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| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > If a business can't pay a living wage, it's not really a successful business. Let's consider the implications of this. We take an existing successful business, change absolutely nothing about it, but separately and for unrelated reasons the local population increases and the government prohibits the construction of new housing. Now real estate is more scarce and the business has to pay higher rent, so they're making even less than before and there is nothing there for them to increase wages with. Meanwhile the wages they were paying before are now "not a living wage" because housing costs went way up. Is it this business who is morally culpable for this result, or the zoning board? | |
| ▲ | raw_anon_1111 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Can we use the same argument for all of the businesses that are only surviving because of VC money? I find it rich how many tech people are working for money losing companies, using technology from money losing companies and/or trying to start a money losing company and get funding from a VC. Every job is not meant to support a single person living on their own raising a family. | | |
| ▲ | dpkirchner 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's what VC money is for. When it comes to paying below a living wage, we typically expect the government to provide support to make up the difference (so they're not literally homeless). Businesses that rely on government to pay their employees should not exist. | | |
| ▲ | raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That’s kind of the point, a mom and pop restaurant or a McDonald’s franchise owner doesn’t have the luxury of burning $10 for every $1 in revenue for years and being backed by VC funding. Oh and the average franchise owner is not getting rich. They are making $100K a year to $150K a year depending on how many franchises they own. Also tech companies can afford to pay a tech worker more money because you don’t have to increase the number of workers when you get more customers. YC is not going to give the aspiring fast food owner $250K to start their business like they are going to give “pets.ai - AI for dog walkers” | | |
| ▲ | dpkirchner a few seconds ago | parent [-] | | In that case they probably shouldn't be running a McDonald's. They aren't owed that and they shouldn't depend on their workers getting government support just so the owners can "earn" their own living wage. |
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| ▲ | CamperBob2 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Classically, not all jobs are considered "living wage" jobs. That whole notion is something some people made up very recently. A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't need a "living wage." As a result of forcing the issue, now the job doesn't exist at all in many instances... and if it does, the owner has a strong incentive to automate it away. | | |
| ▲ | autoexec 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't need a "living wage." As a result of forcing the issue, now the job doesn't exist at all in many instances The majority of minimum wage workers are adults, not teenagers. This is also true for McDonald's employees. The idea that these jobs are staffed by children working summer jobs is simply not reality. Anyone working for someone else, doing literally anything for 40 hours a week, should be entitled to enough compensation to support themselves at a minimum. Any employer offering less than that is either a failed business that should die off and make room for one that's better managed or a corporation that is just using public taxpayer money to subsidize their private labor expenses. | |
| ▲ | kube-system an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A teenager is presumably also going to school full time and works their job part time, not ~2000 hours per year. If we build a society where someone working a full time job is not able to afford to reasonably survive, we are setting ourselves up for a society of crime, poverty, and disease. | |
| ▲ | swiftcoder 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't need a "living wage." Turns out our supply of underage workers is neither infinite, nor even sufficient to staff all fast food jobs in the nation | |
| ▲ | jfindper 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't need a "living wage." Wow, a completely bad-faith argument. Can you try again, but this time, try "steelman" instead of "strawman"? | |
| ▲ | 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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