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by nullc 416 days ago
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.

1 comments

> 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