(July 13, 2013 at 11:20 pm)Rhythm Wrote: Subsidizing their poor business model by sliding the bill over to health and human misery/poverty - I'd say. I'm racking my brain trying to think of an item that a human being (any human being) could spend an hour working without adding enough value to that item to warrant more than a single dollar for that labor. I'm drawing a blank.I'm not necessarily talking about work that directly affects things to be sold. For instance, at a hairdressers the floor needs regular sweeping to keep it clean. That sweeping doesn't directly affect anything the hairdresser makes money off (though it does indirectly because people are more likely to get haircuts there, etc.), and such a menial task that requires no skill might not be worth whatever the government sets minimum wage at.
Quote:You realize that it wouldn't be "employees worth less than $1 an hour" that get paid 1$ an hour, yeah? It would be any employee an employer can legally pay 1$ an hour getting paid 1$ an hour.I've explained this before; it's not how the economy works. You wouldn't pay a supermarket $20 for a loaf of bread, but the supermarket wouldn't sell it for less than a dollar. The price you pay is somewhere in the middle; otherwise you go somewhere else for your bread. The same applies with employment. If you have skills in some area, you aren't going to accept a $1 an hour wage, but your employer might not want to pay anything over $20 an hour. Again, the wage is set to some value in between, where both parties are happy. If you aren't happy, go somewhere else for a job.
If you really think that scrapping the minimum wage would suddenly mean companies paying "any" employee minimum wage, you are having a laugh. If that were true, why don't all companies pay their workers minimum wage already?
