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

[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.