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this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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Is no one else going to blame an overly specific minimum wage? I couldn’t find anything too specific but in California, it looks like:
Of course they’re going to outsource drivers, This looks like a nice Christmas gift to UberEats/DoirDash
I think this is a novel idea and an interesting thought experiment.
If we passed this federally, I think it's most likely we see an outsourcing - to ourselves. With the market floor raised so high across the board, distortionary effects would then kick in and what I posit we'd see is a shitload of both business and consumer flight to rural areas.
Prices for rent, obviously, would go through the fuckin roof. This would cause a mass exodus to surrounding areas, but I think business investment would actually beat them, because if you're paying 60k/year anyway, you may as well put your facility in the cheapest possible location.
Businesses are already shifting toward being physically close to their suppliers/major logistics hubs, to save cost elsewhere, so big "shipping towns" (which are, essentially, a few big wholesale distributors and nothing else) could see massive investment.
What's weird for me is that this may actually help our housing situation in the medium term, as explosive growth in these areas even out demand hotspots.
Idk about high raises in labor market floors to predict much beyond that, but it's something I'll definitely check out.
These aren't completely pie-in-the-sky proposals, either. Simply tying maximum compensation for publicly owned companies would start this kind of a chain rolling, in a smaller way, I think. Labor prices would jump ludicrously just from the amount of low-skill labor employed by major companies.
Inflation would be bonkers and you can't raise interest rates too fast or you basically nuke your economy, so how this plays out for the average joe is anyone's guess. Fun to think about tho
I can't for the life of me think that this will be good for them though. Food delivery services are notoriously shitty/slow. If I order a pizza and have to wait for an intendent person to come pick it up and deliver it when ever is convenient for them? Thats not gonna work for me... and I would be loud and boisterous to the company.
In an alternate timeline where restaurants never thought to offer delivery (or regulated against it…since objectively it is kind of strange how we do it now), but did offer takeout, I’d expect private food courier services would have thrived. Especially in denser areas.
Even in an era before DoorDash and internet, it’d be a call-center/concierge style.
But also gig drivers aren't getting the minimum. Uber and Lyft promise you'll make the minimum through the ride fares if you work a whole hour. But that doesn't happen. Many people don't notice because the pay is distributed across the rides but some have actually done the math with their daily totals. They also just lost a court case about paying mileage, so they not have to reimburse mileage they weren't doing before.
With a business climate like that it's no wonder everyone else is jettisoning delivery drivers. The rideshare companies are getting away with murder by comparison.
This is what's so annoying. I had literal arguments with both people online and IRL about this massive jump in minimum wage and how it would have this exact effect. I was told over and over that it didn't work like that, that people needed a livable wage, etc. My argument was that not all work has equal value and that minimum wage jobs aren't intended as jobs you raise a family on. They're a stepping stone as you enter the workforce and begin to develop/gain skills to be able to do work which has more value. With the insane increase in fast food minimum wage only one of two things will happen. Option one is that the price of the food shoots up and can no longer be competitive. Why would you pay $30 for fast food when you can go to an actual restaurant and get better quality for the same price? This leads many of these fast food joints to close and with it the jobs. Option two is that companies find ways to cut services and/or automate to offset the increased cost. The end result here is that once again the jobs go away.
I would love to have a proponent of this explain to me how no jobs is preferable to lower paying jobs. As a highschool kid, I was grateful to have my minimum wage job.
Except minimum wage should support you fully because, as you may have noticed in high school, NOT everyone working at your minimum-wage workplace was "a high school kid". Walmart and a lot of other places that skate by offering minimum wage effectively outsource the rest of the money they SHOULD be paying to the government - what you may know as "your fucking taxes". You wanna see less people using welfare? You should be out there demanding companies pay more - some estimates are that Walmart's profits are effectively buoyed as much as 40% by taxpayer-funded welfare programs like EBT, SNAP, TANF, and various forms of rent assistance, and there are similar numbers for other minimum-wage retailers and workplaces.
"BUT THAT MIGHT RAISE PRICES", you cry? Well, here's the good thing - by raising MINIMUM wage, you can go to your boss and say "hey I'm only making $17 an hour doing [highly skilled job], that's only $2 more than minimum, could we work out a raise?" And if you get your whole workplace to do this, or enough of your fellow coworkers doing similar positions, they would definitely feel far more compelled.
Actually everyone I worked with in high school was a high school kid. The only person older than that was the store owner, and she obviously was making more due to her larger investment/risk.
Here's the problem with your entire pitch, I'm going to be paying taxes regardless. They will never go down, they will only ever go up. If one problem is solved the government will simply use my taxes for something else. This is how government works. Additionally, increased wages get passed onto the customer. I know many people here like to pretend that they don't, but prices either go up, or quality/quantity go down. That IS what happens, so I'll be paying for it either way.
Your whole argument about an increase in minimums allowing other workers to request raises also doesn't work. Instead what happens is the increase in pay causes an increase in prices, negating the gains across the board. We just saw this exact thing play out during covid. Stores had to very quickly increase the wages they were paying, prices went up, negating the increase in wages.
My argument is that the jobs DIDN'T go away, they just became gig jobs. In the big picture the increase had no effect except for speeding up the transition from one form of delivery job to a different form of delivery job.
Min wage has to cover living expenses because otherwise people are forced to make up the difference from wellfare. So in effect it is a subsidy from taxpayers to companies that pay low wages.
Full time, min-wage workers cannot afford rent for a 1-bedroom flat in 90% of the entire country.
But that IS the jobs going away. You converted a full time job into an occasional time job. Say you were make $15/hr 40hrs/week. That's $600/week. Now they convert your full time job into a gig job and you're making $20/hr, but you only work 10 hours per week. You're now making $200/week. You now need to try and make up that $400/week shortfall in your income. Good thing you got that massive pay increase though, right?
Not 'part-time' work , gig work. Ubereats, Deliveroo etc. A lot of these guys are working full time. Maybe you weren't paying attention to those guys you said couldn't argue with you.
I thought we were supposed to hate gig work because it exploited the workers. Wasn't that the entire point of California's AB 5? Why all of a sudden are we in favor of gig work?
I'm not