Not if they can’t afford to live on their wages, they aren’t.

Yossarian wrote:

Not if they can’t afford to live on their wages, they aren’t.

But that's up to them to sort Yoss. They don't have to take the Job I'm offering if the terms don't suit. Or they don't have to stay once a better offer comes along. And if no one takes the money I offer I either have to offer more or not employ someone and try to cover the work another way.

RedDave2 wrote:

Yossarian wrote:

Not if they can’t afford to live on their wages, they aren’t.

But that's up to them to sort Yoss. They don't have to take the Job I'm offering if the terms don't suit. Or they don't have to stay once a better offer comes along. And if no one takes the money I offer I either have to offer more or not employ someone and try to cover the work another way.

Do people really have that choice, though?

Here in the UK, if you’re on benefits and you’re offered a job and you turn it down, your benefits are cut off.

And is everyone getting better offers? Some people will never climb the ladder, they’ll never earn more than minimum wage for whatever reason. Do they deserve to never be able to afford to live because they don’t have the skills to change their jobs?

Yossarian wrote:

RedDave2 wrote:

Yossarian wrote:

Not if they can’t afford to live on their wages, they aren’t.

But that's up to them to sort Yoss. They don't have to take the Job I'm offering if the terms don't suit. Or they don't have to stay once a better offer comes along. And if no one takes the money I offer I either have to offer more or not employ someone and try to cover the work another way.

Do people really have that choice, though?

Here in the UK, if you’re on benefits and you’re offered a job and you turn it down, your benefits are cut off.

And is everyone getting better offers? Some people will never climb the ladder, they’ll never earn more than minimum wage for whatever reason. Do they deserve to never be able to afford to live because they don’t have the skills to change their jobs?

The benefits thing is a bit shitty, I'll agree. But most people have the ability to get better offers. If they choose not to, its their choice in most cases.

Anyway, it's late and I'm off to bed. I don't think we'll ever quite see eye to eye on this kind of thing.

Which is odd because Escape assures me your a closet center right kinda guy...

They want to introduce a universal wage here, which in theory is a nice idea. But the reality is that if you live in the city it isn't enough to get by, but if you live in a village it's a load of money, so it hardly seems fair. A minimum wage is the same, as the cost of living across the country is hugely different. Having to pay a waiter in a small local bar 15€ a hour would be ruinous as the business might not even make enough to cover that in a day.

Unless we’re getting our terms badly mixed up here, so let’s be clear. If a business is employing someone on a full time permanent contract it should be their responsibility to ensure the wage paid is commensurate with “enough to live on” and that “enough” should be defined by a 3rd party regulatory agency (gov, or what have you). If the business does not meet that responsibility it should be the job of the regulatory agency to enforce it.

This is basic functioning society stuff here. If you drink too much capitalistic soda then sure you can start to believe the shite about market forces (“if they don’t want my shittily paid job they don’t have to take it” and “increased wages = increased cost of living”) but I would have hoped anyone in here would know that is not how it works in practice.

You as a business owner are extracting Labour from an employee and generating profit from that Labour (AFTER you have paid them). That gives you the moral imperative. If you are not or cannot profit from that Labour (AFTER you have paid them) you either cannot support that employment or your business is failing.

There is in all cases nuance: if your trading is suffering temporary slow down, there could be gov grants; you could agree with your workforce (pref via union type group representation) temporary cuts in pay or hours and so on. But in general the above stands and any other view is frankly heinous

What was Marx’s favourite meal cos that’s all you’re serving now

What can I say some of us are more equal than others

Who decides how much a person needs to live on? If you have a family to support should you be paid more than if you live at home with your parents?

RedDave2 wrote:

No one is contracting someone to do 100s of hours of work for a tenner though are they.

No, but the system will allow it, and in some industries, will encourage that. And that's awful. 
But this wasn't what I wanted to seize on.

RedDave2 wrote:

I'm completely for workers having rights and being treated with dignity. I just don't feel its a fair expectation that every job has to be enough to sustain a single adults life style. Unless you put a ceiling on what a person can earn or at least a rubber band link (ie top earner can only be x times minimum wage) than there will always be this problem and hiking the minimum wage up won't solve it... It's up to the employer to work out what they can pay that get that help from someone. If they can't afford the extra help, it's not on the government to fill the gap (with the exception if we are talking grants to help start ups grow to a point where they can employ more people on their own)

This is the thing. I can't disagree with that.

Because moving the responsibility of providing a minimum wage to the employer, will just move the problem.

There's going to be a cut off point, where it's only profitable for the largest companies to directly satiate the demand for a proper minimum wage and, first thought, is that it will price the small and medium enterprises to fold, which will mean less competition in very key industries. 

For example, while Tescos can stand to do much more in their position, as a prospective employee, I'm better off working stacking shelfs for them than any other grocer. In fact, I'm more likely to get a job from them, than my local grocers, which will very likely be staffed nepotically to make the business profitable.

I'd say instead, that companies of a certain size should be forced to pay a living wage, and more tax, with those taxes being redistributed as an incentive for smaller enterprises to give staff a living wage.

But this would be flawed too, because you can imagine why a larger enterprise, especially one that only just makes the size threshold, would think this is unfair.

But TLDR, basically, I do see Davy's point.

But the alternative will be oligopolies by default.

At least now, you have a (diminishing) long tail of small enterprise. Some who also do see the business merit of paying their staff fairly for their time, and supporting the communities they are tied to.

Without centralising everything, the fairest thing you can do, is give smaller operations the help and support they need to succeed and fail on their own merit.

Yossarian wrote:

I mean, we wouldn’t tell small businesses that they didn’t have to comply with waste disposal laws due to the cost on their business, would we?

No. But you will be playing with fire, almost literally, if you made it prohibitively expensive to do. Whether that's with a direct mistake, or a miscalculation.

Tying that back to Davy's point, if he can't offer a job to someone because of the cost of doing it, then he himself might not then make a living wage, and the person who would have taken the job, would definitely be no closer to a living wage either.

Or alternatively, Tescos (though Davy works in the restaurant business by the sound of it, right?) get another employee.

All of my stupefied response to "fuck you and work for what we pay you" attitude aside - what's the alternative, again, please?

People itt who support a proper living minimum wage have provided nuance, have provided answers to questions, have provided context (differences between small and large corps, support for former in grants and tax breaks and so on, definition of living wage set by government agencies based on research on living costs, definition of full time permanent work as opposed to temporary contracts and part time contracts, and so on).

People itt who have reservations about a proper living minimum wage have provided unsubstantiated mutterings about inflation (prove it, or provide any evidence that this could be so), increased burden proportionally on smaller companies (umm it's not exactly a level playing field today but ok: regulation and support can be added to the conversation as per Yoss, and more tools besides - surely better than "fuck the workers", no?). So what's your solution to people NOT being paid enough to live by their full-time permanent employers? The only one this country has come up with is meagre state support, which amounts to state-subsidised workforces for large companies. Can you do better?

Yossarian wrote:

I don’t care one bit if jobs that don’t offer living wages disappear because of this. I don’t see it as a positive thing at all that there may be some people working 40 hours per week who can’t afford to live on their wages.

Oh, absolutely. 100% agree with the last sentence.

The first one though, is suggestive of a totalitarian form of governance, and I personally wouldn't want to support that form of socialism, because you fuck social mobility all over (only state chartered entrepreneurs have an opportunity to run a business? That sounds unfair to me).  

That said, most especially coming from my background, I think a universal living wage would be a very good thing. And until it becomes a reality, I'm not going to say it's a silly idea. But until we're sure it works, there's no problem in discussing why we think it might not.

For some people, being an entrepreneur is their job, and the value they create, even the bad ones, is high. 
Much like artists, which is where we started the discussion.

But one thing I think we do agree on, is that the extremely successful entrepreneurs and artists, should be paying a good deal more money to support the bad ones. And I also believe that relief should incentivise people to be ambitious, and be something more than a handout.

Pop & Roujin are desperately seeking housewives, eh?