The employer gets a free pick who they hire. If there are a bunch of applicants the one that accepts the lowest salary is the most attractive financially to employ. But if they are okay with small pay because they don’t have any leverage. So in order to get any kind of balanced situation the who gets employed should be ambivalent about taking the job or not taking the job. We can directly go for the weakest link who will be rejected from all other employment.
Sure for some educated positions people will leave so ridiciluos offers on the table. Low requirement jobs are a relevant alternative when you consider that you reject all of higher requirement jobs. We can go for the weakest link, the bottom rung of jobs that get the applicants that get rejected from any other level of job. So the most desperate person would need to reject scraps and choose to go without. I guess that is one form of dying with dignity.
If the most desperate person manages to reject then the next desperate person gets checked how many pennies needs to be added for them to grab the offer. Letting simple suppply and demand balance it means companies profit from desperation and have incentive to maintain or create it.
I guess I’m confused how you reconcile the view that this would definitely happen with the fact that we’ve run the experiment and it doesn’t happen. The minimum wage in the United State is $7.25 and overtime pay at that wage would be $10.88, but Walmart doesn’t pay anyone less than $11 per hour*. If they actually had the leverage you think they do, they could make all of their employees work huge amounts of overtime and still pay them less than they actually do in reality.
I think the problem is that you’re assuming employers don’t compete for jobs, but they do, and they also put in effort to retain workers (it’s a waste of money to hire someone for low pay and then have them quit and switch to your competitor once they’re trained). It’s true that there are some people that companies don’t want to hire at all, but if a company doesn’t want to hire you in the first place, why would they want to hire you for long hours?
The average “front-line worker” pay at Walmart is $17 per hour.
I did guess that the state with highest minimum wage would allow for a corporation that wants to operate as one entity in multiple states to be above the local average in some locations (or the global one). Quick search seemed to indicate there are quite a lot of states at 10.8 which is not far off 11.
There would also be some PR costs to literally hit the minimum on the penny which would generate a small margin.
But I have also heard stories that Walmart actively assists its employees to get every benefit and support that they ared entitled to. If a persons pay comes in significant fraction from public money the private forces are not keeping it balanced. The persons are actually half-employed rather than fully employed.
I would also think that having a employee be in working 5 and never getting a raise would be too unbearable. So you allow atleast some progression making the average of go up. That is also one trick. Emphasise that there is going to be good pay in 2 years in order to keep money hopes low for those 2 years. At the very extreme this leads to things like paying with only “exposure”.
I don’t see how any of these things change my point. If Walmart could offer desperate people any wage and hours they want, there would be no reason for them to pay over the minimum wage, offer raises, or help their employees get benefits they’re entitled to. They do all of these things because their employees do have other options and they need to do enough to make a job at Walmart at least as attractive as other jobs or non-jobs (going to school, not working).
The employer gets a free pick who they hire. If there are a bunch of applicants the one that accepts the lowest salary is the most attractive financially to employ. But if they are okay with small pay because they don’t have any leverage. So in order to get any kind of balanced situation the who gets employed should be ambivalent about taking the job or not taking the job. We can directly go for the weakest link who will be rejected from all other employment.
Sure for some educated positions people will leave so ridiciluos offers on the table. Low requirement jobs are a relevant alternative when you consider that you reject all of higher requirement jobs. We can go for the weakest link, the bottom rung of jobs that get the applicants that get rejected from any other level of job. So the most desperate person would need to reject scraps and choose to go without. I guess that is one form of dying with dignity.
If the most desperate person manages to reject then the next desperate person gets checked how many pennies needs to be added for them to grab the offer. Letting simple suppply and demand balance it means companies profit from desperation and have incentive to maintain or create it.
I guess I’m confused how you reconcile the view that this would definitely happen with the fact that we’ve run the experiment and it doesn’t happen. The minimum wage in the United State is $7.25 and overtime pay at that wage would be $10.88, but Walmart doesn’t pay anyone less than $11 per hour*. If they actually had the leverage you think they do, they could make all of their employees work huge amounts of overtime and still pay them less than they actually do in reality.
I think the problem is that you’re assuming employers don’t compete for jobs, but they do, and they also put in effort to retain workers (it’s a waste of money to hire someone for low pay and then have them quit and switch to your competitor once they’re trained). It’s true that there are some people that companies don’t want to hire at all, but if a company doesn’t want to hire you in the first place, why would they want to hire you for long hours?
The average “front-line worker” pay at Walmart is $17 per hour.
I did guess that the state with highest minimum wage would allow for a corporation that wants to operate as one entity in multiple states to be above the local average in some locations (or the global one). Quick search seemed to indicate there are quite a lot of states at 10.8 which is not far off 11.
There would also be some PR costs to literally hit the minimum on the penny which would generate a small margin.
But I have also heard stories that Walmart actively assists its employees to get every benefit and support that they ared entitled to. If a persons pay comes in significant fraction from public money the private forces are not keeping it balanced. The persons are actually half-employed rather than fully employed.
I would also think that having a employee be in working 5 and never getting a raise would be too unbearable. So you allow atleast some progression making the average of go up. That is also one trick. Emphasise that there is going to be good pay in 2 years in order to keep money hopes low for those 2 years. At the very extreme this leads to things like paying with only “exposure”.
But yeah there is some tension.
I don’t see how any of these things change my point. If Walmart could offer desperate people any wage and hours they want, there would be no reason for them to pay over the minimum wage, offer raises, or help their employees get benefits they’re entitled to. They do all of these things because their employees do have other options and they need to do enough to make a job at Walmart at least as attractive as other jobs or non-jobs (going to school, not working).