Sure, they’d should stop trying to live off these jobs. Presumably they should try begging at street corners instead?
Perhaps you could educate us on proper use. I lived very well on seven-whatever an hour. I bought health insurance, maxed my IRA, traveled, and learned skills. Was I oppressed? I certainly couldn’t have raised a crop of kids at my personal standard for quality childrearing.
I think this is an interesting topic. It could make a good GD thread, if at very least to learn about topic and related issues. I’m not sure how best to construct an OP to prompt useful discussion.
I am leery of a policy that forces an interaction when one party is unwilling, especially when it interferes with my doing business with a potential employer.
Correct, but it has unintended bad consequences. Our 1940s era union laws were designed to protect both business interests and extant unions, and that’s essentially what happened. But to some degree it’s backfired on both, because it lead to the unions being noncompetitive, lack of meaningful competition leads to lots of bad behaviors and to be honest that’s the biggest reason unions are not that popular with workers any longer. There’s a few industries where they are still a great boon, but not many. Public sector unions of course should be abolished and have no legitimate cause for existing, as the relationship between a government and its employees should never be subject to anything but the will of the legislature in how it crafts those relationships.
It’s much better in other countries where there’s no “union shop” but instead multiple unions can have members working at the same work site, and if one union sucks ass a worker can switch. I do think that there is an important interface between unskilled labor and management and unions can actually help that relationship be more of a partnership when implemented correctly. Europe actually does this really well.
In America instead you have unions that were locked in during the era of child labor and basically almost outright war between labor and management. Most of the rhetoric and even the issues from that era simply are not relevant any longer, but the rhetoric is still used to justify the existence of unions. The actual leadership of unions tends to be extremely corrupt on various levels, and certainly rarely act as true agents for their membership.
I think this has a negative impact on management culture as well, management that deals with unions I think becomes intrinsically worse toward its employees wherever it can when the relationship is irredeemably adversarial. When you have a more European relationship where they certainly slam against one another, but have a general relationship of partnership I think it actually promotes types of management thinking that are more progressive toward labor. Good labor relations thus isn’t just a matter of soaking management and making unions ultra-powerful, but rather creating an environment where the union can actually serve as a coherent voice for its membership but with the recognition everyone has a stake in making the business venture succeed. Unions like the UAW believe they exist solely to pillage regardless of the impact on the actual core of what lets everyone come to work (the company making money greater than its costs.)
Perhaps we can start with the minimum wage being raised to where it was (inflation adjusted) 40 years ago. Or would that destroy capitalism as we know it?
We peg plenty of other things to some sort of inflation index. Not doing so with the minimum wage is, effectively, getting rid of it.