Comment on Anon gets an ultimatum
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 months agoThe point of these jobs is to generate surplus profit for your employer
No, the point is to teach kids that working retail sucks, and they should do everything they can to never have to do that again. There’s only excess profit if you’re sticking around more than a year or two.
Retail is to get experience with working. You show up on-time, interact with people, learn to organize stuff, etc. You get a taste of the most unpleasant parts of almost everything society has to offer, so you get an idea of which parts to actively avoid the most. If you don’t mind dealing with stupid customers, go into sales. If you don’t mind organizing stuff, try accounting. If you don’t mind managing shifts, get an MBA. And so on.
If you cannot afford to live, how the hell are you supposed to work?
Exactly! If we try to solve that problem by increasing the minimum wage, we’re just enabling more people to stick to crappy jobs and live unfulfilling lives. If a minimum wage job isn’t enough to live on, people will be forced to look elsewhere and get decent jobs that pay better and have better working conditions.
Retail and fast food should be the domain of teenagers and college students learning valuable life lessons about never being stuck in retail or fast food.
And while I agree they’re more of a band-aid than a structural benefit
They’re worse than a bandaid, they’re a full-body cast. They bind you so you can’t get out. It’s similar to the welfare system, where the time you spend getting benefits or whatever should be spent looking for a better job.
We don’t need a labor movement, we need something like UBI. My preference is NIT (Negative Income Tax), which is basically UBI but limited to people below a certain income.
If everyone could afford to survive (basic needs like shelter and food) without having to work a crappy job, they’d be more selective about the work they take on. Here’s my proposal:
- completely end the minimum wage - don’t just lower it, eliminate it entirely
- institute NIT where you’re guaranteed to be at the poverty line at a minimum, even without working (poverty line is ~$15k for a single person, depending on area)
- transform Social Security to fund this NIT, so it’s an actual safety net instead of a retirement program, and remove the income cap
Here are my expected results:
- wages for retail and fast food would plummet, and most workers would be replaced by high school and college kids; prices for fast food would also fall
- unemployment would go up, as would the number of people not looking for employment
- enrollment in trades would go up, since people now have the time to try something new
- unemployment would trend downward again after an initial shock, and average incomes would go up
- automation of jobs would be slowed in certain jobs, and increased in others, depending on desirability of those jobs
Addressing the symptoms is just going to exacerbate the issue. I believe this proposal cuts at the root of the problems we have, which is that people don’t like working in jobs that don’t go anywhere, but they feel they have to in order to afford to live. Let’s socialize the cost of undesirable jobs so we can encourage people to create more desirable jobs instead and automate the stuff nobody wants to do.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The retail industry does not exist to teach kids retail jobs suck.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
The industry, no, but the jobs do.
Compare working at Target to working at Costco. Target is a “working retail sucks” job, whereas Costco is a “retail can be a career” job. At Costco, you do a wider range of jobs, like driving forklifts, selling memberships, etc. At Target, you just restock shelves and occasionally help customers find stuff. Target wants disposable employees, so its onboarding process is streamlined to narrow roles (i.e. perfect for students looking for a part-time job).
So while those jobs may not have been created with that in mind, that’s how they’ve been optimized. Most retail jobs are intended to be disposable, which means they’re targeting the low-end of the market.
Laurentide@pawb.social 2 months ago
None of this changes the fact that a job’s purpose is to create profit for the employer and that any educational benefit to the worker is entirely coincidental. Target doesn’t care how many teenagers need to learn that “working retail sucks”. That’s not what the job is for. Target only cares how many people are required to keep their stores running well enough to make money for them.
If you think there should be some kind of work-study program specifically for teenagers so they can gain a bit of job experience as part of their education, fine. That’s something that can be discussed. But don’t lie to us that Walmart is this program.
“[job type] is intended for teenagers” is nothing but corporate propaganda to justify poverty wages. If it were actually true then why the hell is McDonald’s open during school hours? Which teenagers are supposed to be working those jobs?
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Yes, nobody is counting the number of teenagers and creating that many jobs, that’s not a thing that happens in a market economy. The actual mechanics are that a certain amount of unskilled labor exists, so companies adjust how their businesses operate to take advantage of it. If labor is expensive, businesses find a way to reduce labor needs (e.g. automation), and if it’s cheap, they create jobs.
So, if we increase the minimum wage, businesses will hire fewer teens because they’re too expensive for the quality of labor and inflexibility of schedules. If we decrease the minimum wage, they may find a way to use more of that cheaper labor.
Yeah, that’s one of their busiest times, so they’ll make sure their labor needs are met. Maybe they’ll pay more, or use college students who have more flexible schedules. Teens tend to get less valuable shifts, like late nights, and that’s for a reason.
If labor is too expensive, they’ll also probably just close earlier because the labor costs aren’t worth the minimal business they’d get.
If we instead use something like a Negative Income Tax or Universal Basic Income, it won’t matter if wages go down because people will have enough to live on. And if we only provide NIT to citizens and permanent residents, we won’t have as much competition at the low end and can reserve those jobs for our teenagers. So a teen could make $5/hr and be happy because they don’t need to pay rent, and a college student could make $5/hr and receive $10/hr or whatever as NIT and be happy because they can afford rent and tuition. We don’t need a $15 minimum wage in that scenario.