Many of those businesses provide useful services, and I’ve wondered whether there’s a public good argument to be made for subsidizing them rather than eliminating them.
I would have to contest that in this case, the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence. On general principle, lacking special cases with adorable old grandmothers and shiny MIT graduates, what is added to the public good by subsidizing businesses that are literally not efficient enough to keep their own employees alive? How can we claim such a business is adding net value to society?
Note that I’m trying to distinguish between a subsidy and an investment. When a shiny MIT graduate needs money for his start-up, there could easily be a public good of investing in him, but in that case the public deserves shares of stock as compensation—and will be able to realize gain from those shares as capital gains or dividends when the time comes. With Wal-Mart, the public doesn’t even receive a capital stake in the business. It just pays for private actors to get rich on jobs that are, judging by their wage levels, far less efficient and productive than the ones people used to have.
What constitutes a “living wage” has literally nothing to do with how much money it takes to meet your survival needs; it is an amount of money which is supposed to support your family at a “normal standard of living” in your area. The actual cost to survive is naturally quite a bit lower than that, and can be calculated with things like the ‘Food Energy Intake’ or ‘Cost of Basic Needs’ methods of establishing poverty lines.
Adding to this confusion is the fact that the Federal Poverty Line seems to be what most people use as their yardstick, despite it being an abstraction over the entire US with no allowance for regional cost-of-living differences and appears to be a relative measure of poverty based on mean income rather than an absolute measure based on the cost of survival needs.
[Edit] Surprisingly, the Federal Poverty Line does actually seem to be an absolute measure, although I still can’t find exactly what goods are supposed to go into calculating it and there is still no allowance for regional price differences.
Let’s assume something truly basic: a living wage covers housing, food and health insurance. That is, a worker paid a living wage will not starve, will not die of treatable disease for financial reasons, and will not be removed from work via arrest for vagrancy (because they have a place to stay).
Quibbling over definitions won’t get us anywhere. Let’s talk about the real issue, and if it means we have to taboo “living wage”, so be it.
I have no problem tabooing “living wage” in our discussion, but it is important to remember that the word has an actual definition in policy terms; if we talk about paying Walmart / Sam’s Club employees a living wage that actually means one very specific thing in terms of how much money they are going to get, and it’s not a particularly intuitive amount at that.
But that’s a debate for the talking heads; if I understand you correctly, we just want to know if someone working at Walmart would starve without public assistance.
Let’s assume for the moment that the Federal Poverty Line is the number we’re trying to avoid here; above that you’re still in a shitty position but you are not actually starving (technically you’re probably not starving below it either, but I can’t find good Cost of Basic Needs data for the first world). An average Walmart employee makes about $17,600 a year plus minimal benefits for 35 hours of work a week, which is piddling but also enough to support yourself and one other person by federal standards ($15,510 a year). With another 15 hours a week of work in a second job at the federal minimum wage (remember, most states have a higher minimum) a Walmart employee can support a family of four ($23,550 a year). This is also assuming only one person in the family of four is working, which is a bit of a spherical chicken these days.
So without any public assistance at all a single person with Walmart as their primary job can definitely support themselves and another person at a level above the Federal Poverty Line, and can support a family of four at that level with an additional part time minimum wage job. It would be an uncomfortable paycheck-to-paycheck kind of existence, but all of their basic survival needs would be met out of their own income.
Now don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying that Walmart is morally in the right here, or that their employees shouldn’t have a more comfortable and secure way of life. On the contrary, I think it’s disgraceful the way real wages have fallen in the last half-century and how many good blue-collar jobs have been destroyed by our ludicrous trade policies. But the question of whether Walmart employees would be starving without EBT is an empirical claim and one which is easily disproved.
Do you consider it unethical to pay less than it takes to pay less than it takes to live alone, but enough to hold down an appartment with a couple of roommates? Is every treatable disease, no matter the cost of treatment, included in that, or are insurance companies allowed to draw a line inconsderation of how common or expensive a treatment is? Is that insurance pool required to subsidize riskier but likely better off (ie, older) people? Is that food required to be convenient, tasty, and nutritious, or can the wage assume the employee does their own shopping and cooking with less costly food?
What if one potential employee has a different idea of what it takes to live than others?
Do you consider it unethical to pay less than it takes to pay less than it takes to live alone, but enough to hold down an appartment with a couple of roommates?
Is Wal-Mart offering a couple of roommates?
Is every treatable disease, no matter the cost of treatment, included in that, or are insurance companies allowed to draw a line inconsderation of how common or expensive a treatment is?
Let’s say it’s every disease a middle-class person could get treated. The point is to eliminate class distinctions in medical care, not to suddenly wave our arms and inaugurate Utopia.
Is that food required to be convenient, tasty, and nutritious, or can the wage assume the employee does their own shopping and cooking with less costly food?
The food is required to be nutritious enough to never damage the health of the employee. Cooking time can be assumed to be traded off with working time, which can be taken to imply a 40-hour workweek as is legally considered full-time in most developed countries. Convenience and taste are left to taste, though I’m assuming at least some access to decadent upper-class luxuries (/sarcasm) such as iodized salt.
What if one potential employee has a different idea of what it takes to live than others?
I dunno, what if we stop trying to evade the point that Wal-Mart’s wages are unlivable?
I mean, come on, we’re talking about a company that set up a charity collection for its own employees. That means even Wal-Mart acknowledges Wal-Mart pays poverty wages.
I think I was just trying to get at the fact that living wage definition can reasonably differ, and that being so, isn’t it up to the workers to evaluate for themselves, based on what they can tolerate or accomodate?
You’re going to have to go into more detail about that charity collection, because although I assume that Wal-Mart may very well pay below what one can comfortably live on alone long term, the fact that some or many of the employees inspire charitable giving doesn’t prove that—a living wage, and one that can provide enough to live on in all foreseeable bits of bad luck are two different things, at least according to your definition. And if you work at Wal-Mart, you probably are a little worse at things like long term planning or impulse control.
On a tangent, there’s another large employer I often hear about underpaying their employees—universities and grad students—but it doesn’t seem to raise the same ire. Maybe I’m not clear on the details and the difference is significant?
On a tangent, there’s another large employer I often hear about underpaying their employees—universities and grad students—but it doesn’t seem to raise the same ire.
Would you like me to tell you about the misery of being a grad-student? I can speak from first-hand experience!
But if I do, I’m yelled at for being more fortunate than the poor sods at Wal-Mart, you see.
I read that article; it seems to support my possibly awkwardly worded argument above that having a charity drive for employees who have had unforeseen events and are currently in hardship does not prove—or is merely weak evidence that—the store pays a wage at which the average competant person would be able to expect to live with above minimal standards of living.
For one reason, to be perhaps presumptious, workers at Wal-Mart probably have less long-term planning ability than workers at higher paid jobs—or at least draw from populations in which the skills are less common, etc—and therefore, even if paid enough to live and save, are less likely to have a “rainy day fund” and more likely to need a charity hand-out should they have a car problem, or health problem, etc. Note that it was charity provided by fellow employees, not the general public, so someone they pay clearly has more than the bare minimum.
All employers take attention: Never do anything useful for your employees, because it will create an impression that you are not paying them enough, which makes you an evil person!
(Not meant seriously. But it makes me sad that when one has decided to hate some person, any good deeds of that hated person can be very easily explained away as an evidence that the person feels guilty or needs to fix their evil image.)
It is rhetoric because “living wage” in the US is far beyond what’s needed to keep people alive. People who don’t get paid a “living wage” do not drop dead in the streets from malnutrition and exhaustion.
Can we drop the pointless definitional agreement and just find a study specifying what wage-level is necessary to keep people from dropping very preventably dead or being arrested for vagrancy?
I am not particularly interested in a study. At one point in my life I was poor. Very very poor. I have quite a good idea of how much money do you need to survive in a US city. Hint: it’s far below what is usually called “a living wage”.
It may be that no one is efficient enough to supply ,low cost low quality goods and services to people who can’t (typo corrected) afford better and pay a living wage at the same time. At that point, you can shut down the business and hope that services and goods of better quality will be supplied by the government (when?), technology will improve so that workers in those businesses will be more productive so that it’s possible to pay them more, leave the unattractive business in place as it is, or subsidize the business.
I’m not saying subsidizing the business is a great choice (keeping the system even relatively honest might be impossible), but I think it should be considered rather than just saying the business shouldn’t exist.
If we condition our reasoning on the proposition that nobody can efficiently provide goods to poor people cheaply, then yes, I would at least claim the Proper Move (which is not necessarily easy from our status quo position) is to have certain things provided as a public service.
On the second hand, if we’re already talking about instituting such a thing as a Basic Income Guarantee, then it makes good sense to do so and then remove subsidies for “sub-living efficiency” businesses. After all, with a correctly configured Basic Income, possibly plus even a small income from real business (which will be easier to come by due to the demand/money-velocity boost), even those at the lower end of the income scale should have the purchasing power to start buying, at the very least, frugal goods instead of cheap goods.
I would have to contest that in this case, the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence. On general principle, lacking special cases with adorable old grandmothers and shiny MIT graduates, what is added to the public good by subsidizing businesses that are literally not efficient enough to keep their own employees alive? How can we claim such a business is adding net value to society?
Note that I’m trying to distinguish between a subsidy and an investment. When a shiny MIT graduate needs money for his start-up, there could easily be a public good of investing in him, but in that case the public deserves shares of stock as compensation—and will be able to realize gain from those shares as capital gains or dividends when the time comes. With Wal-Mart, the public doesn’t even receive a capital stake in the business. It just pays for private actors to get rich on jobs that are, judging by their wage levels, far less efficient and productive than the ones people used to have.
I am unaware of any such businesses. Perhaps you want to dial down your rhetoric a little bit? It looks silly.
It’s not rhetoric. If a company says they cannot pay a living wage without the subsidy, then that is what such a statement means.
What constitutes a “living wage” has literally nothing to do with how much money it takes to meet your survival needs; it is an amount of money which is supposed to support your family at a “normal standard of living” in your area. The actual cost to survive is naturally quite a bit lower than that, and can be calculated with things like the ‘Food Energy Intake’ or ‘Cost of Basic Needs’ methods of establishing poverty lines.
Adding to this confusion is the fact that the Federal Poverty Line seems to be what most people use as their yardstick, despite it being an abstraction over the entire US with no allowance for regional cost-of-living differences and appears to be a relative measure of poverty based on mean income rather than an absolute measure based on the cost of survival needs.
[Edit] Surprisingly, the Federal Poverty Line does actually seem to be an absolute measure, although I still can’t find exactly what goods are supposed to go into calculating it and there is still no allowance for regional price differences.
Let’s assume something truly basic: a living wage covers housing, food and health insurance. That is, a worker paid a living wage will not starve, will not die of treatable disease for financial reasons, and will not be removed from work via arrest for vagrancy (because they have a place to stay).
Quibbling over definitions won’t get us anywhere. Let’s talk about the real issue, and if it means we have to taboo “living wage”, so be it.
I have no problem tabooing “living wage” in our discussion, but it is important to remember that the word has an actual definition in policy terms; if we talk about paying Walmart / Sam’s Club employees a living wage that actually means one very specific thing in terms of how much money they are going to get, and it’s not a particularly intuitive amount at that.
But that’s a debate for the talking heads; if I understand you correctly, we just want to know if someone working at Walmart would starve without public assistance.
Let’s assume for the moment that the Federal Poverty Line is the number we’re trying to avoid here; above that you’re still in a shitty position but you are not actually starving (technically you’re probably not starving below it either, but I can’t find good Cost of Basic Needs data for the first world). An average Walmart employee makes about $17,600 a year plus minimal benefits for 35 hours of work a week, which is piddling but also enough to support yourself and one other person by federal standards ($15,510 a year). With another 15 hours a week of work in a second job at the federal minimum wage (remember, most states have a higher minimum) a Walmart employee can support a family of four ($23,550 a year). This is also assuming only one person in the family of four is working, which is a bit of a spherical chicken these days.
So without any public assistance at all a single person with Walmart as their primary job can definitely support themselves and another person at a level above the Federal Poverty Line, and can support a family of four at that level with an additional part time minimum wage job. It would be an uncomfortable paycheck-to-paycheck kind of existence, but all of their basic survival needs would be met out of their own income.
Now don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying that Walmart is morally in the right here, or that their employees shouldn’t have a more comfortable and secure way of life. On the contrary, I think it’s disgraceful the way real wages have fallen in the last half-century and how many good blue-collar jobs have been destroyed by our ludicrous trade policies. But the question of whether Walmart employees would be starving without EBT is an empirical claim and one which is easily disproved.
Do you consider it unethical to pay less than it takes to pay less than it takes to live alone, but enough to hold down an appartment with a couple of roommates? Is every treatable disease, no matter the cost of treatment, included in that, or are insurance companies allowed to draw a line inconsderation of how common or expensive a treatment is? Is that insurance pool required to subsidize riskier but likely better off (ie, older) people? Is that food required to be convenient, tasty, and nutritious, or can the wage assume the employee does their own shopping and cooking with less costly food?
What if one potential employee has a different idea of what it takes to live than others?
Is Wal-Mart offering a couple of roommates?
Let’s say it’s every disease a middle-class person could get treated. The point is to eliminate class distinctions in medical care, not to suddenly wave our arms and inaugurate Utopia.
The food is required to be nutritious enough to never damage the health of the employee. Cooking time can be assumed to be traded off with working time, which can be taken to imply a 40-hour workweek as is legally considered full-time in most developed countries. Convenience and taste are left to taste, though I’m assuming at least some access to decadent upper-class luxuries (/sarcasm) such as iodized salt.
I dunno, what if we stop trying to evade the point that Wal-Mart’s wages are unlivable?
I mean, come on, we’re talking about a company that set up a charity collection for its own employees. That means even Wal-Mart acknowledges Wal-Mart pays poverty wages.
I think I was just trying to get at the fact that living wage definition can reasonably differ, and that being so, isn’t it up to the workers to evaluate for themselves, based on what they can tolerate or accomodate?
You’re going to have to go into more detail about that charity collection, because although I assume that Wal-Mart may very well pay below what one can comfortably live on alone long term, the fact that some or many of the employees inspire charitable giving doesn’t prove that—a living wage, and one that can provide enough to live on in all foreseeable bits of bad luck are two different things, at least according to your definition. And if you work at Wal-Mart, you probably are a little worse at things like long term planning or impulse control.
On a tangent, there’s another large employer I often hear about underpaying their employees—universities and grad students—but it doesn’t seem to raise the same ire. Maybe I’m not clear on the details and the difference is significant?
Would you like me to tell you about the misery of being a grad-student? I can speak from first-hand experience!
But if I do, I’m yelled at for being more fortunate than the poor sods at Wal-Mart, you see.
As to Wal-Mart and their charity incident...
I read that article; it seems to support my possibly awkwardly worded argument above that having a charity drive for employees who have had unforeseen events and are currently in hardship does not prove—or is merely weak evidence that—the store pays a wage at which the average competant person would be able to expect to live with above minimal standards of living.
For one reason, to be perhaps presumptious, workers at Wal-Mart probably have less long-term planning ability than workers at higher paid jobs—or at least draw from populations in which the skills are less common, etc—and therefore, even if paid enough to live and save, are less likely to have a “rainy day fund” and more likely to need a charity hand-out should they have a car problem, or health problem, etc. Note that it was charity provided by fellow employees, not the general public, so someone they pay clearly has more than the bare minimum.
All employers take attention: Never do anything useful for your employees, because it will create an impression that you are not paying them enough, which makes you an evil person!
(Not meant seriously. But it makes me sad that when one has decided to hate some person, any good deeds of that hated person can be very easily explained away as an evidence that the person feels guilty or needs to fix their evil image.)
Colleges and football players are starting to raise the same kind of ire in some circles. These things are to some degree a question of fashion.
It is rhetoric because “living wage” in the US is far beyond what’s needed to keep people alive. People who don’t get paid a “living wage” do not drop dead in the streets from malnutrition and exhaustion.
Can we drop the pointless definitional agreement and just find a study specifying what wage-level is necessary to keep people from dropping very preventably dead or being arrested for vagrancy?
I am not particularly interested in a study. At one point in my life I was poor. Very very poor. I have quite a good idea of how much money do you need to survive in a US city. Hint: it’s far below what is usually called “a living wage”.
It may be that no one is efficient enough to supply ,low cost low quality goods and services to people who can’t (typo corrected) afford better and pay a living wage at the same time. At that point, you can shut down the business and hope that services and goods of better quality will be supplied by the government (when?), technology will improve so that workers in those businesses will be more productive so that it’s possible to pay them more, leave the unattractive business in place as it is, or subsidize the business.
I’m not saying subsidizing the business is a great choice (keeping the system even relatively honest might be impossible), but I think it should be considered rather than just saying the business shouldn’t exist.
If we condition our reasoning on the proposition that nobody can efficiently provide goods to poor people cheaply, then yes, I would at least claim the Proper Move (which is not necessarily easy from our status quo position) is to have certain things provided as a public service.
On the second hand, if we’re already talking about instituting such a thing as a Basic Income Guarantee, then it makes good sense to do so and then remove subsidies for “sub-living efficiency” businesses. After all, with a correctly configured Basic Income, possibly plus even a small income from real business (which will be easier to come by due to the demand/money-velocity boost), even those at the lower end of the income scale should have the purchasing power to start buying, at the very least, frugal goods instead of cheap goods.