# The role of the working poor in our society **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 31, 2009, 7:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904 "2009-07-31T19:26:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 2:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/61 "2009-08-01T02:48:49Z")
> [@adhay](#): > > Always welcomed by your average landlord in the US. Then we spot our problem, don’t we? ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 2:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/62 "2009-08-01T02:50:10Z")
I am pleased that the Free Market cultists don’t go door to door, pressing pamphlets upon the unwilling. That’s a blessing. Still, its annoying when people express their unfounded faith in the magic of the Free Market with the bland assurance of a weatherman telling you the time and temperature. We should defer our moral decisions to the Free Market, it will decide who is valuable, and who is squat. Salesmen, mostly, the sacred Free Market is very, very fond of salesmen. But how is it we have occupations that are necessary, but are not valuable? Common sense would dictate that if something is necessary, it is valuable. And a salesman would appear, by strict Free Market theology to be useless, it is competition for the best product that decides who wins and who loses, what effect does salesmanship have on how fast the chip runs, or how much gas the car uses? The Free Market is as nebulous, demanding, and arbitrary as any god in the pantheon. And equally deserving of worship. At least Jesus has nice music. ---
**Author:** ![adhay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecd19e/32.png) [@adhay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adhay)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 2:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/63 "2009-08-01T02:50:51Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > Common decency. For those who need it, a definition of [decency](http://www.thefreedictionary.com/decency). 3b is of particular interest. ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/64 "2009-08-01T02:54:41Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > Wow, I have rarely seen such an ill-thought-out post in my life. Your entire train of logic is “the poor who blow their money on stupid thinsg rather than budgeting wisely are the majority, so everyone else has to buy them off.” but I suspect you simply didn’t actually think out your response. Well your response is pretty ill-thought out. It assumes that the poor have lots of disposable income to spend unwisely. ---
**Author:** ![Rand\_Rover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/db5fbb/32.png) [@Rand\_Rover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rand_Rover)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 2:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/65 "2009-08-01T02:55:01Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > Common decency. People are not blue jeans, to be worn and discarded. Or to rip fashionable holes in. You are correct that people are not blue jeans, and I thank you for that astute observation. But services provided by people are like blue jeans. They are worth what they are worth. ---
**Author:** ![Blalron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/35a633/32.png) [@Blalron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blalron)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 2:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/66 "2009-08-01T02:55:34Z")
> [@Rand\_Rover](#): > > Blalron: Let’s say you want to buy a new pair of jeans. You go to your favorite store that sells such items. They have a pair of jeans you like for $50. You wouldn’t mind paying that much for those pair of jeans, so you decide to buy them. > > Do you pay the store (a) $50 or (b) an amount in excess of $50? > > Similarly, when one person (“Employer”) wants to purchase services from another person (“Employee”), why would (or should) Employer pay any more than what Employee is willing to work for? I’ll answer your analogy with another analogy. If you’re dying of thirst in the dessert, and you spot a lemonade stand that charges 100 dollars a glass (the businessman is heavily armed so stealing is not an option), do you pay the price? Of course you do. The options are pay or die. But I’d hardly call it a fair exchange. No fair exchange can be made under duress. Abject poverty is duress. ---
**Author:** ![adhay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecd19e/32.png) [@adhay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adhay)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 2:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/67 "2009-08-01T02:58:03Z")
> [@adhay](#): > > Always welcomed by your average landlord in the US. > [@](#): > > Then we spot our problem, don’t we? Humor me. ---
**Author:** ![Rand\_Rover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/db5fbb/32.png) [@Rand\_Rover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rand_Rover)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 2:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/68 "2009-08-01T02:59:17Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > We should defer our moral decisions to the Free Market, it will decide who is valuable, and who is squat. Why do you think someone’s worth is determined by how much money they make? > [@](#): > > But how is it we have occupations that are necessary, but are not valuable? Common sense would dictate that if something is necessary, it is valuable. The problem here is you are not separating out the overall function from the services of any one person involved in that function. Society may grind to a hault if the trash doesn’t get picked up, but that doesn’t mean that each garbageman should be paid a million bucks a year. ---
**Author:** ![Rand\_Rover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/db5fbb/32.png) [@Rand\_Rover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rand_Rover)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/69 "2009-08-01T03:00:47Z")
> [@Blalron](#): > > I’ll answer your analogy with another analogy. If you’re dying of thirst in the dessert, and you spot a lemonade stand that charges 100 dollars a glass (the businessman is heavily armed so stealing is not an option), do you pay the price? Of course you do. The options are pay or die. But I’d hardly call it a fair exchange. > > No fair exchange can be made under duress. Abject poverty is duress. So you think that poor people don’t have any choices for jobs? There is just one job, and they take it or die? And there are no charities or social services that would give them food for free? ---
**Author:** ![treis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bc79bd/32.png) [@treis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/treis)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 3:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/70 "2009-08-01T03:26:43Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > You mean during what time period? For me, it was up to about 1990. From about 1985 on I made more than minimum wage, but averaged less than minimum wage because I only worked part time while I was in school. > > I don’t see that things have changed much. Actually it makes a big difference because minimum wage isn’t tied to inflation. Here is a cite with U.S. minimum wage in real dollars: [url=[http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1222&context=key\_workplace](http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1222&context=key_workplace). As you can see, 1990 had a real minimum wage of 5.55 and 1991 was 5.93. Nearly 10% more than the real minimum wage of 5.15 in 2004. I don’t know what Alberta’s numbers look like, but it makes a huge difference if you were making minimum wage right after an increase or right before one. ---
**Author:** ![Rumor\_Watkins](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/d9b06d/32.png) [@Rumor\_Watkins](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rumor_Watkins)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/71 "2009-08-01T03:55:22Z")
> [@Rand\_Rover](#): > > Similarly, when one person (“Employer”) wants to purchase services from another person (“Employee”), why would (or should) Employer pay any more than what Employee is willing to work for? I absolutely love how people handwave away the nonexistence of certain conditions in a real-world situation that make analogies to pure economic theory apropos. ---
**Author:** ![adhay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecd19e/32.png) [@adhay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adhay)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 4:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/72 "2009-08-01T04:12:09Z")
> [@Rumor\_Watkins](#): > > I absolutely love how people handwave away the nonexistence of certain conditions in a real-world situation that make analogies to pure economic theory apropos. If only we could work out some way to harvest all that energy. Hmm. They’d probably want Jeff Skilling to market it. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 4:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/73 "2009-08-01T04:55:41Z")
> [@adhay](#): > > Humor me. Artificial and imposed limits like the minimum wage are going to cause issues in what is otherwise a free market. The cost of living space is dependent on what other alternatives there are for that same land. If it’s not profitable, people aren’t going to make apartment buildings. When they do build apartment buildings, they’re going to charge the maximum they can for the smallest legally viable square footage. But the problem is that the market moves to where that is profitable. If people living on minimum wage choose to live in city-centers where the land is worth a lot, and if they refuse to buy rooms smaller than X square feet, then there aren’t going to be apartment buildings of any other sort than that. If people aren’t going to rent someplace set up like a dormitory or a barracks, then there isn’t going to be the option to rent at an apartment like that. (And, I wouldn’t be surprised if the government prohibits setups like that, based on some deluded idea that it’s more important to give the poorest person more room than your average income Tokyo-dweller than to give him health care.) The people who would be fine to live in a barracks-like setup, or who would be fine to live with a roommate in a smaller-than-common space end up being screwed by being the odd-man out. There’s no market for the non-representative sample. Now, does this get fixed by removing the minimum wage? Possibly. Giving people enough money to live near the city center (tenuously though it may be), seems to have resulted in a market whereby everyone chose to do that instead of renting at barracks-like apartments out of town a ways, and so the other options went the way of the dodo. If they didn’t have enough money to manage a day-to-day lifestyle in a $450 apartment, they might choose to opt for a $100 a month barracks deal, but I suspect that instead most would opt to rent at whatever else would tap out their funds and we’d be right back where we are. Unfortunately, in this particular case, the 90th percentile customer is defined by poor planning and that makes the market prey on poor planning as the best way to make a buck off the customer. But, the same thing happens in the other direction. If you raise the minimum wage, you’ll just end up with poor planners wasting more money on silly stuff and no way to get them to do otherwise via the open market, even though there’s no particular technical barrier to it, just a human one that’s self-dooming. So I would say that this is a case where the government should step in to the housing market and provide incentives to create affordable housing situations for the poor, and try and route the poor into accepting that quality of life. It is regrettable that people would have to be treated like children, but the simple truth is that any solution is just throwing money at the issue that’s going summarily go down the hole or end up as inherently unfair to the people who worked hard. ---
**Author:** ![Blalron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/35a633/32.png) [@Blalron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blalron)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 4:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/74 "2009-08-01T04:57:45Z")
> [@Rand\_Rover](#): > > So you think that poor people don’t have any choices for jobs? There is just one job, and they take it or die? And there are no charities or social services that would give them food for free? It’s not quite so black and white. But employers have far more bargaining power than employees. ---
**Author:** ![Rand\_Rover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/db5fbb/32.png) [@Rand\_Rover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rand_Rover)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 5:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/75 "2009-08-01T05:01:17Z")
Care to suppor that statement? Or are you just going to leave it out there as a bare assertion? ---
**Author:** ![Blalron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/35a633/32.png) [@Blalron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blalron)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 5:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/76 "2009-08-01T05:35:03Z")
> [@Rand\_Rover](#): > > Care to suppor that statement? Or are you just going to leave it out there as a bare assertion? I’m looking for some good cites. I’ll respond when I’m able. At this point I’ll just say it’s a gut feeling that most employees feel more fear of losing their job than employers fear their workers quitting in protest. This is a broad generalization that doesn’t always apply, but I believe it applies more often than not. If I can find some hard data to back that up, I’ll do it. ---
**Author:** ![Snowboarder\_Bo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowboarder_bo/32/229_2.png) [@Snowboarder\_Bo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snowboarder_Bo)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 6:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/77 "2009-08-01T06:07:23Z")
> [@Blalron](#): > > It’s not quite so black and white. But employers have far more bargaining power than employees. Employers also have a greater ability to re-make the system to suit their needs than employees. ---
**Author:** ![adhay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecd19e/32.png) [@adhay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adhay)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 6:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/78 "2009-08-01T06:24:15Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > I suspect that poor Mexicans might find a roommate to live with so that the cost is split. Living 5 or 6 people to a room just isn’t going to kill anyone–lots of societies live that way as a matter of course. > [@adhay](#): > > Always welcomed by your average landlord in the US. > [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > Then we spot our problem, don’t we? > [@adhay](#): > > Humor me. > [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > Artificial and imposed limits like the minimum wage are going to cause issues in what is otherwise a free market. First mention of minimum wage. > [@](#): > > The cost of living space is dependent on what other alternatives there are for that same land. If it’s not profitable, people aren’t going to make apartment buildings. When they do build apartment buildings, they’re going to charge the maximum they can for the smallest legally viable square footage. It’s the American way. > [@](#): > > But the problem is that the market moves to where that is profitable. If people living on minimum wage choose to live in city-centers where the land is worth a lot, and the jobs are > [@](#): > > and if they refuse to buy rooms smaller than X square feet, We’ve been talking about 5 or 6 people who would like to do just that. > [@](#): > > … > The people who would be fine to live in a barracks-like setup, or who would be fine to live with a roommate in a smaller-than-common space end up being screwed by being the odd-man out. Finally! > [@](#): > > There’s no market for the non-representative sample. We’ve been discussing that market. > [@](#): > > Now, does this get fixed by removing the minimum wage? > … Off topic again. > [@](#): > > So I would say that this is a case where the government should step in to the housing market and provide incentives to create affordable housing situations for the poor, and try and route the poor into accepting that quality of life. Great idea. And I don’t think it would require much routing. Remember those 5 or 6 folks looking for a place to share? ---
**Author:** ![Cazzle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cazzle/32/75_2.png) [@Cazzle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cazzle)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 6:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/79 "2009-08-01T06:41:53Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > Life expectancy in the U.S. is greatly affected by high rates of obesity (the highest in the world) and homicide. Nitpick: The US is second. Australia has taken the title of [most obese nation](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article4171160.ece) in the world, and retains [second place for longevity](http://www.theage.com.au/national/australia-now-second-in-life-expectancy-stakes-20080624-2w6h.html). ---
**Author:** ![LouisB](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/dfb087/32.png) [@LouisB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LouisB)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2009, 6:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904/80 "2009-08-01T06:59:55Z")
Just for the record, I’d like to know when and where any citizen of the USA actually saw a person digging ditches with a pick and shovel, other than on a small farm or a prisoner work detail. Also, I’d like to have the same information regarding the digging of post holes and setting of posts, with the same caveats giving above. Those are two very mechanized jobs, done with equipment that is all but self operating. Just so you know. Also, the flipping of burgers is a job that could be automated very easily. Roofing and plumbing are pretty much mature industries and are also not done very cheaply. Automobile repairing gets more complicated every day. I would suggest that those who make an excellent income hire a few of the less qualified as full time gardeners, handymen, nannies and chauffeurs instead of relegating them to jobs that basically no longer exist, unless we become Luddites and smash the machines. I suppose we do need bartenders, cocktail servers, waitstaff and cooks, although the job of bartenders has been automated in several places. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-role-of-the-working-poor-in-our-society/504904.md?page=5)