Unless you're working in outside sales or independent contracting, there are very few industries in America where the actions of a specific worker are directly associated with a specific amount of revenue. As far as I know, though, commissioned-based salespeople don't work for minimum wage anyway. It is difficult if not impossible to pin down a specific revenue trend to the actions of a specific worker. There are other means to measure performance and productivity, but you can't really monetize employees hour by hour in most cases.
I'm not clear on why you think that's a substantive argument. It's like reacting to the statistical link between cigarettes and lung cancer by saying "There are very few cases where a specific smoker's habit is directly associated with a specific tumor. You can't really show a given patient wouldn't have gotten cancer anyway even if he hadn't smoked."
Yeah... that's actually TRUE. You really CAN'T show in many cases that a specific patient actually developed cancer from a single causal factor. Cancer is complicated like that.
And then there's Bomb#19 saying "Every Newport cigarette increases your risk of cancer by 0.082%, while Virginia Slims only increase your risk by 0.072%, so if you had smoked Virginia Slims instead of Newports, you wouldn't have gotten cancer until 71 months from now." That, also, isn't a valid statement to make.
By "the first worker" I was referring to the "Or should she not hire the guy, and get $20000 less revenue and $30000 less expense?" worker. By "a $30000 problem", I was referring to the unemployed guy having $30000 less than he needs for a decent lifestyle instead of having $10000 less than he needs.
I'm confused... does this employer no longer HAVE workers? Is that the point you're making?
And again, this is a flawed argument, because you're assuming the labor of a specific worker can be directly and literally quantified in terms of expenses and revenues. This is not the case for anything but commission-based sales, whose workers DO NOT pull minimum wage in the first place.
The point is that people trying to make employers pay higher wages very often take a "screw-em" attitude to the subset of the workers who won't be getting a share of the larger pool of money the employers will pay.
Actually, I've continually pointed out that "workers who won't be getting a share of the larger pool of money the employers will pay" are the same workers who wouldn't have gotten hired (or retained) no matter what their wages actually were because they are not actually qualified to do the jobs they're doing. Pay rate and compensation is not nearly as important in hiring decisions as qualifications and productivity. People get fired for being incompetent, they get fired for being insubordinate, they even get fired for being criminals and/or douchebags. I've heard of (and rejected) applicants for not being qualified, for having shitty attitudes, for being sloppy or annoying, for not understanding what the job entailed. Hell, I've rejected job applicants just for openly supporting Donald Trump. But I have never heard of an applicant getting rejected
because they aren't productive enough to get paid a minimum wage. That isn't a real thing that actually happens.
Total consumption of unskilled labor goes down when you raise the price from $20000 to $30000.
It is LITERALLY impossible for you to factually make this claim. "Unskilled labor" isn't a finite commodity with a quantifiable supply you can plot on a graph. You can quantify "hours worked" on a specific task and you can even measure the number of people per hours worked. But those hours are not pre-existing: you don't just produce "labor hours" out of a gland under your armpit and then sell it to employers in little jars.
in which case, what you would ACTUALLY see -- and then only for unskilled labor at or near minimum wage level (not all such jobs are, and you know this) is a shift in the distribution of those hours. The unskilled workers simply pull fewer hours and are pressured to finish their jobs that much faster, or the skilled and unskilled workers BOTH reduce their hours or are given more unpaid leave. Or the very lowest performing worker in the unskilled labor group is fired (rising wages is as good an excuse as any) and the manager simply refrains from replacing him. Or the unskilled workers have their hours reduced and one of the skilled workers assumes some of their responsibilities. Or the skilled workers have their hours reduced and the unskilled workers are forced to step up and take on some tasks that used to require skilled workers.
You're trying to measure a condition that is inherently unquantifiable and then you start making very specific predictions as to what will happen to that condition under X circumstances. To use your own example, this is a bit like trying to calculate exactly how many cigarettes does it take to trigger the existence of a cancer cell.
But you haven't shown that paying a group of workers who are paid $20000 a year and who add an uncertain, hard-to-measure amount with a probability distribution that peaks at $20000 to their various employers' revenue either is irresponsible, or will completely sink a country's economy.
I also haven't shown that my vagina has rainbow colored pubes... is there a reason I would WANT to show either of those things?
Employers have been paying their estimated least productive employees less than you would define as "a living wage" since the beginnings of money economies
That's the thing: employers don't actually estimate the "productivity" of their employees in concrete terms like that. In fact, my experience has been that only very poor business managers would even be stupid enough to TRY.
I'm deeply confused as to why you keep implying that "productivity" is what wages are based on. It's not, and it never has been.
