I honestly don’t understand why there aren’t more people who, when given the platform to discuss minimum wage, don’t simply distill it to the simplest of facts:
- A forty hour work week is considered full time.
- It’s considered as such because it takes up the amount of time we as a society have agreed should be considered the maximum work schedule required of an employee. (this, of course, does not always bear out practically, but just follow me here)
- A person working the maximum amount of time required should earn enough for that labor to be able to survive. Phrased this way, I doubt even most conservatives could effectively argue against it, and out of the mouth of someone verbally deft enough to dance around the pathos-based jabs conservative pundits like to use to avoid actually debating, it could actually get opps thinking.
- Therefore, if an employee is being paid less than [number of dollars needed for the post-tax total to pay for the basic necessities in a given area divided by forty] per hour, they are being ripped off and essentially having their labor, productivity, and profit generation value stolen by their employer.
- Wages are a business expense, and if a company cannot afford to pay for its labor, it is by definition a failing business. A company stealing labor to stay afloat (without even touching those that do so simply to increase profit margins and/or management/executive pay/bonuses) is no more ethical than a failing construction company breaking into a lumber yard and stealing wood.
- Our goal as a society should be to protect each other, especially those that most need protection, not to subsidize failing businesses whose owners could quite well subsidize them on their own.
I wish I had this post two hours ago.
A living wage should enable a middle class lifestyle, not just basic necessities. It should enable necessities, leisure, and savings, or else we’re also saying that there are people who deserve to devote the entirety of their productivity to surviving another week of labor in order to do more labor with no possibility of enrichment or advancement.
“…they are being ripped off and essentially having their labor, productivity, and profit generation value stolen by their employer.”
This is capitalism. No amount of liberal analysis about labor being “a business expense” (and that businesses that can’t afford to pay employees an adequate living wage are “failing businesses” – Wal Mart would beg to differ, but I digress) is going to change the simple fact that labor is ripped off by the nature of surplus value appropriation by capitalists within the capitalist mode of production. Workers do not/can not take home the full product of their labor under this system. Like, by definition. You provide work, the entire value of it belongs to the capitalist, then the capitalist dolls out mere fractions of that value back to you so that you can just get by and repeat the process the next day. This whole thing is maintained via property hierarchy, and it dehumanizes people by treating their labor as just another cost to be minimized, no different from other overhead.
