# a living wage **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 23, 2002, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447 "2002-07-23T21:07:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2002, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/61 "2002-07-24T21:05:40Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by msmith537 \* > **I hate to tell you people this but the market pays you what you are worth. It does not pay you want you THINK you SHOULD be worth.** OK, say a person with an MBA from Harvard gets a job flipping burgers at McDonald’s. What determines his worth there? His education or the skills he employs in the performance of his job? Obviously someone with an MBA from Harvard is “worth” much more than the kid he went to high school with who didn’t even move out of his mother’s basement. Shouldn’t McDonald’s pay him for that? ---
**Author:** ![Palo\_Verde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/65b543/32.png) [@Palo\_Verde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Palo_Verde)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2002, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/62 "2002-07-24T21:22:52Z")
Just to give some definitions. According to the **Living Wage Recourse Center** a living wage is “equivalent to the poverty line for a family of four, (currently $8.20 an hour), though ordinances that have passed range from $6.25 to $12.00 an hour, with some newer campaigns pushing for even higher wages. Increasingly, living wage coalitions are proposing other community standards in addition to a wage requirement, such as health benefits, vacation days, community hiring goals, public disclosure, community advisory boards, environmental standards, and language that supports union organizing.” They say this should apply to private businesses that benefit from public money. ---
**Author:** ![doreen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/858c86/32.png) [@doreen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/doreen)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2002, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/63 "2002-07-24T21:43:46Z")
\*\*perspective{/b] Guess I wasn’t perfectly clear here, > [@](#): > > * * * > > Because it won’t be only the minimum wage workers who’ll get a raise. Say the burger flipper is actually only making minimum wage, and gets a raise from $5.15 to $10.50/hr. You won’t be able to get supervisors at $7.50/hr or assistant managers at $10/ hr anymore. They’d rather flip burgers.If the assistant manager pay gets too close to the general manager’s salary, he’ll need a raise too. A modest .25/hr raise wouldn’t have this effect, but neither would it lead to people being able to quit one of their jobs You left the most important line when you quoted me > [@](#): > > They’ll only be able to quit one job if prices don’t go up. And if there’s a big jump in the minimum raise,they will. That’s why people won’t be able to quit one of their jobs. If minimum wage is doubled, and all or most other wages also go up, prices will rise, and people will not be much better off. If as an (extreme) example, other wages doubled along with the minimum wage, no one would be better off. What used to cost $1.00 would now cost $2.00 ---
**Author:** ![perspective](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f475e1/32.png) [@perspective](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/perspective)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2002, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/64 "2002-07-24T21:56:49Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by ElJeffe \* > If your McD’s supervisor decides to give you an extra 25 cents per hour after a month or two, it absolutely reflects your increased value to the company. You’ve lasted that long, so your employer has decided that you’re reasonably likely to hang around awhile. You’ve undergone training, so that’s a cost that no longer needs to be spent on you. You’ve shown that you’re not going to steal from the registers, and there have been no instances of you spitting in the burgers. A raise after a month would be pretty generous for most fast food joints. Training costs? I was working serving customers within my first day at McD’s. Showing that I won’t steal from registers happens much more quickly than raises are handed out. My point is that I potentially could have been a good enough emloyee to earn a .50 cent raise (twice the .25), but I probably won’t get it because the business model doesn’t need to reward better employees. > [@](#): > > If the person directly above you honestly had no idea what kind of employee you are, then he’s a crappy manager. All that proves is that you worked for a doofus. The people I’ve worked for have always been very atune to how good of an employee I was. Well good for you. I think that this is prevalent enough though because there isn’t enough pressure to remove these bad managers. Those that manage low wage workers are generally also low paid inneficient managers. > [@](#): > > Just because the job requires very little skill doesn’t mean that performance doesn’t matter. Now it’s probably true that in a job like that, intelligence and aptitude are less important than work ethic and courtesy, but that still pertains to performance. You’ve mentioned why people get fired, not why they get raises. There’s no incentive to reward people in that business model. > [@](#): > > If people could just change their business models to make employees more valuable, why wouldn’t they do that to begin with? Because then they’d probably have to pay them more. > [@](#): > > Supply and demand, baby. So then there isn’t necessarily a relationship between how much a person earns for the company and how much they get paid? Then it’s possible that the businesses can afford to pay their employees more and still make a profit. > [@](#): > > African Americans and women make less _precisely_ because their worth is less, statistically speaking. Descrimination has nothing to do with it. Blacks tend to have lower education levels. This makes them, on average, less valuable to companies. Women tend to pursue lower-paying jobs to begin with - teachers, social workers, and so on. When you look at the relative worths of blacks and women in the same jobs, you find that they earn pretty much the same wages, which is to be expected. Actually I seem to remember studies showing that women tend to be just as qualified and yet make less money _at the same jobs_ that men work. Maybe there are some people more versed on this issue who can back me up. > [@](#): > > Research has found that companies that descriminate against [insert group here] tend to perform worse than companies that don’t, which is to be expected. They select inferior employees based on irrational prejudices, which makes them less competitive. … The market selects against these companies. Your assuming the prejudice isn’t widespread enough to even out the market. **msmith537** , > [@](#): > > Is it better for those employees to be paid nothing when I decide that my business model won’t support those raise increases? If you fire your employees you’ll be less productive, that business will probably go somewhere else. If another business model better able to respond to the change in the market hires them back: Yes. > [@](#): > > No one said that the cost of production sets the market price. The two things are independent of each other. So companies could very well be paying their employees less than what they earn for the company and hence could afford to give them a raise. > [@](#): > > There is a diference between productivity and worth. Two people may be equally productive however one could be “worth” less to a hiring manager for any number of superficial or bigoted reasons. Just like a blue car may be worth less to me than a black one. They both do the same job equally well, I just prefer the black one. > > It’s like anything else. How much is a painting, a peice of land, a car or anything else “worth”? Answer - whatever I am willing to pay for it. If you can sell it for more to someone else, go right ahead. It looks like you’re trying to equate racism, sexism with personal tastes in paintings. Go sell that crap somewhere else, I’m not buying your logic. ---
**Author:** ![doreen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/858c86/32.png) [@doreen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/doreen)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2002, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/65 "2002-07-24T22:10:28Z")
> [@](#): > > They say this should apply to private businesses that benefit from public money That’s actually a somewhat different issue than raising the minimum wage across-the-board. And unions do indeed have a position on that one. They don’t want unionized, public sectoe jobs contracted out to private businesses paying much lower wages. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2002, 10:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/66 "2002-07-24T22:43:00Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Olentzero \* > OK, say a person with an MBA from Harvard gets a job flipping burgers at McDonald’s. What determines his worth there? His education or the skills he employs in the performance of his job? Obviously someone with an MBA from Harvard is “worth” much more than the kid he went to high school with who didn’t even move out of his mother’s basement. Shouldn’t McDonald’s pay him for that? \*\* No. McDonalds should not pay him more unless they feel his mad B-skills somehow make him a better burger flipper. There are two things that make the Harvard guy “worth more”: 1 His graduation from HBS demonstrates that he posseses skills and expertise that are very rare, even among other MBAs. 2 There are more companies that would be willing to pay more money to have him work for them. Your guy shouldn’t be paid an investment bankers salary just because he decided to flip burgers. All we need him to do is flip burgers. He would actually be worth less because he is so overqualified. Odds are he is only there on a whim or because the job market is soft. > [@](#): > > perspective > If you fire your employees you’ll be less productive, that business will probably go somewhere else. If another business model better able to respond to the change in the market hires them back: Yes. I’m talking about having to close up shop permenantly because my margins are so low. > [@](#): > > perspective > So companies could very well be paying their employees less than what they earn for the company and hence could afford to give them a raise. No, not every employee generates revenue for the company. Accountants, IT specialists, receptionists, and other operations staff are cost centers. They provide a useful service to the company but they don’t actually produce anything. That is why they are often the first ones laid off. > [@](#): > > perspective > It looks like you’re trying to equate racism, sexism with personal tastes in paintings. Go sell that crap somewhere else, I’m not buying your logic. What don’t you buy? Worth is based on perception and personal taste. Period. Women get paid less because the people who pay them perceive them to be less valuable. If that upsets you, think of it as bad market information. If employers realize that women are just as valuable as men as employees, their salaries will become more equitable. > [@](#): > > perspective > My point is that I potentially could have been a good enough emloyee to earn a .50 cent raise (twice the .25), but I probably won’t get it because the business model doesn’t need to reward better employees. If you really feel you deserve more money, what is stopping you from accepting a better job offer. ---
**Author:** ![lee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lee/32/7455_2.png) [@lee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lee)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2002, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/67 "2002-07-25T00:43:47Z")
When I went to school, none of what went to books, tuition, school supplies etc. came from my husband’s wages. His wages went to basic living expenses. Before I started school I was unable to find work because we did not have a car and the only jobs in walking distance were convenience clerk, night shift. He supported us both, barely. We would have ended up homeless the last 2 months before school, but for a stroke of luck. We proved to our landlord that the upstairs gas was on our meter. She let us have one month of rent free ($165) and use the deposit for the last month’s rent because we so far the apartment was in better shape than when we moved in. One of the reasons I did not work was we calulated the costs of buying presentable clothes and shoes and other things needed for me to work and the inital investment was too high. Also when I had called in response to jobs, most employers refused to interview me because I did not have my own car. That is what prompted me to do a ROI on my working in the first place. BUT Since I qualified for work study while going to school, I worked as much as I was allowed. Also, I was able to get a school apartment for no more than the rent had been before I started school. Our living expenses did not increase much and our income did. We had about 50-65 hours a weekat minimum wage to live on. Our life style was frugal. We lived in the cheapest apartment we could find. My husband walked to and from work. Your little budget is downright silly. What about other expenses? Eyeglassses? Clothes? Shoes? Medicine and doctor’s visits? Houshold items like dishes, cleaning equipment? Renter’s insurance? $100 for utilities? Gas, and electricity alone exceeded $100 sometimes $140. There was also phone and water. Water was $35 a month. I suppose a phone is a luxury. Garbage pickup is not and that was around $10. My husband worked a full time job that required some skills. Because of the lack of jobs in that town, the competition for it was his so it paid minimum wage. That wage was too low to support him alone. It had no benefits. It did not cover the real expense of him living. Those expensies include clothes and medical expenses. When employers fail to provide their full time employees with enough money to live, albeit frugally, they are acting unethically. They are reaping the benefits of something they are not paying for. ---
**Author:** ![ElJeffe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/958977/32.png) [@ElJeffe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElJeffe)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2002, 1:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/68 "2002-07-25T01:05:35Z")
Perspective: You keep making reference to a superior business model that will allow businesses to pay people more while still making the same amount of money. Can you please give an example of such a business model, or prove on exists? You may use any industry as an example. Make sure you limit your example to minimum wage type workers. msmith537: > [@](#): > > Your guy shouldn’t be paid an investment bankers salary just because he decided to flip burgers. All we need him to do is flip burgers. He would actually be worth less because he is so overqualified. Odds are he is only there on a whim or because the job market is soft. Tell me about it. A while ago, I was trying to supplement a full-time job with a second job, because of financial issues. I have two degrees in engineering, but am working in a different field currently, because - well, engineering bored me to tears. And unfortunately, the only types of jobs that really worked with my schedule were minimum wage-type jobs. You can’t imagine the kind of looks people gave me when I handed them a resume for a retail job in a mall with things like “Education: BS and MS in mechanical engineering” and “Previous salary: $55,000/yr” on it. Eventually I started lying on my resume to make myself look less qualified so I could even get an interview. 😃 But if I had gotten a job there, you can be sure I wouldn’t have demanded that they pay me more for standing in front of a register because I know how to build robots. Jeff ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2002, 3:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/69 "2002-07-25T03:31:22Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by lee \* > …When employers fail to provide their full time employees with enough money to live, albeit frugally, they are acting unethically. They are reaping the benefits of something they are not paying for. \*\* And when employees leave for better paying jobs, is that more ethical? It’s not really an issue of ethics. Try this little experiment. Buy a bag of (say 5… 6 minus the one you ate on the way over) donuts and bring them to work (or anywhere else where there are more people than donuts). Start offering donuts to people for a price and don’t tell them how many are in the bag. Start at $5 and work your way downward in small incriments until you are out of donuts. Say you sell them at the following price points: $2.00 $1.50 $0.75 $0.60 $0.20 That tells you that given the price P, demand equals the following quantity Q (number of people willing to pay that price or higher) P Q $2.00 1 $1.50 2 $0.75 3 $0.60 4 $0.20 5 Thats a demand curve just like the little graph in econ. So say you bought the donuts for $3 total. You could give them away for free or sell them for cost. Either way, you would be missing out on potential profits. Thats how business works. Blaming employers for paying low wages is like blaming gravity because you hurt yourself falling. People spending money want to spend as little as possible and people making money want to make as much as they can. ---
**Author:** ![lee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lee/32/7455_2.png) [@lee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lee)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2002, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/70 "2002-07-25T04:51:22Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Rug Burn \* > \*\*I don’t think raising the minimum wage has much effect on the minimum wage earners. > \*\* Yes it does. Sometimes it means everything. It meant that I could eat well enough that I did not pass out in class or walking to work. It meant my gums did not bleed. > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Rug Burn \* > \*\* > > Why should someone be afforded a “living wage” for flipping burgers changing sheets on beds? \*\* Because where else will the next generation of burger flippers or sheet changers come from? Especially the sheet changers. That is not typically a job that one takes to earn beer money, but rather a job you take because you have to support yourself and your kid when you don’t want to try to rely on welfare. Why does everyone have such contempt for the working poor? They are working! I’d like a sheet changer of our country to be able to support herself and her kid and spend some time teaching the kid right from wrong. Why should hard work, work that someone has to do, mean poverty so wretched that it would be unethical to deliberately bring a child into the world to share it? And you can’t claim that job will be exported if wages increase. Workers in Asia can’t change sheets for a local hotel. AND BTW not everyone chooses to bring the children we have into poverty. Some of us are raped and choose not to abort. Some get married and then find out that the wonderful man we dated likes to beat us black and blue because the birth control failed and he blames us and is hoping to cause a miscarriage. Some of us have decent jobs, a bright future, get married and have kids only to lose our jobs when the economy goes pop, or we become disabled. And some of us are left alone to raise our children because our spouse dies suddenly. What would you have us do then? Give them up for adoption and dodge our moral responsibility to teach our children as best we can and not foist that duty off on another? ---
**Author:** ![Procacious](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Procacious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Procacious)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2002, 10:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/71 "2002-07-25T10:00:12Z")
> [@](#): > > ## quote: > > Originally posted by Procacious > Maybe my attitude towards this is colored by the experiences I have had. Every single employer I have ever known to pay minimum wage has been a complete SOB who thinks that their employees should thank God that they’re working for them and earning a whole $5.15 an hour. > > * * * I was not actually the one that posted this. > [@](#): > > ## quote: > > Originally posted by Procacious > This is caused by the silly belief that you don’t really have a skill unless you have a piece of paper to prove it. Businesses would do well to stop believing this falsehood. As someone once told me, “College is the greatest scam this country has going.” You spend all those years in school learning very little and get paid so much more just because you have a degree. Everything I learned in undergraduate school I could have learned in a few months tops. It is the degree, not the knowledge and skills, that people look for. > > * * * > > I will agree that the COST of an education is one of the biggest scams. Other than that, this statement is completely off base. If you could have learned everything they taught you in a few months, then maybe you should have chosen a harder major. > The reason college grads get paid more is that they have quantifyable proof that they completed a particular course of study. If I work for an accounting firm (and I do), how would I know which applicants, out of thousands of applicants, are actually qualified to be accountants? I got a couple of B.S. degrees in under 4 years and only stopped at 2 degrees because the school had a limit on how many units an undergraduate could take. If I were simply learning on my own, it would not have taken more than a few months to learn everything I learned in undergraduate school. It took so much time because there was a limit on how many units I could take per quarter and because every class lasted 10+ weeks. What a waste of time. And there are no “hard” majors in school. Book learning is very easy (for me anyway). I understand why employers look for degrees, but it doesn’t change the fact that there are people out there with the same skills as myself that would be willing to work for half as much because they do not have a college degree. > [@](#): > > Honestly, I don’t see much of a problem with trying to support yourself on minimum wage in most areas. Here, I can get a studio apartment for about $400. That has to be nice. The cheapest ones anywhere near me are at least twice that. But that is no excuse to force businesses to pay a living (or even a minimum) wage in my area. I had a roommate in my studio apartment when I was in college. Sure it meant no privacy, but it also meant only $400 a month in rent per person. > [@](#): > > According to this report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, people receiving food stamps made an average salary of $15,172 (if they had children under 18) and $9,177 (without children under 18) in 1998. At the same time, their total expenditures were $16,910 and $10,552 respectively. They’re actually losing money. So it seems to me increasing the minimum wage to a living wage actually might give them the chance to set some money aside each year. The spending averages more than the income because it can. Thanks to credit, people can actually spend more than they earn. If there were no credit, they would learn to spend less. I would bet that the average expenditures exceed the amount earned for people in the next income category up. A significant percentage of Americans spend whatever they can get their hands on and thus live in debt (last statistic I heard was 60% of Americans had no net worth). It is not because they “need” everything they are buying, it is only because they are allowed to buy it. If people had to learn to live off what they made, they would learn to spend what they made. This may mean 12 people living in a one-bedroom apartment. If that is all one can afford then that is all one should have. (I realize that many places have laws about having 12 people living in a one-bedroom apartment, but those laws are extremely inappropriate and discriminate against the poor). > [@](#): > > ## quote: > > ## Originally posted by msmith537 I hate to tell you people this but the market pays you what you are worth. It does not pay you want you THINK you SHOULD be worth. > > OK, say a person with an MBA from Harvard gets a job flipping burgers at McDonald’s. What determines his worth there? His education or the skills he employs in the performance of his job? Obviously someone with an MBA from Harvard is “worth” much more than the kid he went to high school with who didn’t even move out of his mother’s basement. Shouldn’t McDonald’s pay him for that? No they shouldn’t pay him for that. The only way the Harvard grad would be worth more is if he has a skill that makes him a better burger flipper. How he chose to spend several years of his life does not make him worth more unless those years were spent learning to be one of the world’s greatest burger flippers. A degree in evolution has no value to a burger flipper. If his degree does not apply to his job then he may as well have no degree. (The degree may show that he has a better work ethic, but this is not necessarily the case as we have no idea what the work ethic of the high school kid is). > [@](#): > > So companies could very well be paying their employees less than what they earn for the company and hence could afford to give them a raise. Sure some companies could, but they shouldn’t be forced to. They are businesses not charities. > [@](#): > > Also when I had called in response to jobs, most employers refused to interview me because I did not have my own car. Wow, I have never even heard of that (except of course in cases where the car would be used for the job, such as a delivery job). What an odd standard to place on employees. > [@](#): > > ## quote: > > Originally posted by Rug Burn > I don’t think raising the minimum wage has much effect on the minimum wage earners. > > * * * > > Yes it does. Sometimes it means everything. It meant that I could eat well enough that I did not pass out in class or walking to work. It meant my gums did not bleed. That was because of how you chose to spend your money. If you had 3 times the people living in your tiny apartment, you would have had money left over for better nutrition. All people have to make decisions about how to spend what they have. > [@](#): > > AND BTW not everyone chooses to bring the children we have into poverty. Some of us are raped and choose not to abort. Some get married and then find out that the wonderful man we dated likes to beat us black and blue because the birth control failed and he blames us and is hoping to cause a miscarriage. Some of us have decent jobs, a bright future, get married and have kids only to lose our jobs when the economy goes pop, or we become disabled. And some of us are left alone to raise our children because our spouse dies suddenly. What would you have us do then? I would have them lower the standard of living of both them and their children until they are spending no more than what they are earning. Capitalism is not compassionate. ---
**Author:** ![lee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lee/32/7455_2.png) [@lee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lee)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2002, 12:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/72 "2002-07-25T12:36:45Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Sam Stone \* > \*\*And let’s remember that we’re not talking about people starving here. That ‘living wage’ is about three times the average income for the rest of the world. Even the poorest in the U.S. live lives of incredible wealth compared to the average person in the 3rd world. So it’s not like we’re at the breaking point here. A minimum wage that high is nothing less than an attempt to redistribute income, and not part of a social safety net which is what the minimum wage was supposed to be. \*\* We are talking about people starving. I nearly did. Before I got married or even moved in with him, I once passed out from hunger on my way to work at a minimum wage retail job. I fell in a snow bank and probably would have died there, but some homeless person woke me up and helped me inside. I lost my job the next week because I got the flu and called in sick one day. Many other times through our poor years, I had to choose between rent and food. I nearly died choosing rent, but the gamble paid off. I don’t think we would have recovered if We had llost our apartment. ---
**Author:** ![Rug\_Burn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/a87d85/32.png) [@Rug\_Burn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rug_Burn)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2002, 12:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/73 "2002-07-25T12:56:50Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by lee \* > \*\* > Yes it does. Sometimes it means everything. It meant that I could eat well enough that I did not pass out in class or walking to work. It meant my gums did not bleed. > > Because where else will the next generation of burger flippers or sheet changers come from? Especially the sheet changers. That is not typically a job that one takes to earn beer money, but rather a job you take because you have to support yourself and your kid when you don’t want to try to rely on welfare. Why does everyone have such contempt for the working poor? They are working! I’d like a sheet changer of our country to be able to support herself and her kid and spend some time teaching the kid right from wrong. Why should hard work, work that someone has to do, mean poverty so wretched that it would be unethical to deliberately bring a child into the world to share it? And you can’t claim that job will be exported if wages increase. Workers in Asia can’t change sheets for a local hotel. \*\* I don’t have contempt for the working poor at all. Actually I have the upmost respect for people such as yourself that have made the necessary sacrifices to create a better life for themselves. However, and I really don’t mean to be harsh, I don’t feel that the gov’t owes anyone the same quality of life that comes from learning a valued and marketable skill. > [@](#): > > \*\* > AND BTW not everyone chooses to bring the children we have into poverty. Some of us are raped and choose not to abort. Some get married and then find out that the wonderful man we dated likes to beat us black and blue because the birth control failed and he blames us and is hoping to cause a miscarriage. Some of us have decent jobs, a bright future, get married and have kids only to lose our jobs when the economy goes pop, or we become disabled. And some of us are left alone to raise our children because our spouse dies suddenly. What would you have us do then? Give them up for adoption and dodge our moral responsibility to teach our children as best we can and not foist that duty off on another? \*\* I’m not sure what this bit has to do with deserving a higher minimum wage, but OK. If you’re in poverty and are raped and \*\* choose \*\* not to abort or put the child up for adoption; you chose to bring that child into a life of poverty. The wife beater really doesn’t have any connection here at all that I can see. Sadly, losing a good job to the economy has become a reality for far too many people. Hopefully this is a short term problem and they will find employment in some other location or find a lower paying job until the market rebounds. If your spouse dies suddenly, I hope you had at least a basic life insurance policy. As I see it, many of the problems here stem from placing far to little value on education and by young people getting married too soon after high school with no real plan on how they will make a living. It is much easier to get an education while single than it is after marriage and other responsibilities creep into our lives. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2002, 1:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/74 "2002-07-25T13:21:34Z")
This whole discussion is based on the idea that there are two prices for anything - what it “should” cost, and what you can get someone else to pay for it. The first is completely imaginary. We get away with minimum wage laws because - the costs are hidden, and incurred by someone else - most jobs are worth more than minimum wage in the US - most mimimum wage earners are working for supplemental income, not to support a family The logic of mimimum wage implies that we can reduce poverty by increasing the mimimum wage. Then why don’t we just increase the minimum wage to $100 an hour, and eliminate poverty altogether? Every argument as to why that wouldn’t work applies to any minimum wage law at all. Regards, Shodan, who has to get back to his more-than-mimimum-wage-job, but thanks all who have posted ---
**Author:** ![papergirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/aca169/32.png) [@papergirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/papergirl)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2002, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/75 "2002-07-25T14:31:30Z")
Just a side note to **Lee** , because I’ve been in very similar circumstances and am feeling some of the same reactions, and I’m beginning to feel a little protective here. I think the hard thing (for me, at least, and presumably for you as well) is that when I read this thread, I react from a very personal place…you worked very hard, you made sacrifices, and you did all the things that seem to be expected of one who is working to get out of poverty. And yet, at the end of the day, you were still poor, and you don’t get many pats on the back for having worked your way out of that hole. It’s an emotional experience, and it’s hard to NOT react emotionally when people start throwing around flat comments about how poor people should or should not behave. I am just trying to keep in mind that those type of comments have nothing to do with me personally, and that my personal experience of poverty has nothing to do with the economics of the whole subject. I am fighting the impulse to sit some of you down and tell you a thing or two about what it REALLY means to try to raise kids on even a decent income, when you suddenly find yourself abandoned with two children…but I will keep fighting it, because you are speaking in abstracts about a somewhat abstract subject, and God willing, you will NEVER have to face the circumstances that **Lee** or I, or undoubtedly many other Dopers, have had to face. FWIW, I have a husband and four kids. He’s a paramedic, I work part-time out of my home and doing newspaper deliveries, and we absolutely **DO** live within our means–far more so than anyone else I know in our income bracket. We aren’t poverty-stricken, but the idea of paying for further education for him or a Masters for me, or even picking up a decent-sized life insurance policy for either of us is just laughable at this point. And yep, I agree that there is a degree of contempt for the working poor, who are somehow expected work more than one job in order to pay for their studio apartments and their bicycles and their minimal groceries, while somehow attending classes so that they can QUIT working two or three jobs. They must have more hours in their days than I do. I understand the arguments for not raising the minimum wage, and I do understand that capitalism is not compassionate…it would just be nice to see the people who are discussing it recognize the dilemmas that many minimum wage earners face. (_not_ a slap at anyone who has posted thus far, really.) ~karol ---
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2002, 2:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/76 "2002-07-25T14:47:41Z")
**Procacious** , **msmith** , and **ElJeffe** : So if a Harvard MBA goes to McDonald’s to flip burgers, he should be paid a burger flipper’s wage because he is only employing skills required by the position. So it seems more to me that the market is not deciding what he is worth, rather that the market is deciding what his skill (or as Marxists term it, labor power) is worth. So, on the one hand, we have a low-paid job with easily learned skills, the result of which is actually providing food to people. Regardless of the nutritional merits of a McDonald’s burger, food is one of the primary needs of the human race, and successfully fulfilling that need ensures the human race continues. On the other hand, we have a high-paid job with skills that require years of training, the result of which is, more or less, successful administration of a business and the generation of profit for that business. Successfully generating profit for a company really only benefits those individuals at the top of the corporation, and ensures they and their children have a fairly luxurious lifestyle as long as the business climate is good. Therefore, I put it to you three that the skills which capitalism assigns more value to are the skills which directly benefit capitalism as a system and ensure the continued generation of profit, rather than those skills which actually are geared towards meeting human need. That, to me, is a completely backward method of valuing skills. > [@](#): > > _Originally posted by Procacious_ > **Thanks to credit, people can actually spend more than they earn. If there were no credit, they would learn to spend less. If people had to learn to live off what they made, they would learn to spend what they made.** I’ve always heard it said by proponents of capitalism that consumer spending is good for the system. Why, then, is it a bad thing to give the poorest section of society more money to spend? Is consumer spending only acceptable if the wealthy do it? > [@](#): > > **This may mean 12 people living in a one-bedroom apartment. If that is all one can afford then that is all one should have. (I realize that many places have laws about having 12 people living in a one-bedroom apartment, but those laws are extremely inappropriate and discriminate against the poor).** Yeah, fire hazards will thin the working population out nicely. :rolleyes: We had housing like that in cities like London, Boston, New York, and Chicago. They were called tenements and they were unmatcheed in their level of filth, disease, and squalor. God forbid we should actually do something constructive like rent control, or housing subsidies, or light and airwells that would guarantee a decent level of housing for the poor. Better to keep it cheap and ignore quality just so they can afford it on their own. ---
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2002, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/77 "2002-07-25T14:50:11Z")
**lee** and **bodypoet** : Thank you for adding a further dose of reality to this debate. Your posts are a much-needed antidote to most of the fumes being spewed in here. ---
**Author:** ![Rug\_Burn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/a87d85/32.png) [@Rug\_Burn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rug_Burn)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2002, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/78 "2002-07-25T15:01:19Z")
So a burger flipper should make a million a year and an investment banker should get minimum wage? Where do I sign up? Would you like fries with that? ---
**Author:** ![LonesomePolecat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a88e57/32.png) [@LonesomePolecat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LonesomePolecat)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2002, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/79 "2002-07-25T15:02:22Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by msmith537 \* > \*\*I hate to tell you people this but the market pays you what you are worth. It does not pay you want you THINK you SHOULD be worth. \*\* I hate tell you social Darwinists this, but the market pays whatever the upper classes think they can get away with paying the lower classes. The market is a social and political phenomenon, not a morally neutral force of nature like gravity or electo-magnetism, and politics has a helluva lot to do with the way wealth and resources are distributed. Deserving money and being able to get money are two different things. It is tremendously naive to believe that an unrestrained free market will always give the best possible long term outcome for everyone. A human life has value other than the market value of an individual’s labor. A human life has value \*simply because it is a human life. \* The market may dictate that a person is only worth $5.50 an hour, but it does not automatically follow that he should be allowed to go homeless or to live in fear of hunger in his old age. Christ on a crutch, even so conservative a figure as William F. Buckley Jr. once remarked that the market should not be the final arbiter of all values. What’s so damn hard to understand about this? ---
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2002, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447/80 "2002-07-25T15:06:50Z")
:applauds: Bravo! 🆒 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-living-wage/120447.md?page=5)