Not at all. The basic right to property is and has always been limited by taxation and business regulation to serve the common good. The economic security of the lowest-earning workers is exactly the sort of common good that trumps shareholders' property rights.
Put simply: the right of people to provide for themselves and their families is superior to the right of shareholders to get a slightly larger return on their investment.
But that's a completely new argument. What you wrote was:
"Those employees are people, and the United States of America describes itself as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Which means that in a disagreement between a corporation and a worker over the value of that worker's labor, the worker should be in a much stronger bargaining position.
It is unethical to compromise the financial security of a person to benefit something that is NOT a person."
Of course you were dehumanizing the shareholders.
The shareholders are not the same thing as the
company. The rights of shareholders to maximize the return on their investment is unhindered by economic regulations; the shareholders aren't actually responsible for implementing those regulations or seeing that they are followed properly.
In fact, it is the other way around: the managers of the business have a responsibility to the shareholders to try and help investors realize their economic goals. If the government mandates there are certain things they must do in order to do business legally, then they have to make sure they have a business model in place that will be consistent with regulations and not cause their company to be sued, fined, or otherwise compromised by illegal activity. The shareholders are not responsible for the actions of the CEO, but if the CEO accidentally tanks his company by laundering money for the zetas, the shareholders are screwed.
Corporations, however, do not have a basic right to exist or even a right to be successful. They have a responsibility to live up to whatever obligations they have agreed to live up to. One of those obligations is to obey labor laws and business regulations. Those regulations are not so onerous as to make it impossible to do business, but if some businesses cannot operate without violating the laws, it should not exist.
But the question you were challenged to answer was "Why should the employer pay more than the labour is worth to them?"
For the same reason the employee should receive less than his time is worth to him.
It should be noted, by the way, that the minimum wage does not in fact make employers pay more than the labor is worth to them. It makes labor worth more, by making it more scarce, by cutting some of the suppliers out of the deal.
That assumes that employers have some sort of magical clairvoyance as to the actual worth of a prospective employee. This is far from the case; you cannot know just from a resume or an interview if an employee is actually "worth" a higher rate than another. The only reliable way to know that is to see how this worker performs on the job.
The most you can say is that some employers will be RELUCTANT to hire more people if wages are higher, but that is a weak case; the demand for labor isn't associated with the COST of labor, but is instead dependent mostly on the number of workers needed to do the job.
So why should the laws on this point be based on the will of the majority?
It isn't. It's based on the NEEDS of the majority. We NEED to live in a fair and stable society that doesn't leave huge chunks of our population twisting in the wind with no easy way to improve their situation. We actually need this a lot more than shareholders need a slightly larger return on their investments, and CERTAINLY more than managers need to find it easier to keep their profit margins in double digits.
It's a balance between a "nice to have" and a "have to have." It would be nice to have high profits and high investment returns, but we HAVE TO HAVE a labor market that allows even the poorest workers to feed their families.
What is it you mean by "suppression of wages", other than that sometimes people agree on a wage among themselves instead of asking you to decide for them? What makes your preferred wage the magic reference point based on which all lower wages shall be defined as "suppressed"?
It isn't a matter of "preference" either. When the pay rate decreases compared to the real cost of living -- that is, fails to keep up with inflation or even decreases DESPITE inflation -- wages are said to be falling. When this is happening because a large number of employers are deliberately pressuring their employees to work for less money, this can be described as "suppression of wages."
In which case you need, as I said at the beginning of this exchange, a cost-benefit analysis, instead of folk-economics and tribalism.
I'm not surprised you've chosen to introduce your "stop bashing the outgroup!" hobby horse here since that is pretty much the only thing that ever gets you to post nowadays. But if you scroll back through this thread, I believe I have been pretty consistent about the importance of the labor market keeping up with inflation in a way that prevents the growth of a large, permanent underclass.
It is, in other words, similar to regulations on any other business practice: is your factory producing toxic waste that is polluting the neighborhood around it? Are your products consistently unsafe but you sell them anyway because you just assume most people know the risks? Are your workers experiencing conditions that significantly shorten their life expectancy or compromise their health? These are all things we do not allow in a civilized society. You cannot really make a moral case IN FAVOR of these things just on an individual basis, nor by appealing to the rights of shareholders, nor by appealing to unintended negative consequences. The public good of the community and the nation at large MUST take precedence over the good of the business and/or its shareholders.
But you haven't shown that paying $20000 for labor that causes a $20000 revenue increase produces toxic waste
That's because it is impossible to show that $20,000 worth of labor will actually produce $20,000 worth of revenue. Cost-benefit analysis DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY when it comes to labor. There are ways to measure performance and productivity in a business setting, but there is no coherent way to put a "dollars in/dollars out" value on a particular worker. Anyone who says they CAN is bullshitting you.
On the other hand, paying a worker only $20,000 a year in a place where a living wage is calculated at $55,000 puts economic strain on that worker AND puts downward pressure on the average wage for his position across the industry. Not ALOT of downward pressure, but enough that if fifty other businesses did the same thing, he is that much less likely to find a place that will pay him a more acceptable rate.
So these workers remain poor, despite their being employed and productive. Their children remain poor, despite their parents working diligently all their lives. And in the case that their pay rate continues to fall far below the rate of inflation, their children are actually poorer than their parents were.
This is deleterious to the economy and to society as a whole.
When you kick some poor people out of their jobs in order to make different poor people richer, that shortens their life expectancy.
Why are you so convinced that there's a specific group of poor people that will suddenly become unemployable if the minimum wage goes up?
It sounds like you've convinced yourself that there is a certain segment of the labor pool who would never get hired at all unless they were
cheap. That is an illogical assumption; employers will still hire them at the lowest rate they possibly can, whatever that rate happens to be. You MIGHT make the case that they will pass some of those costs on to consumers, but that is only true to the extent that products that depend on minimum wage are likely to become more expensive as a result. Products that DON'T depend on it won't see much of an effect.
