[jrflowers]

> 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