Quote:
Originally Posted by wittynickname
Is the problem that consumers "don't want to pay" or that they cannot afford to pay.
I'm sure it's a little of both. But when you're barely making enough money to keep a roof over your head, yeah, you're going to look to pay as little as possible for everything. It's the circuitous model that keeps Walmart employees spending their paycheck at Walmart.
Just piggybacking on this because it's part of the conversation that I think gets overlooked in the minimum wage debate.
If all minimum wage jobs are for teenagers, shouldn't we expect fast food places to only be open from 4-9pm? Should grocery stores also be like this? Should you only be able to grab a coffee on your drive home from work but not to?
Early days in the pandemic we lauded these "low skill" jobs as essential but we cannot find a way to make sure these essential jobs keep people fed and clothed and housed?
If we all agree that these jobs should exist, how can we then tell those workers that they deserve to live in poverty?
And re: small businesses, as someone who worked for one for 15 years...oh well. If your business model requires you to keep your employees below a living wage you are a bad business owner. You're bad at it and you shouldn't have a business. You're not entitled to a profit.
This also applies to big businesses, and stopping them would do a lot to help small businesses. Go back to taxing big businesses and the wealthiest earners at 1960s levels and use that money to buoy small businesses through the process of increasing overall wages. Provide tax cuts only to businesses that have a reasonable executive-to-lowest salary discrepancy, which stops Amazon and McDonalds and Walmart from getting tax breaks while they have employees drawing public benefits.
When poor people get more money they spend it, it's been proven time and time again. Lower and middle income earners having more money helps all businesses, including the small ones. And no, a minimum wage increase across the board will not fix all of the problems but it's like the gun debate: you cannot simply do nothing . People are losing their homes, children are going without food. Something has to give and the absolute bare minimum we can do is get the lowest wages up to something slightly dignified. If we hadn't waited 15 years maybe we wouldn't need drastic change.
|
This was one of the best posts in this thread, but I just wanted to nitpick one line. The bolded is a little antagonistic of people that put everything on the line to make a go of a business and not correct at all, imo.
Most businesses will fail statistically. It takes a lot to put everything on the line and go after it. But there's many amazing, brilliant, hardworking people that go into business and fail. They're not "bad at it and shouldn't have a business", it's just the nature of business and I'm glad so many are willing to at least try.
That's why the key is to regulate a living wage rather than let businesses decide whether to pay one or not. That I'm in support of. I know it's hard enough already to succeed, but paying people a living wage needs to be part of that difficulty, not something you can toss aside to stay afloat.