Working for free is exploitative. It drives the value of labour down and makes it so people can assume that compensation isn’t guaranteed for work they do for others.
Actually it is. The power balance in the employer-employee relationship skews very heavily towards the employer. Which means that without some other form of protection, the employee typically has no choice but to sign and exploitative contract.
Unions work to redress that power balance by giving employees the ability to withhold their labor. You can also redress that power balance with legislation. Legislation can also redress the balance, although legislation usually only happens as a result of powerful labor unions.
That’s another story. Unregulated and exploitative educational institutions are just as much an issue as unregulated and exploitative companies.
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It might not be “net negative” if you’re mindlessly laser focused on the job being done. It’s not just productivity that drops, though. People crunching pay personal costs elsewhere. If you take into account your fitness, your mental health, your diet, sleep, relationships, and all of the stuff that human beings like to do outside of work then it becomes net negative pretty quickly!
There’s another part to this argument as well. I myself am a business owner and as of next year I want to expand and become a bigger, more stable, robust company. While doing that I want to reward my employees with renumeration they deserve and I also want to project them and their jobs responsibly as well.
The trouble I’m going to run into being a business owner that wants to do this is that all my competition aren’t bound by those morals. This will makes it even harder for employers that want to do the right thing to compete. Hence where unions or some fairness can actually be good for everyone because it doesn’t only reward the employees that get exploited it also provides an even playing-field for employers that want to do the right thing.
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Here in Australia they have ‘Graduate Development Programs’, which in other words are ‘University Graduate Rehabilitation Programs’. You work for a year or two at a reduced pay rate while they teach you what you should already have known, and then you have to work another year. Probably the best thing under the circumstances, but not a solution.
That’s the extreme, so how about just enforcing the national minimum wage?
That’s debatable.
But that’s a risk that any company has to factor in financially. Which makes it very hard to start a new one. Perhaps you think it’s a good thing (and in some ways it is) but it also has downsides.
Fair enough, although I don’t think it’s separate at all.
That’s for everyone to decide for themselves.
Fun fact: the national minimum wage is so low that it doesn’t cover cost of living anywhere.
At all.
In the entire continent of North America.
Even in the cheap places. Hell, even $15 an hour won’t cover it.The minimum wage is so bad that, again, we need unions to help with mass contract negotiations just so people can make rent.
Billy has stated he’s Australian, The minumum wage in Australia is actually pretty good in comparison to almost everywhere else.
Baloney. I lived five years on minimum wage. I lived quite well actually.
People growing up in 1st world cities just have a seriously skewed sense of… everything.
Rules of good living are simple. Make dumb choices, you suffer. Act like a fool, get taken advantage of. You get what you deserve. That’s all there is to it.
I thought you stopped reading?
The cost of living is vastly different everywhere, even within the same state or country. I presume everyone already knows this, but it’s worth noting that wages have to be relative to location to some extent.
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Uh, I grew up in a place with a population of 1,149. I currently live somewhere with a population of just over 100,000. The last place I lived was populated by 1,766 people. You’re the outlier here.
Unpaid internships also bring in other issues. For a company, it means you are restricting your candidate pool to those already wealthy. A three month unpaid internship means you can only take on people who can afford to pay rent and eat for those three months without being paid. It will eliminate large portions of the talent pool.
‘Tragedy of the commons’ is still alive and well today. As long as one individual or group is willing to act in their own self interest, everybody who wants to be ‘ethical’ gets screwed over.
Wait, you are arguing against unions from within Australia? Unions have been a major force here for a long time. All of that legislation we have about paid leave, working hours, minimum wage, parental leave, superannuation ect… That’s all stuff that been put forward and fought for by the unions.
You can bet the moment union pressure comes off, that all gets unwound again.
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How does this make it hard to start a business? It doesn’t. Anyone can do that.
I agree that it makes it hard to grow a business, bringing employees on board, but - as a business owner myself, facing exactly the challenges @Antony-Blackett mentions - I think that’s exactly as it should be. A business should not get bring people on board unless it’s reasonably able to look after those people mutually beneficially.
That’s bad, here in Australia it’s $17/hour. Which covers an individual’s living expenses at least.
I have some things to say about this topic, particularly about how much responsibility a company should have for providing someone with a particular standard of living, but it’s a very complex thing and I don’t think it’s a good place to have a detailed discussion. Long story short, I think that things like contract enforcement and minimum wage (possibly) should be used to ensure that real exploitation doesn’t take place, and the rest of people’s lives they should take responsibility for.
It’s been a good thread though.
It’s already unwinding, look at all the companies in Australia in the last couple years that have got in trouble for not paying minimum wages, for paying under the table and exploiting workers, for not paying superannuation which is required by law.
And it’s only going to get worse with the ‘gig-economy’ which is in large part a way for businesses to wipe their hands of any responsibility for their workers.
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Minimum wage in the US is $7.25. While it’s definitely possible to live off of that (low income housing, food stamps, etc) I wouldn’t declare it as “quite well” unless you were comparing it to the living conditions of a poor country but then just about everything qualifies at that point.
No, it isn’t. Not at all.
If your team is in trouble and crunch is the way out, you don’t want to be the one not crunching and making things even worse for everyone else. It might make getting your next job harder (“So why don’t you have a reference from your last position?”), particularly in areas with close knit industry. You probably have to give notice, so there’s a really awkward time between when you announce that you’re out and when you actually get to leave.
Obviously no one starts a business without some idea of how to grow it.
Nothing happens in isolation though. You can regulate how employees are hired and treated by a company, but you then find that you have to regulate individual freedom, the market itself, and take all sorts of desperate and unwieldy measures against international competition, for example. It’s like trying to regulate against climate change.
I’m not absolutely sure what level of protection is necessary for workers, and I’m not saying that industries should be completely de-regulated. But my first question is always, what can each worker do (and what are they not currently doing) to improve their individual situation.
And as long as there’s no protection against being kicked out on your ass at a moments notice when say… you decide to start a family… I can’t think of anything worse.
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If you’re relying on food stamps then you’re arguably not living off the minimum wage alone - you’re using government subsidy.
Which, in turn, means that the government is paying for a business’ ability to under-pay their workers. Pretty lame!
Honestly, if the business can afford to pay people properly then they should do so. If they can’t afford it then they shouldn’t be in business, and the government shouldn’t be giving out food stamps to enable nonviable businesses to limp along.
Edit: I’m not suggesting that food stamps should stop, because that would make things worse for the wrong people. But if minimum wage makes food stamps a necessity then minimum wage needs to change, along with whatever else needs to happen in support of that. This should come down on the business owners, not the workers.
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