(June 24, 2015 at 5:07 pm)abaris Wrote: What all these conservative thinkers fail to adress is that someone is paying the bill in any case. If businesses don't pay living wages, society is basically subsidizing them, since you can't let people starve in the streets. So we have another case of privatizing the gains and socializing the losses.
And in most cases we're not talking about the corner shop struggling to get along but about multinationals moving to countries and regions where working regulations are as low as possible.
Socializing the losses is something we may have to get used to. Businesses are run to make money, not as charities. They depend on efficiency to survive in a competitive environment. If a job isn't worth $12 an hour plus benefits and that's what has to be paid, that job just won't get done or at least the company will have a large incentive to find a way to automate it or ship it overseas. Of course, many jobs will turn out to still be worth doing here at higher wages, even if they're something almost anyone can do with a day of training, and those are identifiable as being the ones left after everything shakes out.
Massive unemployment the likes of which we've not seen before is a specter that doesn't quite haunt me, but it's a cause for concern. I'm an optimist and think it will turn out not to be as bad as all that, but I'm still not in a hurry to hasten increased automation. It's inevitable, but I'd prefer it to be more like a tide than a tidal wave.
In about half the cases we're talking about small businesses. They employ about half the people in the private sector. If the concern is what multinationals are doing in other countries, a living wage law here does not address that.
For the record, I've no strong objection to a living wage law that affects large corporations but not small companies, as long as it is implemented gradually.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.
