The idea that companies base their pay on ‘what the job is worth’ is either laughably divorced from reality or a simple tautology, it’s not a meaningful statement. In general they pay the lowest amount that they can get away with, and actively lobby for laws to make it harder for workers to organize and/or find out information to make informed choices about salary. The amount they pay is not based on how much money the job brings in/avoids losing or any other objective standard, it’s what they can get away with. Sure you an say that the ‘market value’ of a job is equal to what the job pays, but that just boils down to saying ‘the job pays what the job pays’, it doesn’t actually mean anything.
Your ad-hominems are the fallacious debate technique.
Paying what they “get away with” is actually how value is determined. Labor does not have intrinsic dollar value.
And you agree that if there were not these supports to their workers, then walmart would have to pay more, right?
What do you think their workers would do instead, opt for homelessness?
Jobs are worth what it takes to fill them.There is no shortage of people who lack the education, skills, confidence, drive, whatever, to be employed at higher income levels, thus there’s no shortage of people who are willing to take minimum wage jobs. As octopus said, labor has no intrinsic value, only that which both parties are willing to accept.
People worked at these rates, and less, long before today’s government benefits existed.
Well, if they were not being subsidized by the govt, then they wouldn’t opt for homelessness, they just would be homeless. If you don’t make enough money at your job to pay your rent, you get kicked out, that’s how it works.
Labor has the value that companies will pay enough money to get the labor to deliver the goods and services demanded by their customers. If they do not have enough labor available at the current offered wage, then they will need to increase that wage.
And people suffered much worse conditions of poverty and destitution before today’s government’s benefits existed.
But the argument is that without benefits Walmart would have to pay it’s employees more. My question is why would Walmart have to pay more when the only option is homelessness? In other words, people aren’t going to refuse to take a minimum wage job because it doesn’t pay enough and choose no income at all instead.
True, but there’s no shortage of people who’ll work for minimum wage. Where will they all go instead so as not to be available to Walmart if Walmart won’t pay them more than that?
Perhaps, but that has nothing to do with the question of whether Walmart would be forced to pay more sans government benefits. In fact it just shows that people can and will work for less, and endure worse conditions than would exist now without government benefits.
No, it means that they will be homeless, and therefore, not very quality employees. If they have no home, and no transport, and don’t eat, then they are not going to meet the minimum standards that walmart needs in its employees.
If they don’t hire homeless people, they will have to pay more to hire people that can afford to not be homeless.
Two things there. One, currently, there *is *a shortage of people that will work for MW, which is why they have been raising their wages. Two, you are saying that we should encourage a race to the bottom on wages. You can almost always find someone who is willing to do your job for less than you are.
Who said that walmart should be forced to pay more? We are just pointing out that walmart is a beneficiary of those government benefits.
You are assuming that all minimum wage workers will find themselves homeless without government benefits. The more likely scenario is that they’d find their lifestyles somewhat squeezed but still manageable.
Actually, Walmart has been raising its wages as a PR move to appease its customers because of the reputation its developed for treating its employees badly. But at the same time it’s been ostensibly raising wages, it’s been simultaneously cutting hours to keep as many employees as possible as part-time workers with reduced company benefits, and it’s been installing more and more self-checkout registers. It’s also researching and planning ways to use technology to eliminate workers by having customers scan their own items as they take them from the shelf, and by having robots stock shelves. These are a way off yet but in the works. So the likelihood is that even while Walmart is raising wages, it’ll be paying out less and less in labor and using fewer people as time goes by.
You and Pantastic have both been saying Walmart would be forced to pay more were its employees not receiving assistance from the government.
“We” don’t have all the good jobs.
Quite a few of them, yes. You will have teenagers and maybe some college students. But, given that the majority of its workforce receives benefits, it would be losing the majority of its workforce.
Part is a PR move, but a large part is that you cannot attract and retain workers at the wages they were offering. There’s is nothing wrong with them moving to more automation, as that lowers the cost for everyone to receive their goods. It is the labor that they are using that they are being subsidized on, the labor that they aren’t using is irrelevant.
What do you mean by force? I took when you said that as raises in MW or other actual requirements by outside actors. If you are talking about the labor market, then “forced” is a poor choice of words to talk about voluntary agreements between employer and employee, especially when the employer has far more power than the employee.
But, yes, without govt benefits, walmart would not get enough quality applicants at the current offered wages to run its stores, that’s just basic economics.
Well yes, in Hollywood. But those are all liberals.
And again I ask just where you think those ‘quality’ applicants (scare quotes because many I’ve seen in various Walmarts are not what by any stretch of the imagination could be called ‘quality’) are gonna go. I find it hard to believe that in the face of a five or ten percent reduction in monthly income from losing their benefits (if that), these people are just gonna throw up their hands and opt for zero income and homelessness.
Many of the people who work at Walmart don’t depend on their salary alone to cover all their living costs. Many are young or married or living with someone and they pool their resources. Plus they aren’t necessarily stuck at that level all their lives. If they put in enough time and initiative they will move up the ladder to more responsibility and higher paying work. Or they eventually find employment elsewhere with higher pay. It’s easier for people to find better jobs as they get older because older employees have a better image for dependability and tend to have a stronger work ethic than do people in their late teens/early twenties.
It’s pretty much fallacious to look at the minimum wage and expect that it should provide what is often referred to as a livable wage. It’s entry level work and not intended to be the sole support of a household.
If without benefits it’s not enough to live on and avoid homelessness or starvation, they move away to live with family or friends, or if desperate enough, work on the black market (drugs or worse). And then WalMart raises their salary because they can’t get enough workers when offering that low.
We can argue back and forth over this all day but the facts don’t change, and the fact is that people worked for minimum wage and less long before the government benefits available today came into effect. It just simply isn’t true that no one will take minimum wage jobs without government benefits. The fact that minimum wage laws exist in the first place is proof enough that people will work for less.
So I’m out of this discussion now. You can continue to claim that companies only pay minimum wage because of government benefits and tax breaks for corporations but many decades of employment history show this to be incorrect.
Your personal biases against low wage workers aside, the quality of an applicant with a home and transportation is much higher than the quality of an applicant without.
It is far more than 5-10%. You have housing assistance, medical subsidies for themselves and their children, on top of food and direct payment subsidies.
And many do. You are correct that there are employees at walmart who are just subsidizing their income, and they have other primary means of support. But there are also many employees who that is their primary and only job, and their only other means of support is govt assistance.
Sometimes, but not everyone is able to move up, pretty much by definition. And that doesn’t address the issue that even if they are among the lucky ones to get promotions in the future, that doesn’t pay the rent or buy food now, while they are working for walmart, which is why the govt has to step in and pay to cover the costs of living that their employer does not.
I am not sure that this is true at all. People hire young kids because they are healthier and more physically capable than older individuals. What you say may be true in a white collar environment, but certainly not a blue collar one.
I agree, to some extent, that it should not be the employer’s responsibility to pay a living wage. I would be much happier with a universal income and then we can scrap MW, along with many labor laws, altogether. If society decides that it will support the worker pool for private businesses to draw upon and profit from their labor. As society has not done that, then someone has to be responsible for maintaining the labor that is drawn upon for their profit. And who better to make responsible for maintain the labor pool than the businesses that are profiting from it?
It is not a bad thing. I take advantage of it myself. I have more than one employee who receives some form of benefits from the govt. If they were not receiving those benefits, I would either have to pay them more, or they would not be employable. OTOH, I have also raised up more than one employee from the ranks of receiving govt benefits to being fully self supporting.
There is nothing wrong with taking assistance from the govt. The only point here is that it is hypocritical to point out the people that are receiving the benefits, while also not noting that corporations are getting a benefit from this as well.
And that’s another good point that I thought of but hadn’t seen a good way to broach. People with no legal alternatives to poverty will turn to illegal alternatives to poverty.
During my briefish bout with poverty a while back, I was highly tempted to get involved in some fairly lucrative enterprises that would have made the jobs that I had left behind seem inconsequential. That would have taken me out of the labor pool, either because I was pimping it up with all my cash, or in jail 'cause I got caught.