Why is it the employer's responsibility to provide a living wage?

[Ben Davis]

So what are the compelling reasons an employer should be obligated to provide all the means of living(the cash equivalent of such in our society) for an employee?

In principle, the main one is because employees are surrendering the time in which they would otherwise be able to 'gather their nuts' in order to benefit an employer. This requires the employer to remunerate accordingly in order to create an equitable contract.

In practice, we see that current models of free-market capitalism and the employment dynamics of scarcity corrupt this model and place advantage with the employer thus reducing the employees' contract leverage. This is why mass representation of employees and employment legislation are so important: to maintain contract equitability.

Does that make sense?

[Chas]

The great advantage of a fair social contract is precisely the avoidance of such upheaval.

"Social contract" is a bullshit term invented by lefties in an attempt to make their opinions about social responsibilities look like facts.

Their is no social contract.

Oh, sure, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were lefties. Uh-huh.

And of course there is a social contract. It is embodied in the laws and mores of a society.

[Mister Agenda]

Employers owe their workers a living wage because those employees are the only reason they have one.

I can certainly think of cases where they won't have one if they pay all their workers, say, 12 bucks an hour. Some jobs aren't worth $12 an hour. There's a simple formula: if it costs more to employ someone than their labor generates for you, there's no reason to employ them, except charity.

Say I run a car wash. I pay most of my people 8.25 an hour. After payroll, I'm making about two dollars per person per hour. The minimum wage goes to 10.10 an hour. Now I'm making 15 cents per person per hour. I either have to increase my prices to maintain my income (about thirty dollars an hour if I employ 15 people on average). automate, or go out of business because I can't live on 2.25 an hour. The best case scenario for my employees is the one where I raise prices, provided my customers don't very reasonably start going to a cheaper automated car wash.

The most likely outcome is I automate or go out of business after variable amounts of struggle. Are the people I employed, mostly high school dropouts, made better off by the wage hike? They weren't paid well, but at least they were getting work experience and learning important job skills that most of us take for granted but many HS droputs lack, like showing up on time and putting in effort.

If there is a minimum wage that no one should earn less than no matter what the work they are doing is worth, it should be subsidized. That's what we already do with severly handicapped workers, why not do it with people who lack the experience, skiils, or talent to secure a position worth what society deems to be the minimum anyone should make?

Of course you wouldn't want businesses to drop wages and let government take all the slack, but as I said, our government (the USA's and many others) is already in the business of determining how much a person's work is worth and picking up the slack, that would just have to be expanded.

A simpler scheme would be to exempt people under 25 or over 65 from the new minimum wage. They are the most unemployed age groups and the most likely to be negatively affected by minimum wage hikes. Being able to work at under minimum would make an otherwise marginal employee (little education, little experience, minimal skills, or limited physical ability) much more attractive. That counters much of the most serious consequence of minimum wages: potential employees being unable to accept lower wages in order to get hired, which is all some of them have in the way of getting someone to hire them. If you're under 25 or over 65, you'd still be able to offer that, say, down to the old minimum wage.

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I'm going to go with .. because the rest of us shouldn't have to subsidize the workers of cheapskate business owners who expect us to make their business plan work.

A minimum wage worker isn't necessarily low-skilled, lacking in ability, short on work-ethic, or otherwise risky to hire...but a goodly number are. Without business models that depend on those kinds of workers, many of them couldn't get employment at all.

At this point, I would like to add ex-cons to the list of people who should be able to get an exemption to living wage laws, down to living wage minus some percentage.

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Apparently it is not enough for employers to pay for the labor they get...they must pay for the people themselves. It doesn't matter if Joey's work is only worth 7 dollars an hour to the employer, Joey deserves 10 dollars an hour just for being a human being. Why should the difference between what Joey's work is worth and what Joey is worth fall solely on employers?

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[quote='downbeatplumb' pid='667828' dateline='1399722315']
A couple of thoughts on this:

1:If you are not paid enough to live on it is not a wage, its pocket money.

2:If I was offered a job that would not pay me what I need to live on then I would not take the job.

Well there's the thing. The demographics of minimum wage are actually that most of the people making minimum wage don't depend on it for their sole livelihood. About half the people on minimum wage are under 25. Sixty-three percent of people earning under 9.50 an hour are the second or third wage-earner in their family. Forty-three percent live in homes with household incomes of $50,000 or more. In other words, many minimum wage earners are young people from middle-class families or from working-class families they are helping out.

So a high proportion of the people working for minimum wage don't actually rely on it to live and aren't actually poor, which is why they can afford to work for less money than they can live on. As you say, it's pocket money.

That still leaves between one and two million people making minimum or close to it who take those jobs and do have to try to live on them because they can't find one that pays better. It's my contention that those are the people most likely to suffer from increased unemployment as a result of a minimum wage hike.

If the goal is to help the poor, wouldn't it make more sense to target aid (job training, wage subsidies) to these people who are presumably doing their best but still struggling to get by?

By all means, raise taxes on the 1%, the money has to come from somewhere, and put it in to results-based programs instead of the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey approach to alleviating poverty that we've tended to take in the past, but we need to determine what the roots of the problem we're trying to address are rather than hacking at the branches. It's easy to 'feel' what someone else should do to fix what you don't like, but we have science to help us figure out what works. Maybe it will turn out that raising minimum wages would be great, but right now it looks like a very mixed bag, at best.

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Are you oblivious to the fact that those with the means to help are the same people that offer low wages?

Like your comments, Cato. Isn't taxing the people with the means to help a more sure means of targeting the people with the means to help than targeting employers? We have a tendency to think of big corporations when we think of employers, but in the USA, about 8 million people are employed by small businesses, and the average small business owner makes between 30 and 75 thousand dollars a year. To be considered in the one percent, you have to make at least a half million a year. A small business owner can be hit really hard by a wage hike, maybe enough to be driven out of business by it, and on average aren't really the people with the means to help.

[Mister Agenda]

Are business owners somehow exempt from moral/social obligations to other people?

No.

Aren't business owners people too and therefore subject to the same moral/social obligations as other people?

Yes.

By offering a non-living wage while using up their available working hours business owners are keeping their workers impoverished and in need of social services to survive. It is fitting to address through legislation whether that is a fair business practice.

By refusing to fund a minimum income, you shift a disproportionate share of the burden of ensuring people have sufficient income onto employers. Why should someone who has built a business that employs people with minimal qualifications be solely responsible for paying them the difference between what their work is actually worth and what society deems is a fair minimum? A typical person who fits that description is a small business owner who makes $50,000 a year from her business. What work is worth is not determined by how much much the worker needs but by how much their employer values what they do. Say you normally hire someone to mow your lawn, and the price goes up some every year. Is there no price it can reach where you are justified in saying 'no thanks, I'll do it myself from now on; or replace my lawn with astroturf or something, this is getting too expensive'?

Perhaps raising the minimum wage could be more nuanced, with exemptions for people who typically have difficulty finding any employment at all, like ex-cons and high school dropouts. Maybe exemptions could be made for certain small businesses likely to be disproportionately affected, or whose owners have an income less than a certain amount.

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In hunting gathering times, you either made your nut or you died. The state was invented to help individuals make their nut, not legislate someone else help individuals make their nut.

So, if from this point forward, all private business decided they were going to pay their employees $1 an hour for their work, that would be ok?

Even if it were okay, they'd all rapidly go out of business, so it wouldn't happen. It's not inherently wrong unless businesses are actually charities run for the benefit of workers. It's inherently stupid, though.

If not, why not?
I mean, the business is just providing the nut.

Most people start busineses to make money, not as a charity. Even those people who primarily have in mind benefitting society by providing employment must watch their bottom line or go out of business. To live, a business must earn at least as much as it expends, and in practical terms, a business that close to the margin is living on borrowed time.

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Business would not do that(unless their was some massive deflation). The couldn't attract enough employees.

They wouldn't need to.
If all businesses are paying $1 an hour, your choice is to work for that or not work.

Yeah, no one being able to afford their products anymore without massive deflation wouldn't affect them at all.

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A function of the state is to prevent you from doing that. If there is a entity responsible for preventing your from starving/freezing to death, it would be the state.

Since when has the state done it's job? Last I checked this is America land of the lazy, land of the ignorant, land of the cheap.

I was a homeless veteran for 3-years living out of an alley way behind a starbucks.

State wouldn't help, they kept pointing the finger at the Government, I'd go to the Government and they would tell me I am the state's problem.

One always points elsewhere and no one does what they are SUPPOSE to do.

All those "homeless shelters", "food pantry's" were a colossal joke.

When it comes down to it, your Employer, State, and Government will do the bare-bone-minimal to assist you if at all, and believe you me they will fight to the bitter end to not help.

I have been to 45 states in America, I have been to Canada, Germany, Costa Rica, and Afghanistan. Aside from Afghanistan I have to say I like america the absolute least. Bottom dollar land.

Only here can one work there butts off, slave away, and never get anything but bone minimum in a land of "opportunity"

And therefore you're against the American government doing more to help people who are poor?

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Who is forcing you to live there?

Why should I be forced to pay money to live anywhere?

Why should someone else be forced to provide you accommodations for free?

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To advance to a higher paying job. It's called work ethic. It's what I did and it works.

But if they're in a work situation where they're not getting a fair wage, what are the chances they're going to progress beyond that anyway?

Most do. The rate of people who take a minimum wage job who are making more money a year or two later, either from a raise or changing to a higher-paying job, is pretty high. I want' to say 'the majority' but I'd have to go look up the source first and it's getting late, so I'll remain vague.

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As an aside from this conversation, some people have a ridiculous concept of what a living wage is. You aren't in poverty if you own a car.

I don't know about that, but a person's assets should be considered when determining if they are, in fact, poor. Someone making $20,000 a year who has (perhaps inherited) a decent car and a paid-for home can be materially better off than someone making $30,000 a year.

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I suppose that in a place like Wal-mart, or a department like the warehouse where items are stored, it's easier to play at petty politics because the workers are doing a job that's simple to learn and therefore they are easy to replace. Kissing up to an asshole supervisor might be the most efficient way to keep the job, and if a person lacks ambition I guess that will be as far as they get. All the assistance in the world won't make up for a lack of desire.

Here's something about Wal Mart: I can find an illiterate African refugee fresh off the plane a job there stocking shelves or unloading trucks. Try doing that at CostCo or Publix. They pay more and they expect more qualified workers for what they're paying.

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That's an irrelevant equivocation. And considering you've already told someone to go live behind a dumpster because their rent is too high, what do you care?

Actually, the dumpster suggestion was made when the other person wondered why they should have to pay anything for accommodations. A flip question deserves a flip response. Do you really think the suggestion was made in earnest?

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And you are a good moral christian..... But you can't see why an employer should pay the people who make his wealth possible a living wage.......

You sir.....are a prick.

You sir, seem to think anyone with an employee is wealthy.

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It is society's responsibility and the state seems to be the only means with which to enact meaningful change. Employers could and should fix the problem, but are obviously not interested. Employers are partly responsible since they are the means of disbursement and therefore the primary mechanism we have chosen to allocate and share resources. They have proven to be disinterested in that they have continued to suppress wages to the point where people toil full time without being able to afford the bare necessities of life.

To be fair, the bare necessities of life now seem to include a variety of automatic appliances, home entertainment systems, internet, air conditioning, cell phones, and so forth. I'm not saying these things aren't fairly basic these days, but it is a lot more than people used to need to say they were getting the basic necessities of life met.

America may not be a socialist paradise, but if someone is starving in the streets or homeless, it's not literally because they can't obtain food and shelter on 7.50 an hour, or even nothing an hour. They have some other problems that can't be addressed by employment. Getting assistance is a hassle, and if you have mental issues you might not be able to negotiate the bureacracy without a lot of help, but it's there. No one goes without the real basic necessities because they're making minimum wage. They may be struggling if that's their sole income, but they're not actually starving or living in third world standards.

Should a business expend more than it takes in, in order to meet its social obligations in the time it has left before it runs out of money and thus, dies? That is, is the employers ability to pay the demanded wage and remain in business any consideration at all? Many business have very thin margins indeed. In fact many are teetering on the edge. I would think that is why we tend to make our minimum wage increases small and spread them out over time, to avoid the sudden shock that raising it, say, 40% in one year would inflict.

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So what are the compelling reasons an employer should be obligated to provide all the means of living(the cash equivalent of such in our society) for an employee?

In principle, the main one is because employees are surrendering the time in which they would otherwise be able to 'gather their nuts' in order to benefit an employer. This requires the employer to remunerate accordingly in order to create an equitable contract.

In practice, we see that current models of free-market capitalism and the employment dynamics of scarcity corrupt this model and place advantage with the employer thus reducing the employees' contract leverage. This is why mass representation of employees and employment legislation are so important: to maintain contract equitability.

Does that make sense?

Not really. Why would the employee work for someone who isn't 'paying them enough nuts' if they had a better alternative? Why would the employer pay more nuts to the employee than having the employee generates for the employer? That's a practice that will put you out of business if you do it with more than a small percentage of your employees.

Scarcity is at the heart of current employment woes: we are awash in a sea of less-skilled labor, and the tasks that can only be done by a minimually-educated human are shrinking. Sooner or later we will have to subsidize people who fit this description for being alive, because those kinds of jobs are going away and they're never coming back. And those aren't the only jobs going away. It's time to start thinking about minimum income.

[Heywood]

I'm not interested in discussing if minimum wage is good or bad. This is a much more narrow question. In my youth I used to believe that employers had a moral obligation to pay their employees a living wage. As I have aged...I have abandoned that belief because I could find no compelling reason why it should be so.

So what are the compelling reasons an employer should be obligated to provide all the means of living(the cash equivalent of such in our society) for an employee?

And you are a good moral christian..... But you can't see why an employer should pay the people who make his wealth possible a living wage.......

You sir.....are a prick.

Maybe I am a prick.....but at least I can take comfort in the fact that I am not you.

[Silver]

Maybe I am a prick.....but at least I can take comfort in the fact that I am not you.

You are just oozing with good biblical theistic love, aren't you?

[Heywood]

Maybe I am a prick.....but at least I can take comfort in the fact that I am not you.

You are just oozing with good biblical theistic love, aren't you?

I doubt very much that the bible is the true word of God...So I wouldn't call myself a biblical theist. But if it makes you feel better to think of me as a biblical theist....go for it.

Anyways, I will take this moment to concede that I did get the origin of term, "social contract" wrong. The leftist only highjacked it....they did not invent it.

[Silver]

I doubt very much that the bible is the true word of God.

The word of god is only true in that it is always fabricated by man as a construct from how he personally views that which he only wishes truly existed.

[Zen Badger]

And you are a good moral christian..... But you can't see why an employer should pay the people who make his wealth possible a living wage.......

You sir.....are a prick.

Maybe I am a prick.....but at least I can take comfort in the fact that I am not you.

Pfffft, lamest comeback ever buddy,but I'll bet you've been waiting since grade two for an opportunity to use it.

But contemplate this for a moment.

Any business contract between two parties should have an equitable outcome for both parties. Otherwise it is viewed as theft or fraud on the part of one of the parties to the contract.

And the relationship between the employer and the employee is a business contract.
Therefore, if the employee isn't getting fair remuneration for his efforts then his employer is stealing from him.

Do you understand that?
Or should I redo it in crayon for you?

[Ben Davis]

Overall, your responses appear to be 'conservative' or 'centre-right'. Is that an accurate assumption about your views on this topic?

Why would the employee work for someone who isn't 'paying them enough nuts' if they had a better alternative?

That's the crucial 'if'. There are many social & political factors that also corrupt the model of equity. I was simply focussing on the employer in order to answer the OP. The majority don't have a better alternative, they have to take the jobs that are available, based on their skill-set, in their locale. If employers aren't legislated to consider equitability, there are only ethical reasons why they may decide to pay a living wage and we all know that there's no ethical component to free-market capitalism!

Why would the employer pay more nuts to the employee than having the employee generates for the employer?

Personally, I think everyone involved in delivery of a business process should be paid equally but that'll derail this conversation. So the answer to this question is the same as my answer to the OP: because the employer is taking the time in which the employee might otherwise be able to provide for themselves. If the economics of your business model don't cover that investment, it's not viable.

That's a practice that will put you out of business if you do it with more than a small percentage of your employees.

Once again, if an employer can't do this with all your employees, they need to address their business model.

Scarcity is at the heart of current employment woes: we are awash in a sea of less-skilled labor, and the tasks that can only be done by a minimually-educated human are shrinking.

Indeed. The possible answers to this situation don't necessarily sit with employer, mainly with education and 'standard of living' practices that are the realm of local politics but that doesn't mean that employers are totally divorced from that. Many employers have increased their business value by (for example) setting up broad education policies, upskilling staff, aligning roles to people based on their characteristics (rather than their experience) and restructuring resources rather than exploiting redundancy when automating. Of course, smaller businesses may not have access to the necessary capital and would therefore have a greater dependency on the political landscape but many of these possibilities are still practical.

Sooner or later we will have to subsidize people who fit this description for being alive, because those kinds of jobs are going away and they're never coming back.

Sooner or later, the whole world is going to have to move away from the current, unsustainable models of capitalism but once again, that's a derail. I'd suggest that if governments start to take their social responsibilities more seriously (e.g. education, welfare systems, healthcare...), the problems will start to take care of themselves: we'll have more capable, enabled, resourceful people who won't have to rely on subsidisation.

And those aren't the only jobs going away. It's time to start thinking about minimum income.

The only thing to think about minimum income is why it isn't being provided and find ways to make it happen. Governments will need to help small & medium enterprises through that process and back up any changes with equal focus on dealing with the socio-political causes (money where their mouth is!) but for large corporations, it's easily done and should be happening now; there's no excuse for them.