Comment by Arainach
3 years ago
Businesses do not have an inherent right to exist. If you can't pay a living wage, comply with regulations, and be profitable, your business model is not valid and your business should fail and close.
Predictions of dire consequences rarely pan out. Fast food employees in Seattle are earning $15-20/+ per hour and prices did not double - in fact they're not significantly higher than in neighboring counties with lower wages. It turns out that labor costs are only a small fraction of overall costs.
Employees also do not have a right to any particular career. That's nice that people have a dream to make anime for a living. I hope they get to realize it. But the world does not owe them a particular wage for what they want to do just because it's a job that they want. If you can't make enough money doing a certain job, maybe go get a different job then.
There is no job that is ok to pay nothing or as good as nothing. It doesn't matter what "career".
If a job needs doing by a human at all, then that human does indeed deserve a reasonable baseline which allows them to exist and even do so with reasonable dignity.
As time goes on and jobs are done by machines, and there are fewer and fewer jobs that require a human, then the output and ownership of those machines simply should one way or another be distributed enough to have the same effect.
All they have to do to earn that is not be being a criminal right at that moment.
And this extends to people who can't do anything obviously productive too. Even a sick old grandma doing nothing but telling stories to kids for one hour a week is productive, and we have no excuse not to provide for even the ones who can't even do that.
Because even if "the Earth is a life boat", we don't exist in an environment of hardship with fixed and insufficient resources where there just isn't enough food and building material and energy to go around.
There simply is no excuse for the way we treat some people. They didn't do anything wrong enough to deserve it, and it is not forced by physical limits.
Talking about what value someone provides to earn their existence is just a way to rationalize taking advantage of others. None of this equates to "I will be forced to spend 20 years learning medicine to give my time away for free to bums!" But even if it did, why is that a bad thing exactly? Because it's what, like slavery? You mean, slavery is bad after all?
These are not slaves. They are free to leave. Nobody is forcing them to work at this job for so little pay. There are plenty of other jobs that pay better. They should go get one of those if they want more money. If enough of them did, the supply of animators would fall and pay would increase.
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Nobody has a right to a business to exist or any particular job exist and yet nonetheless there are the rules of the game that people must abide by to make society works.
>But the world does not owe them a particular wage for what they want to do just because it's a job that they want
Sure we do, we call it minimum wage. Of course the ceiling is unlimited but there are defined floors.
There are just plenty of loopholes and a lot of off the clock overtime that complicates things. Not just in anime but most of the Japanese workforce. That's a whole other topic to discuss, though.
>>But the world does not owe them a particular wage for what they want to do just because it's a job that they want
>Sure we do, we call it minimum wage. Of course the ceiling is unlimited but there are defined floors.
A minimum wage doesn't guarantee "a particular wage". It only guarantees that if an exchange of money for labor occurs, that the price paid will meet the minimum. However, it doesn't guarantee that the transaction will occur, and if you're unemployed your "wage" is arguably $0.
I'm not convinced that workers shouldn't have any rights or protections. That sounds like a pretty extreme viewpoint. Or just one coming from an employer's perspective where I can see why you might desire no limits on treatments of workers.
It is quite common in highly capitalist societies, workers should be thankful they get a couple of pennies if at all.
They should learn to be hard workers, saving all the penies they can, never be sick, and some day if they don't die before it, living the dream of being their own boss.
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Are you inherently saying that the Japanese anime industry is not following regulations? Because they are, and they have been surviving this way for decades and have no problem finding people who want to work there.
You skipped over the first clause of the sentence: "If you can't pay a living wage"
japanese animators are not living in the streets, homeless and starving so I am not sure what this "if" is about
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> If you can't pay a living wage, comply with regulations, and be profitable, your business model is not valid and your business should fail and close.
The required amount of money to earn a "living wage" is extremely high because of government interference in the economy! And whether you personally find a business model morally "valid" is not a good reason to make economic changes. People deserve a cost-benefit analysis before their livelihood is taken away. The economic consequences of increasing the minimum wage will be just the same as previous attempts. More automation, less customer service, more unemployment among low-skilled workers.
> The required amount of money to earn a "living wage" is extremely high because of government interference in the economy!
Where the line that separates goodwill custody of the commons like roads, public education, enforcing contracts and laws and "interference"?
That's a good question but presently it's fair to say that governments are way past that line. It would be a great start with governments committed to not spending more than they earn and printing money to cover the deficit. At least this would stop the hidden tax of inflation.
Every time politicians decide to do good somewhere they do bad everywhere. It's not that bureaucrats are evil and incompetent (although many are) is just that free markets are the ultimate resource allocation tool and government intervention is necessarily inefficient and make us poorer.
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