Most of these services are exactly the places that expect the most demanding work for the lowest pay. Easy to fix: make sure the c-suite does not get more than 10x of the lowest salary in the company, and suddenly the there is enough money available for a living wage.
Comment on Minimum Wage Must Cover Basics
Lemming6969@lemmy.world 12 hours agoAre there not worthwhile services or items that someone may want to or have to do that don’t profit 50k/yr per person? Should all of those things just go away or be banned?
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 11 hours ago
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 12 hours ago
If there’s work that needs doing, that work should pay a living wage. If it doesn’t, yes, it shouldn’t exist. Raise prices until it can support those workers, and if people won’t buy it at that price, get rid of it. Otherwise, the argument you’re making is that someone needs to do this work, but that person should be destitute.
Lemming6969@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Lots of things are nice to have’s, almost everything actually. Door greeter, ice cream server, shoe shiner, small gyms, and probably a million more. There are so many small things that by themselves, cannot generate even 2 or 3 employees worth of revenue, which is like at least 250,000 a year. Lots of jobs have to be part time or side hustles, and when you allow that, some people will take those jobs as their primary full time job even though it is not a livable wage. Sometimes because that’s what’s available, and sometimes because that’s all they can do. If you open that door then someone will walk through it, and if you close that door, I bet a shit ton of things we all enjoy would disappear. For better or worse, without UBI, there will be jobs that don’t and cannot pay a living wage, that will exist, that people would like to exist, and that people will do. Any rules or sentiment surrounding that must take all that into account.
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 9 hours ago
A lot of jobs only exist because we need people to be working. There’s no societal need for a door greeter. If your ice cream shop doesn’t generate enough revenue to pay someone working there a living wage, it isn’t a viable business, or your prices are too low.
You mention UBI and really, that’s the answer, but without it, everyone needs to work to survive and when there isn’t enough work that needs doing, we invent bullshit work just to say we’re employing someone.
Lemming6969@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
And this is how we get Amazon as the only source of ice cream, to make it cost effective or viable. Everyone here is just virtue signaling, the reality is shit would collapse or at least consolidate to total garbage without low wage jobs. The only solution is UBI, and that can work in societies with extreme logistical excess who also have a culture that wants to help the less fortunate. That’s surely not the US.