Earning a living wage.

Great Debates
301

[QUOTE=Least Original User Name Ever]
Well, I’d say that labor isn’t a commodity. It certainly does get treated as a commodity, but I’m not down with that.

How is labor different from other commodities? Well, unlike..let’s say…copper…poeple have to pay bills and provide for other people. If we can prove that copper can create other little coppers and have little copper societies and make statues out of that inferior metal, tungsten, then we can change how we treat copper as well. The fact that a number can be put on a person doesn’t make it a good thing.

[/QUOTE]

Except that is an emotional appeal that has nothing to do with treating labor as a commodity. You’re right, labor is not a commodity. People can learn new skills and make themselves more valuable. Frozen orange juice and iron ore can’t. People can find a better paying job if they want.

So I’m curious. I’m promoting you to HR director of a major corporation. What do you pay your employees and how do you decide what to pay them? It’s easy to cry “we can’t treat people like commodities” when you don’t actually have to deal with real economic and business issues.

Patriotism. The last refuge of the incompetant. No one owes America anything when there is an entire world full of countries ready to do what it takes to enjoy the same economic success. To suceed, America needs to be competetive and we are becoming woefully pathetic in that regard. We are raising a nation of lazy, entitled morons who can barely complete high school.

If it were your business and your money, would you not invest it in whoever can do the best job at the most competetive cost?

302

[QUOTE=Sarahfeena]
My point is to NOT put a value judgment on whether or not it is a “good thing” for labor to be a commodity. But as far as I can see, it is something that is worth something to someone else, that they are willing to pay for. In this way, purely objectively and not taking into account human need, I don’t see how it differs from other commodities. The point being that natural forces of economics don’t care a hill of beans about human need…it’s like saying that evolution should be equally sympathetic…how can it be if it is simply a law of nature?

I think you understand the question, but I can’t tell here if you agree that there is some way of getting around these economic principles in order to reach some kind of compromise, or not? And, in fact, CAN economic principles be subject to compromise?
[/QUOTE]

Labor is a commodity because numbers have been affixed to it. Putting numbers on labor is not a natural phenomenon. With that being said, I can see how numbers got there and why people did so.

A buddy of mine at work is libertarian and rabidly so. He sends me Libertarian articles all the time from www.mises.org. According to Mr. Von Mises (if I recall correctly), he says there is no compromise at all. Whatsoever. I disagree, but I haven’t got my Nobel Prize yet, so my word isn’t worth too much. Do I think that we can compromise and come up with something? Yeah, I do. Is it going to be a pain in the ass? You betcha. It IS possible, though.

303

[QUOTE=msmith537]
Except that is an emotional appeal that has nothing to do with treating labor as a commodity. You’re right, labor is not a commodity. People can learn new skills and make themselves more valuable. Frozen orange juice and iron ore can’t. People can find a better paying job if they want.

So I’m curious. I’m promoting you to HR director of a major corporation. What do you pay your employees and how do you decide what to pay them? It’s easy to cry “we can’t treat people like commodities” when you don’t actually have to deal with real economic and business issues.

(snip)
[/QUOTE]

You’re aware that not every place in America has a great environment in which to get jobs, right? It’s downright HARD to find employment in many places. I suppose a saving grace for this might be fast food, but how does that pay the bills?

HR Director of a major corporation? I think I’d need some more information to make a statement that’s worth a damned thing, The question is too complex to give a small sound byte to. If I were to try and assign a sound byte, I’d say that we can find a way to put management under a microscope, demand more from them, and work on spreading more money to the workers through direct pay increases or performance-based initiatives.

I wouldn’t have the job for long, I can tell you that.

304

[QUOTE=Least Original User Name Ever]
Labor is a commodity because numbers have been affixed to it. Putting numbers on labor is not a natural phenomenon. With that being said, I can see how numbers got there and why people did so.

A buddy of mine at work is libertarian and rabidly so. He sends me Libertarian articles all the time from www.mises.org. According to Mr. Von Mises (if I recall correctly), he says there is no compromise at all. Whatsoever. I disagree, but I haven’t got my Nobel Prize yet, so my word isn’t worth too much. Do I think that we can compromise and come up with something? Yeah, I do. Is it going to be a pain in the ass? You betcha. It IS possible, though.
[/QUOTE]
I am not sure it is, because as I said before, natural law is not subject to compromise…it has no emotion, no reason, & no logic…it just is what it is. If you don’t believe that these principles of economics are natural law, then I guess you would have a different POV on that. But no one here seems to dispute that there are natural laws at work, but only that somehow those natural laws can be controlled by man. I sincerely doubt that they can. It’s not a matter of whether one desires there to be a compromise or solution, it’s a matter of whether one exists.

In the case I gave, where we set the price of something (labor) artificially high, what do you propose could be done in order to avoid the glut of labor that would be likely to occur? What do you think would be reasonable action? Say unemployment rose to 20%…what could be done to give these people jobs? Have the government create jobs for them? Force companies to keep a certain number of people employed, while at the same time, telling them how much they need to pay those people? How much control do you think is appropriate for the government to take in such a situation, and will these controls work?

I am no fat cat CEO…I work for someone who owns a small business and who takes a hell of a lot more money out of it than I do. She could probably stand to pay me twice as much as she does, and still maintain a nice standard of living herself. So I am not here to speak for the people who are reaping the profits. I just sincerely want to know what people think would happen if we instituted a living wage. I believe it would cause unemployment to go up, mostly among the people who are most in need of a job. I would really, really love for someone to explain to me how they would propose that we avoid that consequence.

Oh, and in terms of labor being a commodity…it may not be a natural phenomenon to work for coin. However, for the most part we all do it. As long as each one of us is willing to trade work for $$$, then that work is a commodity…it’s worth something to someone, or they wouldn’t pay us to do it. If one doesn’t want his or her work to be a commodity, then the thing to do is live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Then all the fruits of ones’ labor is ones’ own.

305

[QUOTE=Least Original User Name Ever]
You’re aware that not every place in America has a great environment in which to get jobs, right? It’s downright HARD to find employment in many places. I suppose a saving grace for this might be fast food, but how does that pay the bills?
[/QUOTE]

Indeed. There are economically depressed areas with few job prospects for the unskilled. The question is, why would anyone want to make those types of jobs even more scarce by pricing them out of the market? How does that help things?

306

Why would min wage price them out of the market.? if the work is there ,they will pay. The competition will also pay. You can not run a fast food restaurant by eliminating workers. There is still work that has to be done. Do you think fast food restaurants will cease to exist if min wage goes up. ? They have survived it before.

307

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061223_truthdiggers_of_the_week_joseph_stiglitz_and_linda_bilmes/
Cause of inflation min wage. C,mon get real. There was another exec retiring to a 180-200 mill dollar package last week. The exec salaries are soaring . Where is the weeping for inflation it can cause. I just read an extensive article on the causes of inflation. It failed to mention min wage.

308

This thread is about the Living Wage, not the Minimum Wage. I was addressing the poster who was talking about there being a lack of jobs. Raising the wage of existing jobs isn’t going to create any new ones, and it will probably eliminate some of the old ones-- especially if you double the MW, which is about what you’d have to do if we’re talking about a LW in its usual sense.

309

[QUOTE=gonzomax]
Why would min wage price them out of the market.? if the work is there ,they will pay. The competition will also pay. You can not run a fast food restaurant by eliminating workers. There is still work that has to be done. Do you think fast food restaurants will cease to exist if min wage goes up. ? They have survived it before.
[/QUOTE]

You simply don’t seem to understand the basic economics of labor. “there is work to do” is a worthless statement. Whether there is work to do or not depends on whether I can hire people to do the work for less than the work is worth.

If a chair costs $100, and it takes 10 hours to make that chair, I might start a business making chairs if I can hire people for $6/hr to do it. My labor cost is $60 per chair. If all my other costs can be covered by the other $40 while still leaving me enough of a profit to pay for the risk I took in taking my money out of the bank and investing it in a chair company, then I’ll make profit, and the company will survive.

Tell me I have to pay my workers $15/hr, and guess what? I’d be selling each chair at a minimum $50 loss. What do you think the end result will be? The business will go under, I’ll lay off all my employees, and the world will have to do without all the chairs I could have been making.

Work is only worth doing if the cost of doing it is less than the value gained from having it done. This is a basic law, and you cannot get around it. This is why we don’t hire people to collect empty bottles - the amount of money that can be made from doing that isn’t great enough to pay for the cost of labor.

In the winter here, we have kids that come around offering to shovel our walks for a couple of bucks. But I notice there are no large walk-shoveling companies, even though this is ‘work that needs to be done’. And why not? Because if I tried to start such a business, I’d rapidly find that there’s no market for walk shoveling at the prices I would have to charge to cover my labor costs. If I pay a full-time worker minimum wage for 4 months of the winter, that’s about $3000. Plus I have the cost of employment (paperwork, covering sick time, management), which adds maybe another 30% to the cost of the worker. So for this guy to be worth hiring, then at $5/hr he’s going to need to shovel maybe 1000 walks in 4 months on average, just to cover his own employment costs. Then I have to provide transportation, equipment, advertising, covering theft and bad debt, pay for office space and secretarial work, pay VISA their commission… In the end, I might need each person to shovel 1500 walks a year just to make the business even remotely feasible. That’s 18 walks a day on average. How likely do you think that is?

If I can’t rationalize that business model, I won’t start the business. Since you don’t see a lot of walk shoveling businesses around, I assume it doesn’t make financial sense, even though there is ‘work that needs to be done’.

We only need hamburger flippers to the extent that people are willing to buy fast food. How many do you think that will be if a burger costs $15? Make the cost of burger flippers too high, and you’ll wipe out the burger flipper industry.

310

[QUOTE=gonzomax]
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061223_truthdiggers_of_the_week_joseph_stiglitz_and_linda_bilmes/
Cause of inflation min wage. C,mon get real. There was another exec retiring to a 180-200 mill dollar package last week. The exec salaries are soaring . Where is the weeping for inflation it can cause. I just read an extensive article on the causes of inflation. It failed to mention min wage.
[/QUOTE]

What you don’t understand is that there are very few of those ultra-high priced CEOs around, so while each individual one may be making huge money, it doesn’t really have much of an impact on the overall economy.

BTW, would you rather live in a society that pays someone like Jack Welch 100 million dollars, or one that pays an outfielder for the Yankees the same amount? Jack Welch’s management and re-engineering of General Electric reinvigorated it and turned it from an old-world manufacturing company of light bulbs and bad appliances into one of the largest high tech companies in the world. In the process, he created tens of thousands of jobs. Isn’t he worth at least as much as Michael Jordan?

311

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
…BTW, would you rather live in a society that pays someone like Jack Welch 100 million dollars, or one that pays an outfielder for the Yankees the same amount?..
[/QUOTE]

I would prefer to live in a society that holds greed in contempt. Your choice is like asking if I would prefer the Toxic Waste Snowcone or the Diarrhea.

312

Okay, then try this: Would you like to live in a society that holds greed in contempt, and therefore the Jack Welches don’t rise to the top? Would you rather have your companies run by mediocrities?

Do you think that would be better for the poor?

313

[QUOTE=John Mace]
…Well, we had a textbook example just a few decades ago. We had the US (with an economy controled by white guys in suits) and the USSR (an economy mismanaged by Marxist MBAs)…
[/QUOTE]

Yeah, if the textbook is the Capitalist Catechism, glossed by Grover Norquist!

I’m not sure what you’re about here, John, you may only be offering a derisive simplification to answer a derisive simplification. A man as educated as yourself cannot believe that the only factor of any importance is the superiority of the capitalist system.

An alterantive scenario: Soviet Russia lost the Second World War, it only didn’t lose as badly as the Germans did. She lost upwards of 20 million people, an inordinate number of young men fed into the meat grinder. She was further hampered by a paranoid Stalinist regime. In her ongoing confrontation with America, she was starting at a huge disadvantage.

But she was in the thrall of Kremlinites, men who believed right down to their toes that America was determined to their destruction, that no rapport or peaceful detente was worthwhile. They were the Soviet version of neo-cons, who regarded any tinkering with Marxism (as interpreted by Lenin) as heretical, and any advice from fuzzy-minded peaceniks as worthy only of scorn. Sound familiar?

Therefore, she had no option but to keep up with America militarily. Starting from such a disadvantage, this would be a daunting task under any system, capitalist, communist, or divinely mandated. The surprising thing may not be that she failed, but that she lasted so long!

Neo-cons crow about St. Ronnie of Bakersfield, how he forced the Russians into collapse with defense spending. Well, what a splendid thing that is! In stead of responding favorably and sincerely to overtures of peace, we keep our enemy in a constant state of dread. And, by happy coincidence, pouring so much of our treasure into the hands of deserving patriots, Lockheed, General Dynamics, etc… Thank Heavens it was squandored on schools, or food stamps!

So now those ghastly Russian weapons are no longer pointed in our direction, now they are for sale on E-Bayski. Oh, goody! And the Russians, so much better off under Putin than Brezhnev. (The neo-cons could have done the world a big favor by throwing Gorbachev a bone. But no, dancing on an enemies grave is more important…)

To put succinctly: your assertion that the Soviet Union collapsed because of the superiority of the capitalist system is based less on history than a carefully filtered view of same. All things being equal, had Russia adopted Calvin Coolidge over Lenin at the end of WWII, but pursued the same paranoid posture with regard to the US, the result might very well have been identical.

314

Either or. We can not have a middle ground. Exec salaries are soaring when min wage stayed put for 8 years. No problem for you. It strikes me as a bit cruel. Middle class is disappearing.
Two percent of world population controls 50 % of wealth. If it continues ,I think it will be very dangerous for the world. They do not control government. They are the government.
Our corps are run by selfish bastards. J,K.Galbraith called them the ratifiers. When a decision is made it results from info developed by the workers. The decision becomes clear from the data received. It does not require ingenuity.

315

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Okay, then try this: Would you like to live in a society that holds greed in contempt, and therefore the Jack Welches don’t rise to the top? Would you rather have your companies run by mediocrities?
[/QUOTE]
Ah, the fallacy of the False Dilemma. If there is one immutable law of economics, it is that wealthy people will do almost anything to stay that way. Jack Welch is hardly going to curl up on a sidewalk grate if his compensation is only 100,000 times that of the LW worker. If anything, he will work even harder to bridge that gap and make up the difference. We need not settle for the mediocre running our companies; we need to cause our CEO’s to increase their productivity to match the increase of the American worker; sell that chair for $200, and make the customer feel lucky to pay it.

316

[QUOTE=elucidator]
To put succinctly: your assertion that the Soviet Union collapsed because of the superiority of the capitalist system is based less on history than a carefully filtered view of same. All things being equal, had Russia adopted Calvin Coolidge over Lenin at the end of WWII, but pursued the same paranoid posture with regard to the US, the result might very well have been identical.
[/QUOTE]

Except I didn’t assert that at all. You said:

I just asked you which economy was more effecient and effective-- the US’s or the USSR’s. Isn’t that what you meant by those two descriptions? If not, what did you mean? I only said “a few decades ago” because the USSR no longer exists, and what remains is not really communist anymore. Go back to the pre-war USSR if you’d like.

317

The fact that CEOs are paid huge salaries is a completely seperate issue than the one we are discussing in this thread. If you limitted CEO pay, that wouldn’t make any unskilled jobs more valuable than they are now.

318

[QUOTE=John Mace]
…I just asked you which economy was more effecient and effective-- the US’s or the USSR’s…
[/QUOTE]

And answered. The Soviet system was under strains that the American system was not, therefore, any such comparison should, in all fairness, consider those constraints. Your question suggests I ignore them, and presume that the magic of the Free Market is the crucial factor.

You might as well ask if hamsters that compete for food pellets perform better than hamsters that share.

319

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Okay, then try this: Would you like to live in a society that holds greed in contempt, and therefore the Jack Welches don’t rise to the top? Would you rather have your companies run by mediocrities?

Do you think that would be better for the poor?
[/QUOTE]

Aww, c’mon Sam you’re not playing fair! We’ll probably always have competitive people (overdose of Capricorn, not enough brown rice), the trick is to offer competitive people something to compete at. We’re working on it. Comrade Big Bird is composing a position paper, about how sharing is nicer.

You’ve never had an idiot for a boss? Ever? Oh, right, Canada. I forgot.

320

[QUOTE=elucidator]
And answered. The Soviet system was under strains that the American system was not, therefore, any such comparison should, in all fairness, consider those constraints. Your question suggests I ignore them, and presume that the magic of the Free Market is the crucial factor.

You might as well ask if hamsters that compete for food pellets perform better than hamsters that share.
[/QUOTE]

OK, compare East and West Germany then.