If they are working full time through the year, they likely aren't spending much time in school and whatever work they are doing should bring in enough money for them to not be homeless, starving, or unable to meet other basic needs like healthcare.
I'd further note that the government and it's taxpayers pay the toll regardless of whether or not we increase the minimum wage. We just end up paying the cost elsewhere in a way that's dollar for dollar a lot less efficient (policing, ER visits, homeless shelters, etc.)
Arguments aside, what do you feel would be an appropriate minimum wage for someone working a job in the US? What factors go into that number? In what situations does that number change?
By living with friends or family, state assistance, and/or charity.
How are you supposed to live on 0 wage? Inevitably for some people that's what a minimum wage means: There is some work with some wage less than a minimum for which this person in this place could work, and they can't because of the minimum. Among other considerations any minimum wage has to balance that harm vs the harm for people who would be paid fairly more with a higher minimum wage.
It's also just the case that an extremely small portion of the public makes minimum wage, and since they're exceptional each of their situations are exceptional in its own way.
What was the last job you had that calibrated your pay by asking if you were a dependent? Should someone make less if they are married? Should adult parents be paid less if they live with and are supported by a child? It is irrelevant.
Lets imagine that there is a job with parameters (including wages) where only high schoolers would take the job. Should that job be required to pay above the market wage to make it also attractive to independent adults? Then what job will the highshoolers have? If I've got to pay a full adult wage anyways, I'm probably not going to employ a highschooler.
It creates a deadweight loss. In this example are kids that would benefit from working, at low wages, from both the experience and income and they're left out. There would be useful work done that probably just doesn't get done, creating harms in the form of missing products and services.
Now sure, non-existence of a minimum wage would create other harms and losses so there is a balancing act-- but in the special case of students being discussed here those other costs don't apply. (and that's also why in practice there are minimum wage exceptions like the 'youth minimum wage program').
This is a bit of a wild way to explain away "we're going to pay people under 18 less because we think we can justify it." Just raise the minimum wage and pay them the same. If they don't take the jobs, they don't. If the jobs go unfilled, raise the pay to a clearing price where they are. If employers can't make the economics work, that's unfortunate.
How you see this issue is likely governed by where on the spectrum between "human" and "labor" you see a person, admittedly. In this context, we're going through contortions to argue to pay people less by age "because we can."
> If employers can't make the economics work, that's unfortunate.
Yes, minimum wages are unfortunate for those who don’t have sufficient skills to work at minimum wage. That’s why there are almost no more human order-takers at fast food restaurants. Kind of sucks for the kids — and poorer folks — who could have worked those jobs and used them as a springboard to something else.
Have you ever lived in poverty? Have you ever earned minimum wage (or below)? I have and I am extremely grateful for the oppturnities it brought me and the life I was eventually able to make out of it.
There are myriad ways to dehumanize a person. One is saying they should be denied some opportunities they would freely choose to take out of a paternalistic desire to help them. It's a complicated subject, you don't need to justify your position by besmirching the empathy of those who have views you disagree with. Reasonable people can simply disagree!
> Lets imagine that there is a job with parameters (including wages) where only high schoolers would take the job. Should that job be required to pay above the market wage to make it also attractive to independent adults? Then what job will the highshoolers have? If I've got to pay a full adult wage anyways, I'm probably not going to employ a highschooler.
> It creates a deadweight loss. In this example are kids that would benefit from working, at low wages, from both the experience and income and they're left out. There would be useful work done that probably just doesn't get done, creating harms in the form of missing products and services.
Why would kids benefit from working? Shouldn't the benefit be from going to school? If they need to supplement their parents income doesn't that just mean that their parents salary is not high enough? It seems the only benefit of allowing kids to work is to the employers, enabling them to depress salaries, because somebody trying to support a family would not take the job. I find it interesting that often the same people (not saying you are) arguing against immigration because the immigrants take away jobs, argue for children to work because it's a "great experience".
> Now sure, non-existence of a minimum wage would create other harms and losses so there is a balancing act-- but in the special case of students being discussed here those other costs don't apply. (and that's also why in practice there are minimum wage exceptions like the 'youth minimum wage program').
> Why would kids benefit from working? Shouldn't the benefit be from going to school?
There is a purely 'academic' educational advantage, -- it's like asking why should there be chemistry lab, shouldn't chemistry be learned by pure manipulation of field equations??-- People learn different things by studying a subject and doing a thing, and some students learn better one way or another. Most people will learn more from splitting their educational time among multiple approaches than from using only a single approach.
But also our goal in education should be the creation of complete adults. We do try to artificially teach a broader set of life skills in school than the purely academic, e.g. that's why assignments have deadlines if all we cared about was teaching material there would be little reason for any deadline other than the end of the semester. Communication, timelyness, responsibility, etc. are all part of a complete education and aren't as well taught via the contrivances of school.
As they say the difference between theory and practice is that in theory they're the same and in practice they are not the same.
It's also the case that the education environment is very unlike the rest of our lives. Most educational environments are very means driven-- you must use the answer you're taught or its wrong, but life is much more results driven. The problems set out for you in education have usually tidy answers which can be arrived at via the tools you've already been provided, in work force (or life in general) that is often not true. In school the (or at least at the sub-gratudate level) the teacher knows best, they're only asking you questions that they know the answers to. In work it's not uncommon that you know best. Your boss knows what he wants done, sure but you know the facts on the ground. If someone asks you a question in work they do not know the answer. Work is also artificial (like.. you have a "boss"??) but at least it's an artificial thing that you'll likely be part of for most of your adult life.
Now one could simulate more 'work like' learning, but education already takes up an incredible amount of time. Being able to spend endless time on unproductive education is a luxury of wealth that some cannot afford. Even if the state were to provide some of it during schooling, an employer still prefers employees with _experience_ and for those who aren't born into every opportunity having early experience can make a real difference.
Work is also not just something people have to do-- the right work in the right conditions is something that people love to do. It can contribute additional meaning in their lives. I would personally rather mop a floor for an hour transcribe a bunch of geometry identities that I could just look up. The grinding school work is nothing that hasn't been done before, it doesn't improve anything in the world, it's hardly something to be proud of (except perhaps if I do remember it a year later, which often students don't). At least if you mop a floor you get a clean floor and the pride of completing a task that in appreciated by others.
And of course, having money that you earned and coming to terms with managing it, spending it on things you want without having to justify it to others and regretting some of those decisions is also an important part of education. And I think it's useful to have the experience of putting in effort to get it, that putting in more effort can get you more of it, and so on. Of course, wealthier families can and do also provide this education for their children through other means... but if there isn't excess money in the household for Jr. to be paid it for chores or whatever, then they'll have to work outside the home to get it.
> It seems the only benefit of allowing kids to work is to the employers
Kids aren't generally great workers. Part of the reason we don't have more youth employment in the US is that employers generally aren't falling all over themselves to get more of them. There are some benefits to employers that make it worthwhile, e.g. occasionally you get a minor employee that is much better than you'd be able to score as an adult, you make your business a more integrated part of the community, and sure you may lower some labor costs particularly for menial tasks that it might be harder to hire a capable adult for. It's also the case that many adults like working with young people, the instinct to teach is human and not just confined to professional teachers.
With respect to your immigrants comments, I think if you talk in terms of immigrants who are taking jobs that generally citizens don't want, who are operating just seasonally or for a limited time, etc. you'll see a lot more support ("well I don't mean THOSE immigrants"), and that situation is more analogous to youth employment.
But beyond that to the extent that youth employment has some negative effect on the broader adult labor market I think most people would feel it to be justified as an investment in the future of their community. The same argument ought to apply to immigrants too but immigrants aren't seen as part of the community unless they've integrated enough and then, presumably, they stop being seen as immigrants. :) For kids it's obvious that they grow up to adults, it's less obvious to people that many immigrants to America 'grow up' to be Americans (by whatever definition makes a person feel good about them being here :) ).
In my country, with a minimum wage, highschool students work seasonal jobs (including McDonalds) at a decent pay.
They are hired because it's expected they will only work 2 months, and are needed because we have 5-8 weeks of vacation per year and employers can assign 3 of those (usually in summer, when they hire students).
Jobs calibrate pay in the same sense that employees calibrate labour: employers strive to pay the least they can for the most labour; employees strive put in the least labour to get the most wages.
A job which doesn’t offer enough to live on will be less appealing to those trying to live on their own, but fine for high schoolers.
High School students do not work full-time, by definition, and so therefore are never going to earn a "living wage" in the sense that that phrase means.
The whole "but kids" argument about minimum wages is a pointless distraction from the actual debate, which is "should there be full-time adult jobs that pay so little that those doing it are living in poverty?".
Personally I think it's obvious that the answer is "no", and any society that answers "yes" needs to take a good long look at itself and what it's actually trying to achieve.
But such a distinction is worthless - there's no rule anywhere saying only teens get minimum wage
It's a completely bullshit argument that says "see, it's not so bad" but purposefully pointing to the small subset of people who are in the most advantageous circumstances.
It would be like me arguing the Great Depression wasn't so bad and then pointing to some group of people who were immensely wealthy and therefore managed to get through the Depression mostly unscathed. It's just... bad arguing.
Why should age matter at all if the person is doing the exact same job? Children already get paid less than minimum wage when there are jobs they legally can't do. The owner of the McDonald's I worked at in high school loved hiring 14 and 15 year olds because he could make them do every single menial job there except cook the food. They were run ragged same as the rest of us for the bonuses only the manager got.
> How can anyone justify paying a high school kid who works part time most of the year a living wage.
Pretty easily. Once you consider how productive an even below-average worker is in the US, the idea of running a business so poorly that you can’t make bank while paying somebody a living wage seems pretty embarrassing.
While the “teenager” line is often vilified as a sign of unfettered greed (which it is), in my experience it’s been more of the respite of folks with so little business sense that it boggles the mind that they would be an employer.
I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business” out loud with a straight face, there are some folks that gleefully proclaim stuff like that as if they’re talking about something other than themselves
High average productivity can just as well come from aggressively not employing anyone that doesn't drive the revenue per head-count forward. I suggest that the below-average workers productivity is inflated by aggressive fat cutting-- and that we'd be better off as a society if we made more room for novice and trainee employees. But this has gone off-topic of the subject of minimum wage because very few people actually receive minimum wage in the US.
> I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business”
An inexperienced new employee can easily be a net loss for a long time as they mess up more stuff than they produce while they learn. This isn't tolerated by a lot of modern business philosophy so the jobs and industries that work like this increasingly just don't exist in the US.
> An inexperienced new employee can easily be a net loss for a long time as they mess up more stuff than they produce while they learn.
Yes. It is an employer’s responsibility to train or fire employees that are harmful to the business. If they can’t manage to do that, that’s a failure to operate the business at the most basic level.
Insisting that there exists x or y groups of employees that intrinsically deserve to be paid less than a living wage is tantamount to asserting that an employer or manager is entitled to have their planned failure to operate the business subsidized by that same group that they insist on hiring.
Again, it’s not just greed behind the “[teenagers]* don’t deserve a living wage” spiel. It also tends to expose laziness, lack of imagination, entitlement, an active disdain for work, a lack of grasp on business fundamentals, etc. In other words, a lack of the bare minimum aspects of intellectual capacity and discipline necessary in somebody tasked with employing people
* it is not uncommon to see “teenagers” replaced with all manner of groups that any incompetent manager or employer might foist the responsibility for their failures upon. There is nothing special about them as a group
The only response I want to read about this starts with, "Historically, the lurch and jerk of technical progress, paranoia manufactured by ubiquitous media, government financial overreach, and heavy-handed speculative projections shattered the ability of many organizations to establish meaningful turnover and generational handoff ..."
Easily. If the job cannot pay a living wage, it should not exist. We'll get there with structural demographics eventually (pushing up wages as labor supply diminishes as the fertility rate continues to rapidly fall), but it would be nice if we could not make so many people suffer in the interim ("time value of life"). Several states are removing child labor restrictions due to "labor shortages," for example. So, you have to starve the beast of underpaid labor.
We have the means, it's a choice. We could make a better choice, but if we don't, demographics dynamics will make it for us.
I mean, I know it's not a perfect solution. This was just one of those talking points people use to justify keeping the minimum wage low, or eliminating it all together.
These same people will also say "these minimum wage jobs are for people just entering the workforce, not people in their 30s/40s etc."
If they are working full time through the year, they likely aren't spending much time in school and whatever work they are doing should bring in enough money for them to not be homeless, starving, or unable to meet other basic needs like healthcare.
I'd further note that the government and it's taxpayers pay the toll regardless of whether or not we increase the minimum wage. We just end up paying the cost elsewhere in a way that's dollar for dollar a lot less efficient (policing, ER visits, homeless shelters, etc.)
Arguments aside, what do you feel would be an appropriate minimum wage for someone working a job in the US? What factors go into that number? In what situations does that number change?