The owner is not putting in an hour of labor that the employee is profiting from. The principle has to do with a person getting some minimal compensation in exchange for giving an hour of their own labor toward someone else's profit. The employee giving an hour of their labor does not mean the employer has given an hour of their labor, so there is no reason that the employer should get any compensation for someone else giving their labor.
That's not an explanation for how the owner and the employee are identical in this respect; that's an explanation for why you think it's a good idea for the owner and the employee not to be treated as identical in this respect. I was asking for a clarification to Malintent's answer to "Is there any corresponding minimally acceptable amount for an employee to increase an employer's quality of life by?". If you have a different answer to that question, that's fine; but there was a followup question for that case. Do you have any method in mind for motivating employers to hire employees they don't benefit from?
My answer exposes the false equivalence behind your question. The issue of "minimally acceptable" is not about some minimally acceptable amount that the employer must improve the employee's life by. The issue is the minimally acceptable amount a person should get in return for giving their very finite labor. Very finite labor is the source of all food, clothing, and shelter that all people depend upon to exist. Every single person either used their own labor or other people's labor to procure these essentials of existence. Capital is infinite and itself does absolutely nothing for these essentials, except to buy the finite human labor that creates all of it. This is not market philosophy, this is undeniable facts of reality.
These facts make the labor and capital fundamentally different and create an inherent asymmetry between what expectations and rules should be put in place regarding the return one gets for giving labor (what employees do) versus the return for giving $ and capital (what employers do). Since employers are giving non-finite $ and not finite labor to the employee, then the concept of minimal compensation for giving finite labor does not apply to what the employer is getting in the exchange.
It’s a rather simple and obviously ethical principle to anyone that does not endorse slavery.
You appear to be asserting that trading your labor to someone belongs in an entirely different mental category from trading anything other than labor to someone.
Yes, because labor isn't just a different mental category but an objectively different type of thing. It is THE root source of all goods and services, and every person can only give the same finite amount of it.
Do you have any empirical evidence that every person who doesn't impose the same mental categorizations on the world that you impose on the world in fact endorses slavery? Or are you making that accusation as a way of poisoning the well and thereby shutting down challenges to your ethical assumptions? Tell us what you endorse; let others speak for themselves.
I am observing the logical fact that the standard ethical objections to slavery apply to taking a person's finite labor without enough compensation for them to exist a result of that labor.
It is not obvious to me that the principle you propose is ethical. To me your principle looks like a rather simple and entirely ordinary tribal double-standard, one rule for your in-group and a different rule for your out-group.
It is not a double standard. You're making a false equivalence between giving two objectively different things, labor and $. They have different names because they are different. The burden is on you to show that two separate things given different names are identical in all ways that matter for the exchange of those things. I have already gone beyond my burden by specifying how they differ in ways that are critical.
According to you, that means I endorse slavery. You're wrong. I do not endorse slavery. Slavery is evil.
If you endorse people being able to take another's labor with livable compensation, then that violates similar core ethical principles that make slavery evil. I am not saying you endorse slavery, but rather that some of the ethical principles that slavery violates apply to taking a person's one innate and finite resource for survival (their labor) without giving them enough in exchange to survive on.
A person getting no compensation for their labor that others profit from is a slave,
When a libertarian calls a person a slave because his labor is taxed to pay for some government program that doesn't benefit him, normal people laugh at that libertarian for his over-the-top rhetoric. When I volunteered to help sort donations for a few hours at a charity, I received no compensation. So according to your theory, if one of the poor people who received a handout turned around and pawned his handout for a cash profit, that means I was a slave.
Nope, it doesn't mean that at all. You chose to use your labor to promote your own social/ethical goals. That is qualitatively different than when a person's engages in labor that doesn't result in any benefit to them, unless there is compensation for it (which is the case for 99.99% of paid employees).
The test for slavery is not whether you receive compensation. It is not whether someone else makes a profit. It is whether someone will make you come back to work if you walk off the job.
The reason that slavery requires physical force to keep the workers on the job is because they are not compensated. They are doing tasks that have no benefit to themselves, and thus compensation from those who benefit is the sole reason they would do the work without threat of violence. Physical enslavement is the byproduct of taking labor from people who get no benefit from that labor and thus have no will to do it.
In a modern world where it is impossible for most people to use their labor to direct produce their food, clothing, and shelter, they have no choice but to give their labor to others in exchange for compensation to buy these things. Thus, similar to slavery, there is no real "choice" to work for some employer. The only choice they have is which employer and even that is often very limited (and increasingly so with corporate consolidation). Thus, their only choice is often to trade their labor for whatever a particular employer is willing to pay them or have nothing at all, beyond what some generous others donate to them. So, free-market faith that "choice" is free and thus their are no moral obligations to compensate more than you can get desperate people to work for is utter nonsense.
Using people's desperation and lack of options to coerce them into giving their labor for sub-sustaining pay is not actual slavery, but only a shade less grotesquely immoral slavery, and something decedent society should prevent, and any sustainable society must prevent.
and tiny amounts of compensation are only slightly better than slavery. A person has finite labor to give, so if there is not a minimum amount they must get in return for it, they suffer and die.
That's over-the-top rhetoric. If there is not a minimum amount they get in return for it they go on the dole.
Only in a system where people with more human decency than those employers give up part of the fruits of their labor to save them, which is only possible if enough other employees are getting compensated above what is minimally acceptable. IOW, a system that most "libertarians" and conservatives oppose.
The fact that the worker would die without the generosity of others does nothing to lessen the gross immorality and indecency of the employer who took their labor without given them enough compensation to survive.
This makes the theory that they must get a minimum amount or they'll die kind of implausible.
They would die without others generously giving part of their own labor to save them. Thus, it is both ethical and perfectly compatible with any defensible economic system for those others to create rules of compensation that limit the degree to which they are forced to either give up part of their own labor to sustain these people or watch them die.
