There is of course all sorts of menial self-employment (collecting soda cans, etc.) that pays anywhere down to almost nothing; and I imagine there would be scams where the pay rate looked ok in theory but then there’d be deductions for room and board, uniforms, etc. But what would be the lowest actual salary anyone would offer by either hour or piecework? Would anyone offer a dollar an hour with a straight face? An extrapolation from when there was no minimum wage and allowing for inflation would be an acceptable estimate.
The real question would be, what would be the lowest someone could offer with an expectation that they would actually get applicants that could do the job? My guess is the lowest someone could reasonably offer would be in the agricultural sector, where illegal immigrants can still be exploited for low ball prices. Outside of that, I’d guess the next group would be teens, which you could probably get for a few bucks an hour…say, $5/hour with a reasonable expectation that you could get some applicants in low end check out clerk, stocking and fast food service industry jobs.
Full time or part time? Any industry/sector? Absolute lowest, or lowest for that industry/sector?
Absolute lowest, as in what would be the rock-bottom pauper labor rate?
I dunno. A lot of smart people work for free as interns, though even apprentices got room and board. I bet some of them would pay for the honor of interning at Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe LLP.
People already pay for internships. However, most of those people are not amongst those who would be greatly affected by a lack of minimum wage laws.
I suspect that many low paid jobs would become salaried jobs where they work you to death for hourly wages that are below minimum wage. Or, they would import “slaves” here and house them in shanty towns to work for what would be moderate wages where they are from. Kinda like what they do in Dubai and other place like that. I think the lowest wage would be whatever the lowest wage someone who is not being coerced would work for anywhere in the world, plus the bare costs of providing semi-adequate dorm housing and food. That said, I doubt places like Walmart would pay much less than current wages since that would just incentivize employees to steal or not work hard. I suspect you would see most of these jobs in agriculture and dirty industrial jobs.
There are already people at Goodwill with mental disabilities working for as low as 22 cents an hour, so we’d have to exclude those to get at what I think the OP is meaning, how low would some other wages go with the elimination of minimum wage.
In today’s world with SNAP, medicaid, WIC, etc, I don’t think you could get anyone to work for less than $5/hour.
There once was a time when parents sent their kids off to work in the coal mines. Not because the money was so good or because they were such horrible parents but because they couldn’t make ends meet without the wages their children would bring in.
Now we have SNAP, medicaid, WIC, etc. so its hard to imagine any significant number of people working for less than $5/hour even in low cost of living areas. As an aside, day laborers (i.e. the guys hanging out in the Home Depot parking lot) will not work for less than $10/hour in my area and I’m pretty sure they are all illegal immigrants.
There is no MW in Iceland, Norway, Sweden or Germany.
Although it’s a bit more complicated than that because of collective bargaining, and in Germany you can’t pay an “immoral wage”. Still, there must be lots of people not covered by unions or whatever who might be hired to do low skill labor at what amounts to the lowest wage.
Mechanical Turk is not covered by minimum wage laws since turkers are contractors. The market has generally settled down to a clearing price of ~$6 an hour for moderately complex tasks (translation, transcription etc) down to as low as $1 an hour for dead simple menial tasks.
A paper from 2011 claims an average wage of $2 an hour with 20% of Turkers using this as their primary source of income.
Outside of exploitative scenarios or situations where there’s significant non-monetary compensation (like experience for internships) this probably represents a good empirical floor for how low people are willing to work.
The job that would pay the least without a minimum wage would be the one where the employees are the most interchangeable, where there’s little benefit from experience, and where there are plenty of people willing to do the job, or some other competition from automation or something similar.
I’m going to go with something like landscaping or generic laboring. Just about anyone can run a lawnmower, weed eater or leaf blower, and/or carry 2x4s, etc…
My wife currently makes 2.13 an hour as a waitress in Texas. I think we are the last state that has people routinely making less than Federal minimum wage. She gets tips as well, but has to pay the other employees with her tips, to a percentage of the total sales she takes in, so its frequently not much more if anything. But she is taxed as she makes federal minimum wage. I am not sure how that works legally but all restaurants in Texas do this (or at least all the ones she has worked at and I have worked at.)
So I think that this job would go down to a non pay job, to which you would hopefully get tips and not have to pay out the other staff (hosts and bussers and kitchen), but that would probably not happen.
Employers cannot let tipped employees net out at less than MW. At least not legally. They have to make up the difference otherwise. This has been covered extensively in the many MW threads we’ve had recently.
I think the Home Depot Day Labor Wage is an interesting data point, but I’m not sure it’s even a good 1st order estimate of what the lowest wage would be if there were no MW. The fact is, those people operate in an environment where prices for goods and services are affected by the prevailing MW. Without a MW, it’s likely that many prices would drop, and the lowest amount a person would work for would drop, as well.
Even without a MW the Home Depot Day Labor Wage is going to be more driven by what is driving those day laborers to be here offering their services in the first place. A significant portion of migrants who come to the United States to do day laboring like that are not permanent immigrants but people coming here specifically because they can leverage their desire to do work at a certain price ($10/hr is significantly under what say, a construction worker makes) to earn far more than they could doing similar work back home, such that they can actually live here for awhile and save up a large amount of money to take back home.
They are also leveraging their different concept of necessity/creature comforts as well. Many Americans feel it is a necessity to have a certain amount of personal space, while many people from the developing world have lived their whole lives double or triple bunking in a bed with their brothers or etc–so 7-8 of them renting a one bedroom apartment and sleeping on cots or such on the floor is not seen as a problem for them.
So they can live here very much on the cheap, but they’re still going to have some living expenses. If the differential between their American living expenses and the wage they collect is too small, then the whole scheme falls apart and they just go back to Guatemala. They’re only coming here to make a good chunk more than they do at home, even if it’s “just a little bit more” than they can make at home most people would not spend years away from their family and friends for a small return.
In college, my brother had a work-study job manning a desk and telling anyone who asked that the doors he sat in front of were “no entry”. Thing is, the doors were chained/locked closed. He sat there 4 hours a day and only had his studies interrupted rarely.
I think a “warm body” job like that would apply.
According to this article, in certain areas of Germany wages can get under one euro an hour, and it has one report of 55 cents an hour.
They seriously drove down their unemployment rate, but of course the pendulum always swings back, and now they’re moving toward more labor market regulations.
I don’t understand what you mean. I am not saying you are wrong or anything, I just don’t understand what that means. Can you explain it to me further?
He’s referring to Federal minimum wage laws, your wife cannot be legally paid less than the minimum wage in total.
Tipped employees can receive direct employer hourly compensation of $2.13 an hour, but that is because they are considered under Wage & Hour regulation to be tipped employees which means a portion of their total wage comes from tips. So the employer is legally allowed to pay them less than the current Federal minimum wage (this is not unique to Texas in reference to your earlier post.)
But the law also says that their total pay must actually exceed minimum wage. So if they do not receive enough in tips to cover minimum wage the employer must make up the difference. Not to do so puts the employer in violation of the law, and typically the penalties are every dollar that they should have paid (so wages owed) + treble damages.
Straight from the Horse’s mouth.
If your wife is making less than MW, she has a beef with her employer.
This page in general has lots of information specific to the minimum wage. From the “Tips” subtopic:
It also appears you’re only entitled to receive what you were owed plus an equal amount in liquidated damages under Federal laws, not the treble amount I mentioned (on further research that ended up being something specific to State law that only applied in a specific circumstance.)