On the labor supply and demand chart you have in your head, there is a region that you're overlooking. It's across from the unemployment region you're stressing over, and it should be labeled 'Underemployment.' You know, like when you have perhaps several jobs and still can't make ends meet. The inevitable result of suppressing the minimum wage, as surely as abolishing the minimum wage, underemployment is as conveniently forgotten as it is obviously there on the chart. The people there are the precariat every bit as much as those in the unemployment region, only more tired and worn out.
Do you consciously choose for most people to be underemployed so that a few homeless people can find jobs for literally pennies an hour? Is that the balance you want to strike?
Clearly, a job that no longer exists is no guaranteed income. If it makes more financial sense for orders to get picked and palettes to get packed optimally by machines than by people, that's what'll happen. In all honestly, that's likely to've already happened years ago. If an employee being displaced by automation is lucky enough to work for a company that offers to retrain them, often they choose to retire rather than learn something new. Of course, that decision quite depends on guaranteed retirement income, or at least Social Security.
Which, like the minimum wage, has been fought for and over, tooth and claw, for generations now. Imagine, for a moment, what the landscape of desolation and despair would be had labor protections like social security and the minimum wage never been enacted. What would those displaced workers have done? Mind you, I'm not talking about hypothetical workers in some near future under pressure from automation, because that's been the case all along. I'm talking about the already-displaced, and for many, the newly-retired.
The original, U.S. federal minimum wage in 1938 was 25¢ an hour. In today's money, that's $4.20 an hour. Some people, especially Republicans, said back then the sky would fall if people made at least that. Sky's still there. If, as you suggest, a minimum wage means fewer people have jobs, well, at least having a job means something.
On the labor supply and demand chart you have in your head, there is a region that you're overlooking. It's across from the unemployment region you're stressing over, and it should be labeled 'Underemployment.' You know, like when you have perhaps several jobs and still can't make ends meet. The inevitable result of suppressing the minimum wage, as surely as abolishing the minimum wage, underemployment is as conveniently forgotten as it is obviously there on the chart. The people there are the precariat every bit as much as those in the unemployment region, only more tired and worn out.
Do you consciously choose for most people to be underemployed so that a few homeless people can find jobs for literally pennies an hour? Is that the balance you want to strike?
Clearly, a job that no longer exists is no guaranteed income. If it makes more financial sense for orders to get picked and palettes to get packed optimally by machines than by people, that's what'll happen. In all honestly, that's likely to've already happened years ago. If an employee being displaced by automation is lucky enough to work for a company that offers to retrain them, often they choose to retire rather than learn something new. Of course, that decision quite depends on guaranteed retirement income, or at least Social Security.
Which, like the minimum wage, has been fought for and over, tooth and claw, for generations now. Imagine, for a moment, what the landscape of desolation and despair would be had labor protections like social security and the minimum wage never been enacted. What would those displaced workers have done? Mind you, I'm not talking about hypothetical workers in some near future under pressure from automation, because that's been the case all along. I'm talking about the already-displaced, and for many, the newly-retired.
The original, U.S. federal minimum wage in 1938 was 25¢ an hour. In today's money, that's $4.20 an hour. Some people, especially Republicans, said back then the sky would fall if people made at least that. Sky's still there. If, as you suggest, a minimum wage means fewer people have jobs, well, at least having a job means something.