gbaji wrote:
So what? The people making minimum wage +$1, and minimum wage +$2, minimum wage +$3, etc are as well. What's the point? You don't honestly think there's some conspiracy out there where millions of employees are paid just a few pennies over minimum wage so that the employer can say "I pay more than minimum wage" do you? Let me link to
a personal income wiki. Look at the "income distribution" chart. It divides each line into $2.5k/year blocks. And while the percentage in each block does decrease as the numbers get higher, it's a relatively smooth change over time. It's not like there's this mass of people making just over minimum wage.
The point is that people near minimum wage are affected by minimum wage increases. The closer you are to this, the more you are affected. Your argument was saying that only people making exactly minimum wage are affected, which is ridiculous. Employers aren't paying people slightly over minimum wage to make a statistical point either, they pay slightly over minimum wage to try and keep employees slightly longer at sub standard wages. Amusing straw man though.
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How do you objectively measure "working as much as they can"? Also, this puts us in the strange position of creating a measurement that increases the number of "people in need" by raising the bar to which we grant the free thing. So if I decide that everyone earning less than $30k/year deserves food stamps, now your measurement says that if an employer isn't paying someone more than $30k/year, they aren't paying them enough.
that's fair, lets say full time then. 40-60 hours a week. The rest of your sentence is correct, except that you're painting the line where someone gets food stamps as arbitrary which it's not.
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That becomes completely circular. Someone is picking an arbitrary number at which they think is "not enough" for someone to make, setting food stamp conditions to that, and then that is used to "prove" the initial assumption (that it's not enough pay).
It's not circular at all. No one is picking a number for food stamps in order to somehow justify food stamps, that's another straw man. The number is picked using the standard of how much money is needed to support yourself and your dependents with lodging and food. If you come up short, food stamps are there to help compensate. This criteria is also a good point at which to say, if you're working full time, you shouldn't be below this number. There is no circularity at all, you determine a number that people need to live, and move forward to multiple conclusions, one is that people who make less
need food stamps. The other is that someone working full time should be over this line.
The rest of your rhetoric is just that. I think a company needs to be responsible to it's employees. Taking advantage of them to squeeze out the maximum profit is unethical. Profit is fine, but there should be a responsibility to ensure that someone who works for you full time, especially for an extended period of time is able to take care of themselves, which is in the lower tier of our economy, often not the case. Your argument has merit, but falls apart when a company has too much power and unbalances the relationship. At such a point, when they can start taking advantage of the employees, there needs to be laws that step in and prevent this from happening. This has been so clearly illustrated over and over again, that the concept that labour laws somehow hurt the workers in the long run is ludicrous.
Edited, Mar 4th 2014 8:06pm by Xsarus