

Obviously it was a whimsical way of saying “slavery is the natural minimum wage” in the absence of all regulations (which is a proxy for government/societal interventions). Some person/company will be willing to enslave people if they can get away with it. Clearly volunteering is not what people mean by “working for $0 per hour”. This is obvious to anyone who reads what I wrote without being disingenuous. Equally obvious is that a laissez-faire system is neither possible, desirable, or scalable. I won’t convince you of this and you won’t convince me otherwise.

You are free to desire to live in a world where a wage of 0 is a reasonable thing for an employer to pay. Fortunately for me people like you have little chance of seeing this desire come to fruition. There is no point in responding further but I will read and contemplate whatever response you decide to make.

[Dracophoenix]

> Obviously it was a whimsical way of saying “slavery is the natural minimum wage” in the absence of all regulations (which is a proxy for government/societal interventions).

Then you should have said that to begin with. It shouldn't be incumbent on me to account for whimsy botching one's meaning.

> Some person/company will be willing to enslave people if they can get away with it.

Enslavement doesn't require a coherent political or economic philosophy. Hobbes has already proven that. Even governments have and continue to enslave people. I don't see how regulations solve that as governments have no higher power to answer to, except perhaps for atom bombs.

That some company may violate an individual's rights in a laissez-faire system does not itself prove that enslavement is an inevitable outcome of such a system. That is a false induction.

> Clearly volunteering is not what people mean by “working for $0 per hour”. This is obvious to anyone who reads what I wrote without being disingenuous.

What difference is there between volunteering and working for $0 an hour exactly? If one volunteers for an organization, that does not mean that one lacks a de facto or de jure employer. One may still need to sign a contract and still be required to perform tasks to a certain standard. Volunteer work is not required to be accepted indiscriminately.

> Equally obvious is that a laissez-faire system is neither possible, desirable, or scalable. I won’t convince you of this and you won’t convince me otherwise.

You and I benefit from one of the great successes of laissez-faire capitalism: the commercial Internet. It's obviously possible (in fact, it has already succeeded for the past 30 years), desirable, and nearly infinitely scalable.

> You are free to desire to live in a world where a wage of 0 is a reasonable thing for an employer to pay. Fortunately for me people like you have little chance of seeing this desire come to fruition. There is no point in responding further but I will read and contemplate whatever response you decide to make.

A wage of zero is a reasonable wage for the employer and employee to agree upon. What is not reasonable is forcing someone to accept a wage of zero under duress or threat of force.

[thaumasiotes]

> The natural minimum wage that the market determines (absent all regulations) is $0 per hour and is called slavery.

Slaves are paid much more than that.

[dragonwriter]

> Slaves are paid much more than that.

No, they aren’t.

Slaves have a higher total cost to employ than that, but none of it is wages.

[thaumasiotes]

That's wrong; much of it is wages. Sometimes those wages are paid in cash, but in the more common case where they aren't, the slaves still get paid in food, clothing, and housing. Each of those is a direct transfer of value to the slave.

[dragonwriter]

> the slaves still get paid in food, clothing, and housing.

If those are in the form of earned compensation to which the slave is entitled (which, sure, along with actual wages is common in some historical forms of slavery, but not really the norm in chattel slavery), they are benefits, not wages. If they are (as is typically the case with chattel slavery) discretionary items given at the pleasure of the employer based on the perceived future value to the employer of the worker having them now, they are just maintenance costs of the slave as an industrial machine.

[thaumasiotes]

> If those are in the form of earned compensation to which the slave is entitled (which, sure, along with actual wages is common in some historical forms of slavery, but not really the norm in chattel slavery), they are benefits, not wages.

Pure sophistry. There is no reason to call the same thing by two different names. Ask the IRS whether the food and housing your employer gives you count as wages.

> If they are (as is typically the case with chattel slavery) discretionary items given at the pleasure of the employer based on the perceived future value to the employer of the worker having them now, they are just maintenance costs of the slave as an industrial machine.

Not much better. The transfer of valuable goods to a slave is a maintenance cost in exactly the same way that the transfer of valuable goods to an employee is a maintenance cost. Nobody's paying salaries out of the goodness of their hearts; they pay salaries because that's what it costs to have work done.

[DoreenMichele]

I don't know where you get that idea. In the historical Deep South of the US, slaves had to work the plantation all day without pay, then go home and grow their own food on the worst strips of land not deemed worth cultivating by their owners.

Traditional African American foods, like hog jowls and chitterlings, were based on the discards that White slave owners would not eat.

[thaumasiotes]

> In the historical Deep South of the US, slaves had to work the plantation all day without pay, then go home and grow their own food on the worst strips of land not deemed worth cultivating by their owners.

This is fairly thoughtless modern propaganda, not a description of the historical Deep South.

Some quotes from Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery:

> "Marriage is to be encouraged," wrote James H. Hammond to his overseer, "as it adds to the comfort, happiness, and health of those entering upon it, besides insuring a greater increase." The economic inducements for marriage generally included a house, a private plot of land which the family could work on its own, and, frequently, a bounty either in cash or in household goods.

> about 6 percent of slaves worked in towns, and 20 percent of those living on plantations were employed as artisans and semiskilled workers of various sorts.

> The belief that the typical slave was poorly fed is without foundation in fact.

> More careful reading of plantation documents shows that the slave diet included many foods in addition to corn and pork. Among the other plantation products which slaves consumed were beef, mutton, chickens, milk, turnips, peas, squashes, sweet potatoes, apples, plums, oranges, pumpkins, and peaches. Certain foods not produced on most plantations were frequently purchased for slave consumption, including salt, sugar, and molasses. Less frequent, but not uncommon, purchases for slaves included fish, coffee, and whiskey.

> the average daily diet of slaves was quite substantial. The energy value of their diet exceeded that of free men in 1879 by more than 10 percent. There was no deficiency in the amount of meat allotted to slaves. On average, they consumed six ounces of meat per day, just an ounce lower than the average quantity of meat consumed by the free population.

> The high slave consumption of meat, sweet potatoes, and peas goes a long way toward explaining the astounding results shown in figure 34. The slave diet was not only adequate, it actually exceeded modern (1964) recommended daily levels of the chief nutrients.

> The most systematic housing information comes from the census of 1860, which included a count of slave houses. These census data show that on average there were 5.2 slaves per house on large plantations. The number of persons per free household in 1860 was 5.3. Thus, like free men, most slaves lived in single-family households.

> Descriptions in plantation records and travelers' accounts are fragmentary. They suggest a considerable range in the quality of housing. The best were three- or four-room cottages, of wood frame, brick, or stone construction, with up to eight hundred square feet of space on the inside, and large porches on the outside. Such cottages had brick or stone chimneys and glazed windows. At the other pole were single-room log cabins without windows. Chimneys were constructed of twigs and clay; floors were either earthen or made of planks resting directly on the earth.

> the houses of slaves compared well with the housing of free workers in the antebellum era. It must be remembered that much of rural America still lived in log cabins in the 1850s. And urban workers lived in crowded, filthy tenements.

> When slaves worked at times normally set aside for rest, they received extra pay -- usually in cash and at the rate prevailing in the region for hired labor. Slaves who were performing well were permitted to work on their own account after normal hours at such tasks as making shingles or weaving baskets, articles which they could sell either to their masters or to farmers in the neighborhood.

> Year-end bonuses, given either in goods or cash, were frequently quite substantial. Bennet Barrow, for example, distributed gifts averaging between $15 and $20 per slave family in both 1839 and 1840. The amounts received by particular slaves were proportional to their performance. It should be noted that $20 was about a fifth of national per capita income in 1840.

> Masters also rewarded slaves who performed well with patches of land ranging up to a few acres for each family. Slaves grew marketable crops on these lands, the proceeds of which accrued to them. On the Texas plantation of Julian S. Devereux, slaves operating such land produced as much as two bales of cotton per patch. Devereux marketed their crop along with his own. In a good year some of the slaves earned in excess of $100 per annum for their families. Devereux set up accounts to which he credited the proceeds of the sales. Slaves drew on these accounts when they wanted cash or when they wanted Devereux to purchase clothing, pots, pans, tobacco, or similar goods for them.

[munk-a]

That's a pretty awful take - labour exploitation in America is rampant with theft by employer being our largest crime by value. It's probably fair to say that 25/hr isn't what the minimum wage should be set to - but it exists to prevent extreme abuse of employees.

[pessimizer]

> There is a natural minimum wage that the market determines.

The market "determined" this "natural minimum wage" because a patchwork of laws dictated (somewhere around) a $15 minimum wage in a lot of locations and as a policy for many state/city/county contracts.

[irrational]

Isn’t it? My sister lives in a state where the true minimum wage is federal minimum wage. My teenager and her teenager both work at the same fast food place. My son makes $16/hour, her son makes $7.25/hour.

[corrral]

This is nonsense unless you're ready to go deeper on what "true" and "natural" mean here. Beware: it'll be easy to run into tautology.