Comment on Minimum Wage Must Cover Basics
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 11 hours agoIf 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 10 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 8 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 7 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.
arrow74@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
Amazing how sone countries have much more survivable minimum wages, more vacation time, low cost health care, and still have local ice cream shops
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 7 hours ago
Low-wage jobs are just exploiting desperate people. If the cost of living were more reasonable, it wouldn’t be an issue - it doesn’t need to be an ice cream shop paying $40 / hr, it needs to be housing and necessities being cost-limited or subsidized. Subsidies for necessities and increased taxes on luxuries would help.