Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
And yet, shockingly, we managed to avoid 0% employment among adults in the 1920s. How on earth did that happen! OMG!
Edit: It occurs to me that you meant "How come 100% of the workforce wasn't kids?" I admit I misunderstood you originally because this is such a retarded argument that it honestly didn't occur to me that you'd be making it. Did you really want an answer for that? I mean, it's a terrible strawman since no one made that argument but if this is the best you have...
As opposed to the strawman you were tossing out there? Let's be fair Joph the whole "But then businesses would just hire seven year old kids and take away the jobs of all the adults!!!" is complete BS.
The point is that despite the fact that businesses *could* (and did) hire children to work in their factories, adults still managed to find work and were still paid more than those children. The reason was because while the kids were willing to work for less money, the adults were more valuable workers.
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Tell me though, do you believe that garment factories at the turn of the century took the savings from hiring children for pennies and passed it along to their adult workers?
Assuming they employed the children in the low skill jobs that kids could do and paid them pennies on the dollar to do it, and they employed the adults in positions which required more responsibility and/or skill and paid them more money, then yes, that's exactly true. You get that if the employer is willing to pay X dollars for the labor which produces Y profits for his business, being able to pay less money for the work that any random person off the street (or a seven year old even!) can do allows him to pay more for his skilled positions, which makes the more skilled people in his industry want to work at his factory instead of his competitor, which in turn means his factory runs better, is more efficient, and produces more widgets per dollar of cost than his competitor and thus makes him more money, he'll do that every single time.
IMO the mistake people make when they engage in this sort of argument is that they assume that there are no forces other than governments passing laws which cause employers to pay people more money. That's clearly not true (because if it was, then no one would ever earn more than minimum wage), but some cling to that assumption and base whole arguments on it. Competition within an industry and within the labor market itself will cause employers to pay the more skilled workers more money. It will force them to do so, in fact. Governments passing minimum wage laws can actually be harmful to semi-skilled laborers precisely because they're at the point where they can't command large salaries, but must work in industries where the profit margins are slim enough that the minimum wage effect actually hurts their ability to improve their earnings over time.
The irony is that those sorts of wage laws have the most negative impact on precisely the portion of the labor market that most need to be helped. The folks working at skilled jobs in high profit margin industries (like say me or your) don't need help. We don't need minimum wage laws because we don't earn minimum wage, nor do the bulk of the people working for our employers (I'd say no one makes minimum wage where I work, but I can't actually be sure there isn't some janitor or cook who doesn't). Point being that minimum wage laws don't affect us. They do affect people who work for employers where the bulk of the workers earn wages at or near that minimum. And overwhelmingly, the effect of a higher minimum wage is to eliminate any wage gains made by more experienced workers in those industries.
We can imagine that if the high school student working at the fast food joint earned $4/hour instead of $8/hour that the single mom working as a shift lead would still make the same $10/hour wage because the employer would just be a greedy sob and pocket the difference, and I'm sure there will be some employers who would ***** over that single mom out of greed, by implementing a minimum wage which rewards the high school student who doesn't need the money far far more than their labor is worth we've removed the ability for the employer to make a choice at all. We've taken it out of his hands. He has to narrow the difference in wages between the minimum paid to the kid who'll be there for 6 months before going on to something else and the amount he can afford to pay the single mom who really needs that money.
We've taken the choice away from the employer entirely. And I honestly believe that does more harm than good to those who most need the higher wages. I'm not claiming that they'd be rich if not for our minimum wage laws, but I do believe that a lot of working class folks supporting a family on a near minimum wage salary would be better off if we didn't have minimum wage laws at all. You're free to disagree with me, but tossing out ridiculous comparisons to child labor in the 1920s isn't really helping matters, nor does it adequately address the points I've made.
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Or today in countries like Bolivia and Ecuador where children are used (often illegally) to mine silver and other metals, do you believe the mine owners are passing that savings on to the adult miners with higher wages?
Are you arguing that the adult supervisors make the same money as the children? If not, then clearly they *are* paying the adults more than the kids. If your argument had merit, they'd pay them the crap wages as well. What forces them to pay the adults more Joph? Clearly you're missing some factor here. Why don't they employ nothing but children? You called this a strawman, but it's part of the point. There clearly is a need for labor that can't be done by children. Some combination of skill, experience, and responsibility mandates that an adult do the work. And that adult is going to get paid more than the child.
Some force makes that happen, and it ain't the government passing laws. Otherwise, as I already said, no one would ever earn more than minimum wage. The fact that people do make more than minimum wage means that the assumption your making must be false.
