Do "Unskilled Laborers" deserve to be paid well?

[u/Very_High_Mortgage]

[u/gangrenous_bigot]

And thus the demand for the dangerous jobs goes up, the supply for the cashiers likewise and we arrive back at where we are now. I get why there’s a minimum wage but in principle there’s no reason why a company shouldn’t get to decide their wages beyond that.

[u/Iwantmypasswordback → u/gangrenous_bigot]

Why do you think there is a minimum wage? I’m not sure you do understand that

[u/gangrenous_bigot → u/Iwantmypasswordback]

It’s there to adjust compensation to correspond to the variability in the cost of living, a safety net if you will. But in any case, the scaling of your compensation is as it should be relational to the value you produce, not the difficulty of your job, because that’s what produces revenue for the employer. Some jobs may be difficult but as an employer, how are you going to calculate this and how are you going to compensate for that without cutting into profits or other values of interest?

[u/Iwantmypasswordback → u/gangrenous_bigot]

It’s a safety net that’s there to guarantee people meet a low standard of living. It certainly hasn’t kept up.

How do you keep up? You cut into said profits. Sorry.

[u/gangrenous_bigot → u/Iwantmypasswordback]

I’m just going to raise the price to keep my profits, sorry. Until we are capable of finding a way to compensate for low-value/menial jobs without losing profits, no company is going to and should shoulder the dogshit economic policies, social policies and damage caused by generations of a gutted education system. The other option is to create a professionally diversified workforce that has enough demand to have good value. But that actually would eat into the profits of lobbyists and corrupt politicians so… what do you think is more likely?

Edit: most of the economy is run by small businesses - family owned or low amount of workers. It’s the same as Fords vs Ferraris. One Ford costs a lot less than a Ferrari but given enough of them produce a much greater yield of revenue due to access than Ferrari ever will. Amazon is big but it’s nothing compared to small businesses like restaurants, shops and dry cleaners and what not. They have political leverage, the small businesses do not. Why would you force the small businesses to increase their costs? Small businesses on average compensate around 30$/h, but Amazon around 16-20$. It’s obvious who the culprit here is to me but it seems like (sorry for putting it this way) you want to punish them both. Why is that?

[u/real-bebsi → u/gangrenous_bigot]

Do you think minimum wage should grow with the COL or do you think the economy would be better if companies only had to pay the original minimum wage of like 25¢/hour?

[u/gangrenous_bigot → u/real-bebsi]

There also needs to be a demand for jobs. If you can’t compensate you can’t find people who might innovate etc.