Comment by amazingamazing
4 hours ago
Given that you cannot force someone to hire anyone at a given wage what is the solution?
At best all you can say is that if you decide to hire, it cannot be lower than some minimum, but often this results in no job at all.
It's just like housing regulations. Someone might try to build a shack with power outlets more than 12 feet apart, and we can't permit that, so they're better off homeless.
The actual problem in the US is housing costs, but most people are around social media knowledge level in this area, and just blame the first thing in front of them. Raising wages will do nothing to ease housing costs, which eat the largest chunk of everyone's pay.
It's particularly sad that we just proved this with the massive Covid-era stimulus and yet didn't collectively learn the lesson.
We gave millions of people unemployment checks that were larger than their actual income had been, gave low and mid income workers stimulus checks, gave business owners forgivable debt for payroll and a year later we didn't have increased quality of life, we just had fast-food that cost twice as much, apartments that cost 50% more and billions of dollars spent on gambling, crypto and meme stock option trading.
There is a good proportion of the planet that will look at that and say "well we just needed to write bigger checks."
I think also the ridiculous nature of the automobile market is a significant secondary problem in the US. When the median new vehicle is $49000 and the median annual salary (pretax) is ~$65,000 that isn't sustainable.
This is what happened in the UK but not immediately, it’s only in the current government where the minimum wage (especially for young people) got hiked massively in the context of a weak overall economy that the effect on job creation became obvious.
Now it’s quite bad though, a whole generation of 16-20 year olds entering the job market and there’s just no jobs because you can hire a 30 year old for the same money
While true when minimum is set too high, the level it is set to generally takes this into account so that "too high" is not reached over the entire jobs market.
> At best all you can say is that if you decide to hire, it cannot be lower than some minimum
That's pretty reasonable. Nobody should be working 40 hours a week at a job and not make enough to support themselves. Any company who can't afford to pay their employees at least that much is a failure who deserves to be out of business.
> Nobody should be working 40 hours a week at a job and not make enough to support themselves.
So it’s better that they don’t get hired at all and live entirely off support of the (forced) largesse of the tax payer?
As one of those tax payers I’d much rather they work and earn at least something.
That's a false dichotomy. Those workers can get hired by a competent business who can afford to pay a living wage and doesn't need the government to subsidize their labor expenses.
Your "often" is not borne out by actual econometric studies. The actual rate of minimum wage that produces dead-weight loss is much higher than most minimum wages in the USA.
In any market, there is wide range of possible clearing prices with cost of production as a floor, and marginal value as a ceiling. Which price the market settles on is often a function of bargaining power as much as productivity. Minimum wage regulation is a heavy-handed way to change that bargaining relationship.
Hmm? Outsourcing is the clear counter example. Or do you think it is a coincidence that no outsourced job is more expensive than hiring Americans.
> Given that you cannot force someone to hire anyone at a given wage what is the solution?
The author writes for Jacobin, which promotes a failed ideology where you CAN force people to “hire anyone at a given wage.”
It’s an advertisement for a failed ideology.