391–400 of 451 posts
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Median (average) measures are the refuge of the scoundrel. Refuting the (willful) abuse of statistics is like trying to refute numerology with reason.
Refuting numerology with reason works quite well for most people.
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These "laws and regulations" still apply to the agency that hires those workers. You're simply paying for them to carry the risk. You can argue that such agencies are more likely to disregard laws and regulations, but how would you fix that? With laws and regulations?
If Big Publicly Listed Company A contracts with Small Fly-by-Night LLC B to provide workers to vacuum and empty wastebaskets, and it turns out that LLC B is illegally withholding wages, then Company A could be partially liable because they should have done due diligence and picked reputable law-abiding suppliers. I can think of a couple different legal metaphors for this: 1. Something similar to banking's Know-Your-C…
For instance, how likely are your Fly-by-night employee or sub-sub-contractor to rat out the Fly-by-night? They may get a beating, their checks withheld, the Fly-by-night go under.
If it still happens, Big Publicly Listed company pays for it to go away in a settlement.
If it goes to court, they Big Company can say "we work very diligently to avoid this situation in the future and what happened is in no way indicative of our values".
Etc.
There's a lot of reasons for this but one of the largest is the near invisible (to me) structural shift from direct hire to contractors for jobs at the lower end of the wage/salary spectrum. There is a fantastic long form article that articulates this better than I can at: https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenn... The portion relevant to this discussion: "Thirty years ago, she says, you could wa…
> let’s be honest, its actual purpose—is that workers get a lot less out of their jobs than they used to. Do you really belive there is a collective of business owners who thought "yeah, let's outsource everything, because f..k employees"? Obviously it's about specialization. Why a software house should hire a cleaning lady? They are not in the business of cleaning, they know nothing about it and they don't want to e…
I honestly think that having people in house to do these kind of jobs can be a benefit. A good receptionist for example can be a real asset. But they are hard to find.
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Yeah, and pressure their system and degrade their standards, they've build over years themselves (in 1900 Sweden was not much different than a third world country today). Why do those other people get some automatic raise?
> Why do those other people get some automatic raise? Because other people are constantly told how great Europe/Scandinavia is. So these 'other people' just want to have good life by moving there.
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> The minimum wage does not naturally rise The minimum amount of money you have to pay for someone to show up for any job rises (and falls) alongside demand for labor in the broader economy. > Under our current system that heavily favors returning productivity gains to capital instead of labor... If you look at the profit margins of those companies that employ a lot of low-end labor, you will find that they're genera…
> The minimum amount of money you have to pay for someone to show up for any job rises (and falls) alongside demand for labor in the broader economy. Oh, what that it were so simple. There are far more factors governing "market wages", which you are describing, including labor supply at a given skill level, automation, political representation of laborers vs employers, and how that representation manifests as power i…
Maybe that's the intention, but what a minimum wage actually does is remove the possibility for anyone to work below an arbitrary number of dollars.
If that value is lower than the going market rate for low-skilled labor, minimum wage makes no difference.
Above that, it removes more and more people from the "eligible to work" pool. There's nothing humane about preventing people from being able to work, especially when you don't have a welfare system to pick up those who are now doomed to unemployment.
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> The minimum wage does not naturally rise The minimum amount of money you have to pay for someone to show up for any job rises (and falls) alongside demand for labor in the broader economy. > Under our current system that heavily favors returning productivity gains to capital instead of labor... If you look at the profit margins of those companies that employ a lot of low-end labor, you will find that they're genera…
If everyone has to raise the minimum wage all, everyone has to raise prices accordingly and ROI remains the same.
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On the other hand, it's never been easier to start a company and instantly reach a global market.
Not only that, but you can draw collaborators from the entire world, and even get investment capital from the globe (like kickstarter, etc.). I remember when I wanted to sell in France, I had to find a French distributor, make a French version of the product, guess how many would sell there, ship a pile to the distributor, the distributor collects most of the money, and unsold merchandise is scrapped. If I didn't hav…
This all true, and empowering for those who have the relevant know-how and opportunities. However, these apparent efficiencies are built on the back of the factors that GP points out. Empowerment for some relies on structures that disempower others. Agency staff live precariously; the companies that use them have ever tighter margins, they are increasingly hollow shells that serve only to generate cash not to provide the security of employment.
The convenience we appear to benefit from is an ever-thinner veneer that disguises deeper problems.
Now, the thing is there is a lot of factories and stuff that needs to be created in order for the entire world to get productive. So until the entire world is productive we need to spend a lot of our current productivity on it.
Btw, the 1% consumes more per capita than the rest but they don't really consume a big fraction of the economy overall, when you give them money they mostly invest it.
So the ultimate result is that in times where there is need to build a lot of factories or equivalent capital will get a bigger share of the pie, and as things stabilize workers will get a bigger share of the pie. Currently thanks to globalism there is need for immense capital investments to increase productivity so of course capital needs to take huge share of our productivity. And personally I'd rather see that another factory gets built in China providing them better productivity and living standard than seeing American workers get another car. This isn't rocket science.