Deregulation in job hiring requirements could spark job growth?

Hey, if we lowered the minimum wage to 17c/hr like the Bangladeshi women who make our clothes for Walmart earn, we could have full employment and a libertarian/conservative nirvana.

http://news.change.org/stories/walmart-lobbies-to-keep-factory-wages-under-two-cents
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Walmart Lobbies to Keep Factory Wages Under Two Cents by Amanda Kloer · October 14, 2010
Topics: Slave Labor
Share6784retweetEver wonder how Walmart can afford to sell a pair of jeans for eight bucks? It's because workers at the factory in Bangladesh where the jeans are made earn a measly one-and-a-half cents for each pair they sew. To make matters worse, Walmart has been lobbying against a government-supported wage increase, which would bump the workers up to 35 cents an hour. It's time Walmart stopped exploiting the workers who make the clothes they sell.

The 2500 workers at the Anowara Apparels factory in Bangladesh spend all day sewing jeans, primarily for the Faded Glory brand of clothes sold at Walmart. They are 90% young women, some with families to support and others trying to simply scrape a living together. The women make between 11 and 17 cents an hour sewing jeans, and they're expected to produce at least ten pairs an hour.

 

No the minimum wage should be abolished entirely.

Why would you want to prohibit people from working just because their skills are worth less than 17 c/hr?

 

We can play the "from my experience" angle, but it really doesn't mean that much. My brother graduated in the tech field and is now a contractor. I also have another friend who quit his accounting job to be a contractor. I know more drug users that are not college grads the vice versa. I personally did manual labor to get my way through college (fast food and waitering). It's like going to Compton, looking around, then saying the majority of African Americans are on welfare.

Even if college grads expect more, the direction of the labor force is moving to being more skilled oriented anyways. The trainings for vacant jobs aren't going to sewing paints or driving tractors. They're going to require a skill set that takes mental disciple and perhaps physical as well. I'm guessig your job is similar. If we get rid of the above asssertion, we can better serve the economy by first, 1.) Offer training in the first place 2.) Accept anyone willing.

 

The thing is he isn't joking.

libertarians can be so unintentionally funny

 

Simple supply and demand, price floors create surpluses, whether it's crops or labor (unemployment).

 

Are you implying that people without college degrees are not going to try and compete for top jobs? They won't network, form alliances, sabotage and marginalize people who aren't like them? Do you really think the only "qualities" that managers and senior personnel look for when training and advancing employees are whether or not they have a degree? And why are you stuck on this family thing, why do you assume college grads aren't as worried about feeding their families or similarly troubled about paying off $50k - $100k in student loans, with four years less savings than Grindstone Lunchpail? Did you ever stop to think that some people went to college because, based on their experiences in high school, they knew they couldn't get decent or valuable jobs at 18?

 

Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Not that you would care apprarently as a fanatic fundamentalist. However, in your mind if those who weren't even worth 17c/hr earned less at their jobs do you think prices would fall to the point at which they could eat?

Unbelievable. The libertarian faith of some makes the Taliban look like open minded Renaissance figures.

As an aside, do you believe that your fundie econ understanding is as firm in its description or reality as say the law of gravity?

 

Whether it's enough to eat is irrelevant, the question is what's the alternative. I didn't say 17c/hr was desirable, it's just preferable to a wage mandate that would give the company no reason to locate there in the first place.

If someone's only competitive advantage is a willingness to do the same work for less, it would be immoral to take that away from them.

Same thing with the minimum wage here. You think you can mandate the way things ought to be and pat yourself on the back, but all you end up with is artificially high teenage unemployment because their labor is worth less than minimum wage. You've erected an artificial barrier for the low skilled to enter the workforce.

A better alternative would be to not purchase products from companies you don't like.

Personally, if I were running a company, I wouldn't feel guilty at all. The people willing to work for the least are the ones that need the work the most. Makes moral and economic sense to work with them. Not to mention the benefit to the customer on the other side in the form of lower prices.

Not faith, just logical consistency.

It's an accurate description of reality, but laws of economics are based on assumptions about human behavior, so they aren't as concrete as laws of nature.

 

I'd agree with this if the factors behind labor prices were not overwhelmingly overpowered by the flexibility and power afforded to capital versus that accorded to lowly labor.

We live in an age where capital can flip through countries effortlessly, while labor is relegated to quasi-serf conditions in the Third World. Mobility of capital and the power afforded to that is sky-high with free-trade accords, while mobility of labor is almost impossible given restrictive immigration conditions, and the money required to travel large distances (impossible to reach for most Third World citizens).

Get back to me when we don't live in a world where something as arbitrary as your place of birth will largely determine how much you suffer or prosper, and when immigration services don't regard lowly laborers as alms-seeking peasants, but as people willing to contribute to society. As it is, the system set up in the Third World is much like how the Church dealt with serfs in the Middle Ages, largely because they could. You can argue with me that the system is better than nothing, but I adamantly refuse to believe that it is anywhere close to the best system possible. It makes no moral sense. It might make economic sense---for the owners of capital exploiting powerless labor not afforded rights deemed fundamental in prosperous countries, but if there's one thing I need to emphasize---it makes no moral sense at all.

 

As others have pointed out, your anecdotal assumption that the poor/uneducated have better work ethics is faulty. Where I work, recent college graduates are expected to, and do, work 12-16 hour days to get up to speed and keep up. They have insane work ethics, and require the knowledge they learned at university to negotiate their work lives.

I don't for a minute believe in the stereotypes of the poor as lazy or stupid. And the wealthy will indeed be able to purchase their children's educations for them. But it's quite evident, even to a child, that a college degree is all but necessary to advance in life. And, if throughout your childhood you don't work to accomplish that goal via academic (or athletic) scholarship, or at the very least take out loans to cover the difference, then I have true questions about your "work ethic."

 

Libertarianism/market fundamentalism reminds me so much of Stalinism. Totalist philosophies that are outside the moral/humanitarian universe spanning the gamut from conservatism to Western Euro socialism.

Stalinists with their belief in "scientific" socialism believed that they had discovered the natural irrefutable law of organizing sociey. If 20 million Kulaks or peasants had to die in the transition, so be it. Likewise if 20 million Bangladeshi or other workers without enough value on the market die, so be it on the road to libertarian utopia.

Looking forward to the book "Libertarianism: The God that Failed".

 

Seriously? As a human being on this planet, they deserve a livable wage. Should that really be too much to ask?

 

In a libertarian world, there would be no stop lights or speed limits.

Happy motoring!

 

Never said it was popular, just right.

Libertarianism contends society can't/shouldn't be organized at all.

This is hyperbole without merit or historical example. A minimum wage law does not guarantee you will get paid, it merely forbids hiring at low wages. It's also insidious in that the unemployed who can't find work may not realize there could be work available to them below the minimum wage.

If someone is willing to work for 17c/hr and someone else is willing to pay it, why would you want to prevent that? That's a private exchange between two parties acting in their own perceived best interest. What business is it of yours?

To get back to the OT, hiring restrictions are also artificial barriers to employment, just like wage laws.