For Rhea to have been entirely on point here would require people's unwillingness to accept casualties to be evidence for businesses causing employee injury; i.e., it would require deriving a conclusion about a matter of fact from a value judgment.
No, it doesn't. That the value has changed over time is a matter of fact, not judgement. No amount of opinion from you or me or Rhea will change the fact that society used to accept starving homeless labourers, and no longer does so. The reason why the circumstances have changed (fact) is because social expectations and values have also changed (also fact).
Just because it's a fact that somebody values something such and such an amount doesn't stop it from being a value judgment. You claim (or, perhaps, you claim Rhea claims) employers (by which you presumably mean specifically those paying MW) can not make a profit without actively contributing to starvation and maimed children. The fact as to what people's value judgments are, regarding whether or not they wish to accept starving homeless laborers, has no bearing on whether the MW-paying employers are, in point of fact, actively contributing to starvation. You can call the value a fact instead of a judgment if you please but it will still be a fact that does not imply the conclusion it was offered in support of.
I'm arguing for a disconnect between the business and employee poverty because no one has exhibited a mechanism by which the business causes employees to be poor.
Has anyone argued for one?
That's the problem. You appear to be arguing for a connection between the business and employee poverty without any causal mechanism. You say they're actively contributing to starvation and they're creating a negative externality. Do they do this via a physical mechanism, or via magic? If you're just preaching to the choir and you don't care whether infidels believe you, then I guess you have no reason to try to explain a mechanism by which MW employment causes starvation, or poverty, or harm to third parties. The "living wage" choir talk like they believe in magic.
Cost of employee to society = X (not starving, desperate or creating other externalities)
Cost to employee to business Y
Where Y < X, society is having to subsidise the business.
Cost of unemployed person to society = Z (not starving, desperate or creating other externalities)
Cost of employee to society = X (not starving, desperate or creating other externalities)
Cost of employee to business = Y
Cost of employment to business = Y
Cost of employment to society = X - Z.
When X < Z, regardless of Y the business is providing a positive externality to society, to the tune of (Z - X). As you say, it's the
employee creating the externalities if he doesn't receive X. Your math would only make sense if it were the business that caused the employee to exist in the first place.
My math is based on the fact that the business is claiming all of the labour of an individual, but not meeting off all his costs.
No, they aren't claiming it. You appear to be using "claim" in some sense other than its normal meaning in English; if you want to keep pushing this line of argument I suggest you find a way to express whatever you're getting at without using that word. People claim mining plots and inventions; the word means "assert one's right to", i.e., "You can't have that without my permission; it's mine." Employers don't do that. Anybody else who wants the employee's labor can buy it from the employee and the current employer gets no say.
As far as meeting all the individual's costs goes, he'd have those costs with or without the employment. So you are not exhibiting a causal physical mechanism. You're appealing to an intuition some people have that the employer ought to cover those costs. To conclude based on moral intuition that some physical effect, e.g. starvation, results from the MW employment, is magical thinking.
You're trying to use an arbitrary start point. Whether this is simply a stick in the sand or an attempt to smuggle a value judgement in as a fact, I can't tell, but it's still arbitrary.
No, I'm calling you on your attempt to smuggle a value judgement in as a fact. There is nothing arbitrary about the "Would output Q still happen if input P were not present?" start point. That's how cause and effect are determined.
You're arguing above that (potential) employees are a cost to society, some of which is defrayed by being employed, and that any contribution the employer makes is thus welcome.
No, I'm not arguing that. Whether any contribution the employer makes is welcome or not is a matter of subjective opinion, and you and the other voters will have to decide for yourselves whether to welcome it or spurn it -- that forms no part of my argument. If you choose to sacrifice somebody's contribution for the sake of your metaphysics, that's your option. But potential employees are a cost to society, and employing them at MW usually causes that cost to go down.
Sort of treating employment like a charity.
It's nothing at all like treating employment like a charity. Charity is intended for the benefit of the recipient. The employer is treating employment as a means to his own end. When the MW employee is better off, and what he costs society goes down, those aren't the intended effects, so they aren't charity. The benefit to the employee is the employer's means to get the employee to agree to the bargain, same as in any other transaction. The benefit to society is simply a positive externality. The employee is also treating MW employment as a means to his own end; and if society chooses to allow it it's probably also as a means to society's own end of reducing the overall level of charity it provides.
But such an economy doesn't work, because there is no other income source other than employment to meet costs. All costs to society ultimately have to be met by someone, and taken simply, that someone is always an employer or business of some kind.
And? We aren't starving; the economy keeps growing; standards of living keep rising. So what do you mean by saying such an economy doesn't work?
So you're trying to argue that an employer should
Let me cut in right there. Do you see a bleeding
moral claim in my posts? You're the one trying to argue about what should be done; but you keep drawing non-moral conclusions from your moral premises.
be able to hire people for less than the amount it takes to maintain them, on the basis that the difference between X and Z will be met by some other employer.
My argument is that there is no point having such employers around. As a society, it's only worth having around employers who pay the Z of their employees, their cost to society. That isn't because of a moral judgement, or fine feelings, it's to stop other, more successful businesses having to support the losers who can't meet their costs.
Huh? Of course that's because of a moral judgment and feelings, and because of the metaphysical accounting principle your feelings appear to be based on. You're calling the MW employers "losers who can't pay their costs"; that's transparently based on the opinion that Z is
those employers' costs rather than the employees' costs or society's costs or the Sultan of Brunei's costs for that matter. It's transparently NOT based on stopping other, more successful businesses having to pay X, since getting rid of the MW employers will cause the other businesses to have to pay Z instead of X and Z > X.
Moreover, your analysis takes for granted that the way MW employment keeps going and going decade after decade is by means of those employers receiving a subsidy from other more successful non-loser businesses, who pay their employees the so-called "living wage" (i.e., the price of Rhea's decency list) plus the taxes that support welfare for MW employees. Interesting hypothesis. It implies that if all businesses were employing a mix of skilled workers and unskilled workers, and all businesses were paying market rate for all their employees, so the skilled workers get a decent wage and the unskilled workers get MW, then every business would be surviving on the subsidies paid to it by every other business, we'd all be prospering by taking in one another's laundry, and the universe would disappear in a puff of logic. The existence of recipients of a subsidy implies the existence of payers of a subsidy; hence if your argument were correct then it would prove the existence of so many businesses that pay all their employees a decent wage that they can make up for all the ones that don't. That means you're offering the economic counterpart of Anselm's Ontological Argument. But whether something exists is an empirical question. A business having such-and-such business practice can't be argued into existence by word game any more than a god can.
And that's the problem with what Wallmart is doing. They displace other businesses to provide employment on a subsidised basis, relying on other businesses (via the taxpayer) to help them meet their employment costs.
Saying it over and over doesn't make it true. You haven't shown that the cost of a decent lifestyle is an "employment cost"; you haven't shown that Walmart wouldn't be able to get workers for the same or lower price if the welfare weren't available, which is what "relying on" means; and you haven't shown that the displaced businesses were paying a decent wage.
In the first place, the employer isn't "claiming" it. The employee is offering it for sale and the employer is amenable. You're talking as though the employer were preventing the guy from selling his labor elsewhere..
They are. Being available for work is written into the contract.
And? Lots of MW employees have two jobs; besides which, there's no "no quit" clause in the contracts. If somebody else offers the employee a better job he can take it. The employer's only legal recourse in the event that the employee makes himself unavailable is to sack him; and the fact that the MW employer will stop paying him is no deterrent to the guy from selling his labor elsewhere -- when he leaves he's getting a bleeding
raise.
In the second place, you're objectifying the guy as a pure laborer with no benefit from his presence other than his labor. That's just nonsense -- we don't give people "decent safe housing, decent safe food and decent safe healthcare" only so employers can get their labor.
Their labour, and the labour of others, is all that it available to pay for it. Unless you're using magic pixies. From the point of view of the economics of the society, that's exactly why we keep them around.
Huh? We keep them around for reasons A, B, C and D; but from the point of view of a consideration that ignores A, B and C, only D is a reason to keep them around; therefore we only keep them around for reason D?
That's your argument?!? Ignoring something doesn't make it go away. We keep them around for the sake of all the benefits, not just the benefits viewable from the point of view of economics. If we kept them around only for the sake of their labor then we'd pay for welfare only up to an actual literal living wage, without the creature comforts popularly called "a living wage".
As far as labor being all that's available to pay for it goes, where are you getting that notion? The Labor Theory of Value? The LTV is a crock of metaphysical baloney. The mutual advantage derived from voluntary trading is available to pay for it, as is the return on capital and the productivity of land.
All the nonlabor benefits from his presence that we are buying with welfare payments are benefits shared across the whole community, not received only by the employer.
Sure, which is why in practice we tax businesses, and spread the revenue around the whole community. But there is only one source of cash here. Ultimately, you're still arguing for one business subsidising another.
You skipped a step there. This part is Step 1:
"Sure, which is why in practice we tax businesses, and spread the revenue around the whole community. But there is only one source of cash here. Ultimately, you're still arguing for one business subsidising".
This part is Step 3:
"another.",
just like when Step 1 is "Steal Underpants" and Step 3 is "Profit". What's Step 2? All you've got is nonlabor benefits from his presence, shared across the whole community and primarily going to the welfare recipient himself, subsidized by various businesses. Can you exhibit Step 2, where you get from there to the MW employer being
the recipient of said subsidy?
If the employer is claiming all their labour (the benefit of their presence) but not paying for the cost of their presence, then they are creating a negative externality.
... And in the third place, your claim of implication is a non sequitur. If somebody creates both costs and benefits, and he delivers all the costs to me and all the benefits to you, that does not constitute you creating a negative externality. That's him creating a negative externality.
You don't think the costs should be charged against the benefits?
What I think
should happen is beside the point; we're still arguing about what
does happen. Let's say your mum died and left you a thousand pounds. Later it's discovered that while she was alive she got plastered and crippled a pedestrian. His lifetime earnings consequently dropped by a million pounds, not even counting his pain and suffering. You took the thousand pounds, so you claimed the benefit of your mum's presence but you're not paying the cost of her presence. According to the inference rule you relied on, that means
you're creating a negative externality. That's absurd. Your mum created it. So the inference rule you relied on is invalid.
As for what
should happen, I take it you think the costs should indeed be charged against the benefits. So does that mean you think we should go after the heirs of people who created negative externalities? To what extent should we go after them? In the drunken mother scenario, should the government assign the million pound debt to you and garnish your wages for life, on account of the cost of the presence of the person whose benefit you claimed being, therefore, "your cost"? Or should the government perhaps just take away the thousand pounds, as partial compensation to the pedestrian, and leave it at that? What does your theory of cost assignment have to say about this?
I.e., neither action contributes to starvation all by itself, but doing both together does so? How does that work? Is there a mechanism you can show by which the two activities combine synergistically to cause starvation? Does the gift of the asset perhaps persuade the employee to spend all his time in that productive activity, thereby preventing him from doing some different productive activity that would otherwise have induced some third party to give him more assets that he could have traded for more food?
The asset is given in return for the employee
spending his time doing labour for the employer. The labourer is consuming a limited resource to meet the employers needs, and entering into a legal contract restricting his rights to work elsewhere.
That's make-believe. Saying it over and over doesn't make it true. There is no legal contract restricting the employee's right to work elsewhere. The employer does not own the employee's labor.
The only thing the labourer has to meet living costs is his labour. If they employer pays too little for it, then the labourer either starves, or imposes those costs on others.
Yes. So you've answered my question: it doesn't work. There is no mechanism you can show by which the two activities combine synergistically to cause starvation. When you described MW employers as "actively contributing to starvation", you just made that up. Because, as you just agreed, if he doesn't starve,
the laborer imposes those costs on others. The laborer, not the employer. The employer is not causing the laborer to impose those costs; if the employer weren't there employing, the laborer would still be imposing those costs, and more.
Why should my business have to pay to support your sweat shop. Why subsidise the sweat shop at all?
Why shouldn't you stop beating your wife? Your business isn't supporting my sweat shop. Your question assumes your conclusion as a premise.
You are starting from a moral judgment that employers should pay employees enough not to need welfare, and deducing from your moral premise the non-moral conclusion that a subsidy to the employee is in fact a subsidy to the employer. That's not a valid reasoning procedure. And it's blatant that that's what you're doing, because when challenged to exhibit a physical mechanism by which MW employment causes negative externalities, you first offer nonsense like imaginary contracts keeping workers from accepting better job offers, and then switch to a moral argument.
So too with employees getting welfare. The employer has to pay for employees. The base cost of an employee is the cost of maintaining that employee to a certain arbitrary standard...
How is it possible for whether an action actively contributes to a physical phenomenon to depend on an arbitrary standard?
The same logic applies to a different yardstick. The only difference between the starvation example and the less than an arbitrary standard example is that society now recognises needs of the employee beyond merely food.
I.e., you're bundling...
... since there's a ready market for Thing 1 and no buyers for Thing 2, you offer them together as a package deal. And, hoping to cut down on the complaints from your customers about the bundling, you tell them that your entire costs incurred in making both things are "the base cost of Thing 1".
That is the cost of maintaining the employee.
While it would be lovely to have a business where you can labour for no time and still make money, I'm afraid the real world doesn't work that way. A business that consumes all of a person's labour, must meet all of their costs. It's not a complicated principle.
Yes, I understand the principle. It isn't a principle society has decided to base policy on. But you'd like it to be, so you're propagandizing for it by making false claims about causation, and by equivocating between the cost of maintaining the employee and the cost of his labor.
But those are your fault; they aren't the fault of the principle you're proposing. Let's analyze the principle itself. A business must meet whatever costs the government assigns to it; we have a society and "it has labour" that's sold, which is to say, we're democracies and our respective voters have voted to make our respective governments the de facto part-owners of all our individual labor; our legislatures currently choose to sell the labor jointly owned by the government and its subjects for no less than minimum wage; but if our legislatures instead choose to put your principle into effect and take up refusing to sell the labor they have for less than the cost of maintaining the employee, they get to do that.
A lot of owners do exactly the same thing with their stuff: they refuse on principle to sell an item for less than they paid for whatever bundle it was part of when they acquired it, because of a mental hang-up about perceiving themselves as having lost money on a deal, even when consequently they end up throwing the item away and recouping none of their expenditure instead of recouping some of it. You want our society to engage in this practice because of metaphysical beliefs about cost allocation: you think when you sell at a loss it means the buyer is a leech.
Let's say MW is 6 pounds an hour; and let's say the wage "living wage" advocates define a "living wage" as is 10 pounds an hour, going by the arbitrary standard society defines as "the cost of maintaining the employee", based on the needs society now recognizes beyond merely food, such as the need for decent housing and the need not to work over 8 hours a day. I.e., they calculate the cost of maintaining an employee at 20,000 pounds a year. Of course, actual costs may vary. For instance, there are hundreds of thousands of people with kidney failure, kept alive by dialysis. This plays hell with their ability to hold down jobs; most of them are unemployed. The ones who work need sympathetic employers willing to accommodate their dialysis schedules and frequent unfitness. For example, a burger flipper might have dialysis on Monday, Wednesday and Friday so he's only available for work on Tuesday and Thursday. All of the labor he has to give, that his employer according to your argument is "claiming all of", is therefore 16 hours a week. A business that consumes all of a person's labour must meet all of their costs, according to your not complicated principle; it follows that she must pay the dialysis patient 25 pounds an hour. Oops! Forgot the cost of the dialysis itself. That's very much a part of the full cost of maintaining that employee to the standard society accepts. Here that would be another 20,000 pounds a year, but let's say half of that is legendary American medical inefficiency. So this employee costs 30,000 pounds a year. And all that's available to pay for that is his 800 hours of labor plus subsidies from other businesses.
So according to your inference procedure, she's a leech unless she pays him 37 pounds fifty pence for each hour he flips burgers. You're paying your burger flippers ten pounds an hour while she's paying hers twelve pounds an hour, which means you're paying to support her sweat shop. So if she wants to be a decent non-loser businesswoman who doesn't mooch off other, more successful businesses who can meet their costs and shouldn't have to also meet her costs, then she has little choice. She'll just have to sack the guy with kidney failure, find a different worker who can live decently on 12 pounds an hour, and thereby stop shifting her costs to society. Your business and the other businesses will then have to cough up an additional 9600 pounds a year. I take it you'll all be happy to do that because at least you'll all have been relieved of the negative externality she was imposing on you.[/sarcasm]
And distinguishing between such companies by comparing them to a standard you've already stipulated is arbitrary will correctly identify the companies that produce wealth, will it?
Absolutely, it identifies the opportunity cost of employment.
I'm not following. What opportunity is being missed out on as a result of the MW employment, and what is the cost of that missed opportunity?
They're not available to work for another employer.
But that other employer, if she even exists, was also offering only minimum wage, so the cost of the missed opportunity is zero. (If she were offering more than minimum wage then the MW employee would have quit and taken the better-paying job, so the opportunity would not be missed.)
If the company is not paying for the value of the employees, then it's offloading that cost onto other people.
What do you mean by "the value" of the employees? Do you mean the degree to which somebody values them, and if so, who?
Society has placed an arbitrary value on the cost of the employee, by dictating a minimum standard to which they must be maintained.
I.e., you don't mean the degree to which anyone values the employees, least of all society. The amount somebody dictates must be spent on anything is only a measure of how much he values it if he's paying that amount
himself. Society is not deciding an employee is worth X and choosing to pay X for him. Your country and mine have discriminatory tax systems, which means society is choosing to make
somebody else pay X for him. All that proves is that society values the employee more than society values the selected taxpayers getting to keep their money. Since there's no reason to think society places a value of X pounds on the targeted taxpayers getting to keep X of their pounds, the mere fact that society dictates X pounds must be spent on am employee isn't the slightest piece of evidence for the hypothesis that society values the employee at X pounds. It follows that when you casually switch between "the value of the employees" and "that cost", you are committing another fallacy (on top of your ongoing equivocation between the value of the employee and the value of his labor).
(And, beating a dead horse, the employee offloads costs onto other people. You choosing to pick the person he sells his labor to and accuse her of offloading costs is baseless and arbitrary. You could equally well pick a farmer he buys his food from and accuse the farmer of offloading costs, on account of the farmer not giving the poor person enough food to live on for a year in return for what he can afford to pay -- say, the going price of six months worth of food -- and claim the farmer is relying on handouts from the soup kitchen to keep him profitable by keeping his customer alive.)
The business, to consume the labour of a person, must pay the maintenance costs of that person.
No it mustn't, because society has not decreed that it must. And even if society were to decree what you want it to decree, that would not be evidence that failure to pay the maintenance costs of that person constitutes mooching, leeching, actively contributing to starvation, imposing costs, or creating negative externalities. What actions cause what outcomes is not determined by who must do what.
This really isn't that complicated. You have a society. It has costs, set at a minimum per person by that society. And it has labour. The labour is sold to meet the costs. If business A does not pay enough for the labour to meet the costs, then that cost has to be met by another business. There's lots of intermediate steps, but that's what it boils down to.
But the labor isn't sold to meet the costs. The labor is sold for whatever society (and the laborer, who let's not forget is still part-owner of the labor) choose to sell it for and some buyer chooses to buy it for, regardless of whether that amount meets the costs, or exceeds them, or falls short. If you think a society should choose a price based on an accounting convention instead of on maximizing revenue or maximizing utility or letting each laborer negotiate for himself or whatever, why should a society do that?
So why on earth would a society want to charge businesses that do meet these costs to pay for the gap left by those that don't?
You keep assuming your conclusion as a premise. The gap wasn't left by the MW employer -- there'd be an even bigger gap without her. The gap was there to begin with and the MW employer filled part of it. So why on earth would a society want to charge businesses to fill in a small gap when it has the option of banning the partial filling of gaps and hence charging businesses more to fill in a big gap? Gee, let me think...
You can rail on about whose costs they really are
You're the one who made the original claim about whose costs they really are. You didn't offer evidence, so I disputed your claim. Why do you think this means I'm the one "railing on"? Do you get a free pass as a non-railer for having gone first? I have an alternate proposal for how to tell which of us is doing the railing: let's check which one of us tried to support the claim that the other one of us is a piece of s***.
, what constitutes a subsidy, and where the moral responsibility lies, but in practice the businesses have to bear the cost, one way or another.
Are you suggesting that to challenge your assertions on those points is to quibble over theoretical trivialities? It's not as though you've been explaining why raising the MW to 10 pounds an hour will maximize total human happiness. Those assertions are your entire case. You are arguing for a policy that it appears will
increase the cost the other businesses have to bear; you're trying to justify that policy by accusing those who don't already follow it of being leeches; and all you've got to back that up with is a long list of unevidenced claims
about whose costs they really are, what constitutes a subsidy, and where the moral responsibility lies.
Oh ffs, NO I'm saying actual real world MW businesses could not operate in that world. Even if marginal burger franchises etc were (somehow) displaced by chimney sweeps etc, the defunct burger franchises would have been no less subsidised.
