Even assuming that hourly rate did track roughly with the production of the least skilled labor, why would anyone pay that? That’s the employer guaranteeing payment to at best break even, without accounting for any other costs or risks incurred by the employer.
But there’s no law that requires hiring anyone in the first place. I’m 100% for raising the minimum wage. I’m for raising it to at least a living wage. But the math does not work if the wage paid by the employer = the price charged to the purchaser. At that point, the employer’s best case scenario is $0 profit, and unless the work is performed, sold, and paid for immediately, a loss on every single transaction. No one has any incentive to employ anyone at that rate.
I have no idea whether $33.33 per hour is the actual productivity rate of the least skilled worker. I tried Googling it but the closest I could find is that the average American worker grossed $29.76 per hour, not the value of their work output. I also see a Bureau of Labor Statistics report that says the average worker creates $57.54 worth of goods and services per hour. But I don’t see the $33.33 figure in admittedly half ass searching.
Regardless of what the figure is, there must be some spread between work output and take home pay or no one has any incentive to hire anyone else.
The profit should equal exactly the minimum wage, no more and no less. In fact it should not even be called “profit”, just the wage of the administration. Doesn’t matter if a profession is “skilled” or “unskilled”, people should be paid to live not to value their skills above others. No reason an MD should be paid more or less than a janitor and we wouldn’t be able to live without either of them. The pandemic showed clear as day how much work is “essential” and badly paid compared to “inessential” and “skilled”.
It’s not even like employers themselves are particularly skilled anyways. Now if you believe that some people inherently deserve a worse life due to their profession, you can just say it.
Ok, I’ve read all this. And it’s ridiculous, no one will open a business if they make $0. Raise the minimum to something livable like $20 and let them make a few million, probably with hard caps over something like $10+ million profit. They won capitalism, congrats, the rest goes back into the company/taxes. It shouldn’t meet exactly the productivity, just better than what we have now.
This idea is fine if you literally just want to survive, but your perfect world would have nothing of joy in it.
let them make a few million, probably with hard caps over something like $10+ million profit
lmao lost lib came over here to defend millionaires. So long as there exists people personally tied to property profiting “a few million”, they’ll have very little to lose to overturn or bypass those “hard caps” to make a few billions. There’s no “winning capitalism” if you can still influence politics to unlock more capitalism to win more. People should open businesses to serve their community, not to rule them.
I very much don’t support billionaires, but I just don’t understand how you’d expect to have anything entertainment-wise in a minimum wage=exact productivity. Microsoft isn’t making Xbox from the goodness in their heart.
What would we spend our $33 on? Just our house and food? I’d much rather $20 and be able to go to the movies or restaurants.
If something has genuine entertainment value, why wouldn’t people create it because they want to be entertained, or to entertain others? Without needing to worry about money to survive, lots of people would pursue arts, literaly just producing “entertainment” for others.
I don’t understand how you get the idea that without profit motive nobody would be creative, or life would turn gray and bland. Restaurants would be just as popular or more popular: people would take more risks and try new things because they aren’t afraid of failing and potentially ruining their lives. Similarly with movies: most junk produced now is just the same playbook because it is guaranteed massive profit; there’s little creativity involved.
Microsoft is a great example because they continuously do dumb shit that puts their workers at risk specifically because the owners are so stinking rich that they’ll never face the consequences themselves. They just bought Activision-Blizzard for almost 4 billion dollars (money none of us will ever have) to get the IP of repetitive but profitable games such as CoD and Diablo. Meanwhile their workers get terrible working conditions are run by a serial abuser and in some cases have even been driven to suicide. From most developers I’ve seen they specifically produce games because they like making games, and yet the existence of millionaire (billionaire in this case) CEOs makes the lives of the developers we both like worse.
As you’ve said, you’d like $20 to be able to go to the movies and restaurants. But before that both you and the workers of those need to pay the rent, and none of the billionaire profit is going to the people actually making the games you like. That is why making the profit be zero is important, so all resources can be put into both your life as a worker and those of the workers who make shit you like, and not to buy some submarine for Bobby Kotick (unless… 🥺 ). Similarly Bob Iger’s riches do nothing to help Disney make Avengers 32: Never-Ending War. Microsoft doesn’t do shit, the workers do, and to make Microsoft’s execs get more actively detracts from what those workers get.
In the current system you’re right, but only because to make $0 you yourself won’t be able to survive.
To suggest that profit motive must exist to want to start a business though is not valid. Think of all the big name “inventors” of the past couple centuries: yes they were being paid enough to live, but what motivated their invention and discovery was genuine passion for knowledge and invention. I’d start a business that made $0 if I was producing a product I thought was cool and meaningful. In fact, not being tied to a profit motive would let me experiment with more unusual ideas for goods and services.
If you pay people enough to survive and entertain themselves, it doesn’t magically turn everyone into a braindead consumer (ironically, that’s what the current system does). If you pay people enough to not have to worry about survival, they can be creative and explore the landscape of ideas, leading to novel discovery and inventions.
Sure, I haven’t done the exact calculations, it just means I’d rather have slightly less than the exact cost of production if it means we could actually spend our new wages on stuff we enjoy.
Idk how you expect companies we enjoy to exist if there is no point in owning/investing in a company.
… I don’t expect companies like the ones that control our planet to continue to exist. I really wish they were impossible tbh. Like we all agreed they were as bad for the planet, like worse than nuclear weapons, and just collectively agreed to ‘never again’ y’know.
So not being exploited is devoid of joy, but being exploited has joy, can you please explain this thought more, where I come from exploitation is not joyful
Not at all what I said/meant. We just wouldn’t have anything non-essential to spend our new found money on if wages = 100% of the revenue.
You couldn’t feasibly fund a movie(33k hours of work to earn $1mill which makes for an awful movie with today’s wages, it would either have to be a 1 person movie or way more startup capital to pay these massive wages), or open a restaurant, you’d be out of money long before you get enough traction, only thing that could be created is one person side project type things like.
I just don’t understand how your 100% communist society would work, who would have enough money to start businesses if they was no extra money? The problem with society right now is that there’s TOO much extra money, not extra money existing at all.
What I want is the workers (colectivly) to own the means of production, and then to get the entirety of the value of their labor. My issue is not with “extra money” as you put it, but that the capitalists have stolen the money from the backs of the workers.
I also would not call any money extra money so long as even a single person is starving, or does not have clean water, or is without a home, or cannot get basic medical care, or any pther basic need. I think these are a little more important than movies
You couldn’t feasibly fund a movie(33k hours of work to earn $1mill which makes for an awful movie with today’s wages, it would either have to be a 1 person movie or way more startup capital to pay these massive wages), or open a restaurant, you’d be out of money long before you get enough traction, only thing that could be created is one person side project type things like.
I haven’t watched it yet, but Solaris is widely regarded as a great movie. I don’t see why you insist that some specific guy needs to get boatloads of money in order to finance a movie that is made solely by the people not getting those boatloads of money. If they make Solaris 1 and it generates a lot of money, why should somebody who is not the workers get all that money?
They could then easily make Solaris 2 earning the wages from the sales of Solaris 1 and if its great it just keeps going. If all people have comfortable lives they won’t need some wealthy Prometheus to descend from Olympus with fiery cash. 33 dollars an hour amounts to some 1.3k dollars per week. At that rate people will be able to work less for their shitty day jobs and afford to work on their artistic endeavours. Don’t you or any of your colleagues have any artistic interest that you can’t pursue just due to lack of resources and time? Imagine working half the amount and being able to contribute to projects you actually care about with your leftover time and money.
I just saw US News as the community name in hot. I favor materially increasing the minimum wage and enjoy meaningful discussion about economic issues, so I jumped into the thread.
Then I noticed how unanimous and fervent the comments were in opposing any profit driven enterprise at all. I thought this is a surprisingly skewed group for discussion of American minimum wage. I looked at the instance and finally realized I had accidentally intruded.
If they do not hire anyone, no work gets done. They have to hire about the same amount of people as already employed, as no capitalist trying to maximize profit is going to pay you more they they think they can get away with, and they will not operate with more workers than they need. They need us, we do not need them
If by skilled labor you mean all labor that is more than being a CEO, then yes, the idea of skilled and unskilled labor is a myth to devide the working class and should be disreguarded.
Second in what universe should we, labor, care about capital or how they feel, they steal from us, they steal our suplus value, they rob the best years of our lives, and in the US, they activly argue aganst us getting basic government survices, they are not our friends. Risk does not cause value, me standing near a fire does not create value, labor creates value. And they would pay it because they need labor, Capital needs labor, labor does not need capital.
Even assuming that hourly rate did track roughly with the production of the least skilled labor, why would anyone pay that? That’s the employer guaranteeing payment to at best break even, without accounting for any other costs or risks incurred by the employer.
It’s the law, son. It makes people do stuff. With guns.
But there’s no law that requires hiring anyone in the first place. I’m 100% for raising the minimum wage. I’m for raising it to at least a living wage. But the math does not work if the wage paid by the employer = the price charged to the purchaser. At that point, the employer’s best case scenario is $0 profit, and unless the work is performed, sold, and paid for immediately, a loss on every single transaction. No one has any incentive to employ anyone at that rate.
I have no idea whether $33.33 per hour is the actual productivity rate of the least skilled worker. I tried Googling it but the closest I could find is that the average American worker grossed $29.76 per hour, not the value of their work output. I also see a Bureau of Labor Statistics report that says the average worker creates $57.54 worth of goods and services per hour. But I don’t see the $33.33 figure in admittedly half ass searching.
Regardless of what the figure is, there must be some spread between work output and take home pay or no one has any incentive to hire anyone else.
The profit should equal exactly the minimum wage, no more and no less. In fact it should not even be called “profit”, just the wage of the administration. Doesn’t matter if a profession is “skilled” or “unskilled”, people should be paid to live not to value their skills above others. No reason an MD should be paid more or less than a janitor and we wouldn’t be able to live without either of them. The pandemic showed clear as day how much work is “essential” and badly paid compared to “inessential” and “skilled”.
It’s not even like employers themselves are particularly skilled anyways. Now if you believe that some people inherently deserve a worse life due to their profession, you can just say it.
Dont forget with raising that minimum wage to meet profit, we are also going to take the means of production.
Ok, I’ve read all this. And it’s ridiculous, no one will open a business if they make $0. Raise the minimum to something livable like $20 and let them make a few million, probably with hard caps over something like $10+ million profit. They won capitalism, congrats, the rest goes back into the company/taxes. It shouldn’t meet exactly the productivity, just better than what we have now.
This idea is fine if you literally just want to survive, but your perfect world would have nothing of joy in it.
lmao lost lib came over here to defend millionaires. So long as there exists people personally tied to property profiting “a few million”, they’ll have very little to lose to overturn or bypass those “hard caps” to make a few billions. There’s no “winning capitalism” if you can still influence politics to unlock more capitalism to win more. People should open businesses to serve their community, not to rule them.
I very much don’t support billionaires, but I just don’t understand how you’d expect to have anything entertainment-wise in a minimum wage=exact productivity. Microsoft isn’t making Xbox from the goodness in their heart.
What would we spend our $33 on? Just our house and food? I’d much rather $20 and be able to go to the movies or restaurants.
If something has genuine entertainment value, why wouldn’t people create it because they want to be entertained, or to entertain others? Without needing to worry about money to survive, lots of people would pursue arts, literaly just producing “entertainment” for others.
I don’t understand how you get the idea that without profit motive nobody would be creative, or life would turn gray and bland. Restaurants would be just as popular or more popular: people would take more risks and try new things because they aren’t afraid of failing and potentially ruining their lives. Similarly with movies: most junk produced now is just the same playbook because it is guaranteed massive profit; there’s little creativity involved.
Microsoft is a great example because they continuously do dumb shit that puts their workers at risk specifically because the owners are so stinking rich that they’ll never face the consequences themselves. They just bought Activision-Blizzard for almost 4 billion dollars (money none of us will ever have) to get the IP of repetitive but profitable games such as CoD and Diablo. Meanwhile their workers get terrible working conditions are run by a serial abuser and in some cases have even been driven to suicide. From most developers I’ve seen they specifically produce games because they like making games, and yet the existence of millionaire (billionaire in this case) CEOs makes the lives of the developers we both like worse.
As you’ve said, you’d like $20 to be able to go to the movies and restaurants. But before that both you and the workers of those need to pay the rent, and none of the billionaire profit is going to the people actually making the games you like. That is why making the profit be zero is important, so all resources can be put into both your life as a worker and those of the workers who make shit you like, and not to buy some submarine for Bobby Kotick (unless… 🥺 ). Similarly Bob Iger’s riches do nothing to help Disney make Avengers 32: Never-Ending War. Microsoft doesn’t do shit, the workers do, and to make Microsoft’s execs get more actively detracts from what those workers get.
G*mers, man…
In the current system you’re right, but only because to make $0 you yourself won’t be able to survive.
To suggest that profit motive must exist to want to start a business though is not valid. Think of all the big name “inventors” of the past couple centuries: yes they were being paid enough to live, but what motivated their invention and discovery was genuine passion for knowledge and invention. I’d start a business that made $0 if I was producing a product I thought was cool and meaningful. In fact, not being tied to a profit motive would let me experiment with more unusual ideas for goods and services.
If you pay people enough to survive and entertain themselves, it doesn’t magically turn everyone into a braindead consumer (ironically, that’s what the current system does). If you pay people enough to not have to worry about survival, they can be creative and explore the landscape of ideas, leading to novel discovery and inventions.
If there were caps on profits of 10m, then minimum wage could sure be more than 20 bucks friendo.
Sure, I haven’t done the exact calculations, it just means I’d rather have slightly less than the exact cost of production if it means we could actually spend our new wages on stuff we enjoy.
Idk how you expect companies we enjoy to exist if there is no point in owning/investing in a company.
Why do we need privately owned companies or investors, what do they contribute?
… I don’t expect companies like the ones that control our planet to continue to exist. I really wish they were impossible tbh. Like we all agreed they were as bad for the planet, like worse than nuclear weapons, and just collectively agreed to ‘never again’ y’know.
So not being exploited is devoid of joy, but being exploited has joy, can you please explain this thought more, where I come from exploitation is not joyful
Not at all what I said/meant. We just wouldn’t have anything non-essential to spend our new found money on if wages = 100% of the revenue.
You couldn’t feasibly fund a movie(33k hours of work to earn $1mill which makes for an awful movie with today’s wages, it would either have to be a 1 person movie or way more startup capital to pay these massive wages), or open a restaurant, you’d be out of money long before you get enough traction, only thing that could be created is one person side project type things like.
I just don’t understand how your 100% communist society would work, who would have enough money to start businesses if they was no extra money? The problem with society right now is that there’s TOO much extra money, not extra money existing at all.
What I want is the workers (colectivly) to own the means of production, and then to get the entirety of the value of their labor. My issue is not with “extra money” as you put it, but that the capitalists have stolen the money from the backs of the workers. I also would not call any money extra money so long as even a single person is starving, or does not have clean water, or is without a home, or cannot get basic medical care, or any pther basic need. I think these are a little more important than movies
I haven’t watched it yet, but Solaris is widely regarded as a great movie. I don’t see why you insist that some specific guy needs to get boatloads of money in order to finance a movie that is made solely by the people not getting those boatloads of money. If they make Solaris 1 and it generates a lot of money, why should somebody who is not the workers get all that money?
They could then easily make Solaris 2 earning the wages from the sales of Solaris 1 and if its great it just keeps going. If all people have comfortable lives they won’t need some wealthy Prometheus to descend from Olympus with fiery cash. 33 dollars an hour amounts to some 1.3k dollars per week. At that rate people will be able to work less for their shitty day jobs and afford to work on their artistic endeavours. Don’t you or any of your colleagues have any artistic interest that you can’t pursue just due to lack of resources and time? Imagine working half the amount and being able to contribute to projects you actually care about with your leftover time and money.
Let me introduce you to how production has existed for a large amount of human hisotry
I just realized we stumbled into lemmygrad
Out of curiosity, where did you think you where, and what finally made you notice? I am genuinely curious.
I just saw US News as the community name in hot. I favor materially increasing the minimum wage and enjoy meaningful discussion about economic issues, so I jumped into the thread.
Then I noticed how unanimous and fervent the comments were in opposing any profit driven enterprise at all. I thought this is a surprisingly skewed group for discussion of American minimum wage. I looked at the instance and finally realized I had accidentally intruded.
If they do not hire anyone, no work gets done. They have to hire about the same amount of people as already employed, as no capitalist trying to maximize profit is going to pay you more they they think they can get away with, and they will not operate with more workers than they need. They need us, we do not need them
If by skilled labor you mean all labor that is more than being a CEO, then yes, the idea of skilled and unskilled labor is a myth to devide the working class and should be disreguarded.
Second in what universe should we, labor, care about capital or how they feel, they steal from us, they steal our suplus value, they rob the best years of our lives, and in the US, they activly argue aganst us getting basic government survices, they are not our friends. Risk does not cause value, me standing near a fire does not create value, labor creates value. And they would pay it because they need labor, Capital needs labor, labor does not need capital.