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RE: George Can't Work For You ... George Can't Sell To You

in #government • 9 years ago (edited)

That's like saying "If I want to be a slave, let me". Sure. If you want, go somewhere, offer your work cheaper than the minimum wage, and in a lot of cases the employer will find a way (if you can convince him that you won't sue :D ).
Nobody checks all the contracts, it's up to the employee to care about his given rights.

Here in Germany minimum wages were introduced last year. It's quite low (~9$ or 1500$ a month), but affected 4 Million workers, 10% of all employees. A lot of which had to receive welfare in addition to their full time job, because you can't feed a family from 1000$. Hell, I'd have issues to get by with this amount all by myself.
They didn't collectively decide that their work is worth less than a living, they just didn't have a way to barter for more than 3-6$ because there's enough cheap workforce. It's not about qualification in those jobs, so the only lever an employee has is his wage.
The situation kept getting worse since years. If the branches like hairdressers, gastronomy, storage and logistics hadn't collectively decided to not pay enough for a living nobody would've cared. Now that it's in effect since a year they're all still in business, so it didn't hurt them like they claimed before.

9 years ago in #government by
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     9 years ago 

    I think you misrepresent what it is to be a slave. If I voluntarily agree to pay you for the opportunity to learn a skill, this is far from slavery, In fact the opposite. If I am free to leave or not participate any longer, I am not a slave. Slavery requires a gun; the threat of violence. Like a minimum wage law for example. : )

    I'm finding it hard to pin down what your actual stance is. In one hand you're saying you support minimum wages laws and thereby the enforcement of such laws, in the other you seem to be saying you support skirting around them if such is your fancy where each involved party voluntarily agrees to a lesser wage.

    "given rights" I'm not sure from the context how you mean this but it is a pet peeve for me to correct. Rights are not given they are inherent in your existence. A government doesn't give or grant you rights.

    I'd recommend Henry Hazlitt's 'Economics in one lesson' https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson-2/ there is a section on minimum wage https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson-2/#calibre_link-41

    Trying to set minimums/maximums on wages is the same as issuing laws for price controls on goods and services. labor is a commodity. price controls have disastrous consequences, inefficiencies, artificial scarcity etc . The prior chapters discuss this in depth.

    There is no point in arguing that as a result of the restriction scheme at least the price of farm products has been raised and “the farmers have more purchasing power.” They have got it only by taking just that much purchasing power away from the city buyer. (We have been over all this ground before in our analysis of “parity” prices.) To give farmers money for restricting production, or to give them the same amount of money for an artificially restricted production, is no different from forcing consumers or taxpayers to pay people for doing nothing at all. In each case the beneficiaries of such policies get “purchasing power.” But in each case someone else loses an exactly equivalent amount. The net loss to the community is the loss of production, because people are supported for not producing. Because there is less for everybody, because there is less to go around, real wages and real incomes must decline either through a fall in their monetary amount or through higher living costs.

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