Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by argentinian 590 days ago
Why do you think that are so many willing to work for pennies, instead of changing profession? Or so many willing to pick a profession that is known beforehand to usually have low wages?
1 comments

People have a drive to work on beautiful and important things. This is easy to exploit, so it is widely exploited.
What do you think about the model of supply and demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand in relation to low paid beautiful and important jobs?
More people than jobs, which is why they are so easy to exploit.
More people than "beautiful important" jobs. But there are other, less sexy and better paid, important jobs.
We could gate the special jobs behind a contest rather than abuse. Just a thought -- but not the most profitable one.

Labor demand is structurally lower than supply. That's the state of the modern world and it could have been a good thing. Instead, even important unsexy work is systematically demeaned and marginalized by this fact. See: unskilled labor -> essential workers -> unskilled labor. The proceeds are boiled away and condensed onto financial assets, which serve the purpose of paying rich people for being rich in proportion to how rich they are. This establishes, reinforces, and perpetuates a class hierarchy where the people on the bottom must constantly pay to exist while the people on top constantly get paid to exist.

What do you think that would be a possible solution? Defining minimum wages?