If they are working full time through the year, they likely aren't spending much time in school and whatever work they are doing should bring in enough money for them to not be homeless, starving, or unable to meet other basic needs like healthcare.
I'd further note that the government and it's taxpayers pay the toll regardless of whether or not we increase the minimum wage. We just end up paying the cost elsewhere in a way that's dollar for dollar a lot less efficient (policing, ER visits, homeless shelters, etc.)
Arguments aside, what do you feel would be an appropriate minimum wage for someone working a job in the US? What factors go into that number? In what situations does that number change?
By living with friends or family, state assistance, and/or charity.
How are you supposed to live on 0 wage? Inevitably for some people that's what a minimum wage means: There is some work with some wage less than a minimum for which this person in this place could work, and they can't because of the minimum. Among other considerations any minimum wage has to balance that harm vs the harm for people who would be paid fairly more with a higher minimum wage.
It's also just the case that an extremely small portion of the public makes minimum wage, and since they're exceptional each of their situations are exceptional in its own way.
Why should age matter at all if the person is doing the exact same job? Children already get paid less than minimum wage when there are jobs they legally can't do. The owner of the McDonald's I worked at in high school loved hiring 14 and 15 year olds because he could make them do every single menial job there except cook the food. They were run ragged same as the rest of us for the bonuses only the manager got.
> How can anyone justify paying a high school kid who works part time most of the year a living wage.
Pretty easily. Once you consider how productive an even below-average worker is in the US, the idea of running a business so poorly that you can’t make bank while paying somebody a living wage seems pretty embarrassing.
While the “teenager” line is often vilified as a sign of unfettered greed (which it is), in my experience it’s been more of the respite of folks with so little business sense that it boggles the mind that they would be an employer.
I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business” out loud with a straight face, there are some folks that gleefully proclaim stuff like that as if they’re talking about something other than themselves
High average productivity can just as well come from aggressively not employing anyone that doesn't drive the revenue per head-count forward. I suggest that the below-average workers productivity is inflated by aggressive fat cutting-- and that we'd be better off as a society if we made more room for novice and trainee employees. But this has gone off-topic of the subject of minimum wage because very few people actually receive minimum wage in the US.
> I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business”
An inexperienced new employee can easily be a net loss for a long time as they mess up more stuff than they produce while they learn. This isn't tolerated by a lot of modern business philosophy so the jobs and industries that work like this increasingly just don't exist in the US.
The only response I want to read about this starts with, "Historically, the lurch and jerk of technical progress, paranoia manufactured by ubiquitous media, government financial overreach, and heavy-handed speculative projections shattered the ability of many organizations to establish meaningful turnover and generational handoff ..."
Easily. If the job cannot pay a living wage, it should not exist. We'll get there with structural demographics eventually (pushing up wages as labor supply diminishes as the fertility rate continues to rapidly fall), but it would be nice if we could not make so many people suffer in the interim ("time value of life"). Several states are removing child labor restrictions due to "labor shortages," for example. So, you have to starve the beast of underpaid labor.
We have the means, it's a choice. We could make a better choice, but if we don't, demographics dynamics will make it for us.
d4mi3n|10 months ago
If they are working full time through the year, they likely aren't spending much time in school and whatever work they are doing should bring in enough money for them to not be homeless, starving, or unable to meet other basic needs like healthcare.
I'd further note that the government and it's taxpayers pay the toll regardless of whether or not we increase the minimum wage. We just end up paying the cost elsewhere in a way that's dollar for dollar a lot less efficient (policing, ER visits, homeless shelters, etc.)
Arguments aside, what do you feel would be an appropriate minimum wage for someone working a job in the US? What factors go into that number? In what situations does that number change?
marcus_holmes|10 months ago
nullc|10 months ago
How are you supposed to live on 0 wage? Inevitably for some people that's what a minimum wage means: There is some work with some wage less than a minimum for which this person in this place could work, and they can't because of the minimum. Among other considerations any minimum wage has to balance that harm vs the harm for people who would be paid fairly more with a higher minimum wage.
It's also just the case that an extremely small portion of the public makes minimum wage, and since they're exceptional each of their situations are exceptional in its own way.
sarchertech|10 months ago
Larrikin|10 months ago
jrflowers|10 months ago
Pretty easily. Once you consider how productive an even below-average worker is in the US, the idea of running a business so poorly that you can’t make bank while paying somebody a living wage seems pretty embarrassing.
While the “teenager” line is often vilified as a sign of unfettered greed (which it is), in my experience it’s been more of the respite of folks with so little business sense that it boggles the mind that they would be an employer.
I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business” out loud with a straight face, there are some folks that gleefully proclaim stuff like that as if they’re talking about something other than themselves
nullc|10 months ago
> I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business”
An inexperienced new employee can easily be a net loss for a long time as they mess up more stuff than they produce while they learn. This isn't tolerated by a lot of modern business philosophy so the jobs and industries that work like this increasingly just don't exist in the US.
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
meltyness|10 months ago
notjulianjaynes|10 months ago
toomuchtodo|10 months ago
We have the means, it's a choice. We could make a better choice, but if we don't, demographics dynamics will make it for us.
https://usafacts.org/articles/minimum-wage-america-how-many-...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://joshbersin.com/2023/09/why-we-are-entering-a-secular...
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-...
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-employers-hiring/101730
https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attac...
platevoltage|10 months ago
sarchertech|10 months ago
It’s also possible that the increased artificial demand for high school labor pushes their average wage to just below the adult minimum wage.
apercu|10 months ago
Send ‘em to the mines and the meat packing plants for $7/hr because they’re only kids!
maxerickson|10 months ago