this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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The point of these jobs is to generate surplus profit for your employer. Nobody works the check out counter at Target as an educational experience and there is no path to promotion in a seasonal position.
If you cannot afford to live, how the hell are you supposed to work? Have you tried showing up to a job on an empty stomach or without any sleep? Your productivity dips straight into the trash. Min wage rates exist to mitigate the negotiating power of unemployed people, absent a large labor movement. And while I agree they're more of a band-aid than a structural benefit, and we might even be better off with them gone if it means a more united and militant labor movement, the idea that we shouldn't raise them because entry level workers just deserve to be malnourished and homeless isn't ethical or logical.
Ah, yes. Working for the experience. Or, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us". The American employment model that never ends badly.
No, the point is to teach kids that working retail sucks, and they should do everything they can to never have to do that again. There's only excess profit if you're sticking around more than a year or two, otherwise the employer is likely not making much and you're getting valuable life experience.
Retail is to get experience with working. You show up on-time, interact with people, learn to organize stuff, etc. You get a taste of the most unpleasant parts of almost everything society has to offer, so you get an idea of which parts to actively avoid the most. If you don't mind dealing with stupid customers, go into sales. If you don't mind organizing stuff, try accounting. If you don't mind managing shifts, get an MBA. And so on.
Exactly! If we try to solve that problem by increasing the minimum wage, we're just enabling more people to stick to crappy jobs and live unfulfilling lives. If a minimum wage job isn't enough to live on, people will be forced to look elsewhere and get decent jobs that pay better and have better working conditions.
Retail and fast food should be the domain of teenagers and college students learning valuable life lessons about never being stuck in retail or fast food.
They're worse than a bandaid, they're a full-body cast. They bind you so you can't get out. It's similar to the welfare system, where the time you spend getting benefits or whatever should be spent looking for a better job.
We don't need a labor movement, we need something like UBI. My preference is NIT (Negative Income Tax), which is basically UBI but limited to people below a certain income.
If everyone could afford to survive (basic needs like shelter and food) without having to work a crappy job, they'd be more selective about the work they take on. Here's my proposal:
Here are my expected results:
Addressing the symptoms is just going to exacerbate the issue. I believe this proposal cuts at the root of the problems we have, which is that people don't like working in jobs that don't go anywhere, but they feel they have to in order to afford to live. Let's socialize the cost of undesirable jobs so we can encourage people to create more desirable jobs instead and automate the stuff nobody wants to do.
The retail industry does not exist to teach kids retail jobs suck.
The industry, no, but the jobs do.
Compare working at Target to working at Costco. Target is a "working retail sucks" job, whereas Costco is a "retail is a small part of a career" job. At Costco, you do a wider range of jobs, like driving forklifts, selling memberships, etc. At Target, you just restock shelves and occasionally help customers find stuff. Target wants disposable employees, so its onboarding process is streamlined to narrow roles (i.e. perfect for students looking for a part-time job).
So while those jobs may not have been created with that in mind, that's how they've been optimized. Most retail jobs are intended to be disposable, which means they're targeting the low-end of the market.
None of this changes the fact that a job's purpose is to create profit for the employer and that any educational benefit to the worker is entirely coincidental. Target doesn't care how many teenagers need to learn that "working retail sucks". That's not what the job is for. Target only cares how many people are required to keep their stores running well enough to make money for them.
If you think there should be some kind of work-study program specifically for teenagers so they can gain a bit of job experience as part of their education, fine. That's something that can be discussed. But don't lie to us that Walmart is this program.
"[job type] is intended for teenagers" is nothing but corporate propaganda to justify poverty wages. If it were actually true then why the hell is McDonald's open during school hours? Which teenagers are supposed to be working those jobs?
Yes, nobody is counting the number of teenagers and creating that many jobs, that's not a thing that happens in a market economy. The actual mechanics are that a certain amount of unskilled labor exists, so companies adjust how their businesses operate to take advantage of it. If labor is expensive, businesses find a way to reduce labor needs (e.g. automation), and if it's cheap, they create jobs.
So, if we increase the minimum wage, businesses will hire fewer teens because they're too expensive for the quality of labor and inflexibility of schedules. If we decrease the minimum wage, they may find a way to use more of that cheaper labor.
Yeah, that's one of their busiest times, so they'll make sure their labor needs are met. Maybe they'll pay more, or use college students who have more flexible schedules. Teens tend to get less valuable shifts, like late nights, and that's for a reason.
If labor is too expensive, they'll also probably just close earlier because the labor costs aren't worth the minimal business they'd get.
If we instead use something like a Negative Income Tax or Universal Basic Income, it won't matter if wages go down because people will have enough to live on. And if we only provide NIT to citizens and permanent residents, we won't have as much competition at the low end and can reserve those jobs for our teenagers. So a teen could make $5/hr and be happy because they don't need to pay rent, and a college student could make $5/hr and receive $10/hr or whatever as NIT and be happy because they can afford rent and tuition. We don't need a $15 minimum wage in that scenario.
I support UBI. I just have issues with the claim that jobs in a capitalist system exist for a purpose other than generating profit for owners. I also resent the implication that some workers don't deserve a living wage. Without UBI, all jobs should pay at least enough to cover living expenses. If a full-time job (or job that expects full-time availability) doesn't pay enough to live on then it's not a job that needs doing.
My point is that it shouldn't be the government that decides what jobs should and shouldn't exist. A minimum wage essentially does just that, whereas UBI/NIT and eliminating minimum wage allows the market to decide what jobs are worth, and we just socialize the cost of some of those jobs (which totally makes sense for teenager jobs).
Let the market figure out the costs of things, and then have government step in to fill in the gaps.