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How can anyone justify paying a high school kid who works part time most of the year a living wage. Not every job is meant to be a “living wage”.

marcus_holmes 1y ago
How are you supposed to live if your job doesn't pay you a living wage?
- sarchertech 1y ago
  The OP is specifically talking about high school students who are supported by their parents.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    What was the last job you had that calibrated your pay by asking if you were a dependent? Should someone make less if they are married? Should adult parents be paid less if they live with and are supported by a child? It is irrelevant.
    - nullc 1y ago
      It's not a question of anyone asking. Lets imagine that there is a job with parameters (including wages) where only high schoolers would take the job. Should that job be required to pay above the market wage to make it also attractive to independent adults? Then what job will the highshoolers have? If I've got to pay a full adult wage anyways, I'm probably not going to employ a highschooler. It creates a deadweight loss. In this example are kids that would benefit from working, at low wages, from both the experience and income and they're left out. There would be useful work done that probably just doesn't get done, creating harms in the form of missing products and services. Now sure, non-existence of a minimum wage would create other harms and losses so there is a balancing act-- but in the special case of students being discussed here those other costs don't apply. (and that's also why in practice there are minimum wage exceptions like the 'youth minimum wage program').
      - toomuchtodo 1y ago
        This is a bit of a wild way to explain away "we're going to pay people under 18 less because we think we can justify it." Just raise the minimum wage and pay them the same. If they don't take the jobs, they don't. If the jobs go unfilled, raise the pay to a clearing price where they are. If employers can't make the economics work, that's unfortunate. How you see this issue is likely governed by where on the spectrum between "human" and "labor" you see a person, admittedly. In this context, we're going through contortions to argue to pay people less by age "because we can."
        nullc 1y ago
        Have you ever lived in poverty? Have you ever earned minimum wage (or below)? I have and I am extremely grateful for the oppturnities it brought me and the life I was eventually able to make out of it. There are myriad ways to dehumanize a person. One is saying they should be denied some opportunities they would freely choose to take out of a paternalistic desire to help them. It's a complicated subject, you don't need to justify your position by besmirching the empathy of those who have views you disagree with. Reasonable people can simply disagree!
        toomuchtodo 1y ago
        Yes and yes. It is why I believe there is no room for negotiation and weaseling out of paying humans a wage required that enables them to live with dignity (as it relates to a minimum wage) [1]. Edit: > There are myriad ways to dehumanize a person. One is saying they should be denied some opportunities they would freely choose to take out of a paternalistic desire to help them. It's a complicated subject, you don't need to justify your position by besmirching the empathy of those who have views you disagree with. Reasonable people can simply disagree! I don't know what else to tell you my dude. McDonalds made $14B in profit last year. I can show you many examples where the economic resources surely exist based on the profits being made, in whatever industry or vertical you want to pick from, to pay people a living wage. I'm not saying no profits, I'm not cheering on communism. I'm simply arguing for the existing system to pay people enough to survive in comfort, regardless of age, with some combination of decreased profits and increased costs. If I can show you the economic value and wealth exists, and we still go through contortions to argue we cannot pay living wages to people (when the evidence is robust that we can), I can either come to the conclusion that someone has not built a robust mental model on all of the variables in play or they just don't think we should pay people enough to live. We're just arguing unnecessary economic system complexity (living wages for some, lower wages for teenagers even though a majority of minimum wage workers are not teenagers [2]) to paper over exploitation for some combination of consumer excess and shareholder returns. No attempt at dehumanizing is being made. [1] https://livingwage.mit.edu/ https://livingwage.mit.edu/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43840936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43840936
    - eadmund 1y ago
      Jobs calibrate pay in the same sense that employees calibrate labour: employers strive to pay the least they can for the most labour; employees strive put in the least labour to get the most wages. A job which doesn’t offer enough to live on will be less appealing to those trying to live on their own, but fine for high schoolers.
    - apercu 1y ago
      But that’s the republican way. They get to decide based on their values and biases the worth of everyone else.
  - marcus_holmes 1y ago
    High School students do not work full-time, by definition, and so therefore are never going to earn a "living wage" in the sense that that phrase means. The whole "but kids" argument about minimum wages is a pointless distraction from the actual debate, which is "should there be full-time adult jobs that pay so little that those doing it are living in poverty?". Personally I think it's obvious that the answer is "no", and any society that answers "yes" needs to take a good long look at itself and what it's actually trying to achieve.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    But such a distinction is worthless - there's no rule anywhere saying only teens get minimum wage It's a completely bullshit argument that says "see, it's not so bad" but purposefully pointing to the small subset of people who are in the most advantageous circumstances. It would be like me arguing the Great Depression wasn't so bad and then pointing to some group of people who were immensely wealthy and therefore managed to get through the Depression mostly unscathed. It's just... bad arguing.
- nullc 1y ago
  By living with friends or family, state assistance, and/or charity. How are you supposed to live on 0 wage? Inevitably for some people that's what a minimum wage means: There is some work with some wage less than a minimum for which this person in this place could work, and they can't because of the minimum. Among other considerations any minimum wage has to balance that harm vs the harm for people who would be paid fairly more with a higher minimum wage. It's also just the case that an extremely small portion of the public makes minimum wage, and since they're exceptional each of their situations are exceptional in its own way.
toomuchtodo 1y ago
Easily. If the job cannot pay a living wage, it should not exist. We'll get there with structural demographics eventually (pushing up wages as labor supply diminishes as the fertility rate continues to rapidly fall), but it would be nice if we could not make so many people suffer in the interim ("time value of life"). Several states are removing child labor restrictions due to "labor shortages," for example. So, you have to starve the beast of underpaid labor. We have the means, it's a choice. We could make a better choice, but if we don't, demographics dynamics will make it for us. https://usafacts.org/articles/minimum-wage-america-how-many-people-are-earning-725-hour/ https://usafacts.org/articles/minimum-wage-america-how-many-... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=labor%20shortages&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://joshbersin.com/2023/09/why-we-are-entering-a-secular-labor-shortage/ https://joshbersin.com/2023/09/why-we-are-entering-a-secular... https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-demographic-reversal-and-what-it-means-for-the-economy/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-... https://wallethub.com/edu/states-employers-hiring/101730 https://wallethub.com/edu/states-employers-hiring/101730 https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attack/ https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attac...
d4mi3n 1y ago
High school kids don't work full time year-round. If they are working full time through the year, they likely aren't spending much time in school and whatever work they are doing should bring in enough money for them to not be homeless, starving, or unable to meet other basic needs like healthcare. I'd further note that the government and it's taxpayers pay the toll regardless of whether or not we increase the minimum wage. We just end up paying the cost elsewhere in a way that's dollar for dollar a lot less efficient (policing, ER visits, homeless shelters, etc.) Arguments aside, what do you feel would be an appropriate minimum wage for someone working a job in the US? What factors go into that number? In what situations does that number change?
Larrikin 1y ago
Why should age matter at all if the person is doing the exact same job? Children already get paid less than minimum wage when there are jobs they legally can't do. The owner of the McDonald's I worked at in high school loved hiring 14 and 15 year olds because he could make them do every single menial job there except cook the food. They were run ragged same as the rest of us for the bonuses only the manager got.
platevoltage 1y ago
here we go. Fine. make a law that adults have to be paid a living wage so that this talking point can disappear for good.
- sarchertech 1y ago
  I don’t think it’s that easy. Creating multiple classes of workers with different wage floors creates new problems. It’s also possible that the increased artificial demand for high school labor pushes their average wage to just below the adult minimum wage.
  - platevoltage 1y ago
    I mean, I know it's not a perfect solution. This was just one of those talking points people use to justify keeping the minimum wage low, or eliminating it all together. These same people will also say "these minimum wage jobs are for people just entering the workforce, not people in their 30s/40s etc."
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
meltyness 1y ago
The only response I want to read about this starts with, "Historically, the lurch and jerk of technical progress, paranoia manufactured by ubiquitous media, government financial overreach, and heavy-handed speculative projections shattered the ability of many organizations to establish meaningful turnover and generational handoff ..."
jrflowers 1y ago
> How can anyone justify paying a high school kid who works part time most of the year a living wage. Pretty easily. Once you consider how productive an even below-average worker is in the US, the idea of running a business so poorly that you can’t make bank while paying somebody a living wage seems pretty embarrassing. While the “teenager” line is often vilified as a sign of unfettered greed (which it is), in my experience it’s been more of the respite of folks with so little business sense that it boggles the mind that they would be an employer. I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business” out loud with a straight face, there are some folks that gleefully proclaim stuff like that as if they’re talking about something other than themselves
- nullc 1y ago
  High average productivity can just as well come from aggressively not employing anyone that doesn't drive the revenue per head-count forward. I suggest that the below-average workers productivity is inflated by aggressive fat cutting-- and that we'd be better off as a society if we made more room for novice and trainee employees. But this has gone off-topic of the subject of minimum wage because very few people actually receive minimum wage in the US. > I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business” An inexperienced new employee can easily be a net loss for a long time as they mess up more stuff than they produce while they learn. This isn't tolerated by a lot of modern business philosophy so the jobs and industries that work like this increasingly just don't exist in the US.
  - jrflowers 1y ago
    > An inexperienced new employee can easily be a net loss for a long time as they mess up more stuff than they produce while they learn. Yes. It is an employer’s responsibility to train or fire employees that are harmful to the business. If they can’t manage to do that, that’s a failure to operate the business at the most basic level. Insisting that there exists x or y groups of employees that intrinsically deserve to be paid less than a living wage is tantamount to asserting that an employer or manager is entitled to have their planned failure to operate the business subsidized by that same group that they insist on hiring. Again, it’s not just greed behind the “[teenagers]* don’t deserve a living wage” spiel. It also tends to expose laziness, lack of imagination, entitlement, an active disdain for work, a lack of grasp on business fundamentals, etc. In other words, a lack of the bare minimum aspects of intellectual capacity and discipline necessary in somebody tasked with employing people * it is not uncommon to see “teenagers” replaced with all manner of groups that any incompetent manager or employer might foist the responsibility for their failures upon. There is nothing special about them as a group
notjulianjaynes 1y ago
Most minimum wage workers are not teenagers https://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-workers/ https://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-workers/
maxerickson 1y ago
I expect you mean requiring a living wage. Or do you really think there are 0 high school kids that are capable of earning more?
apercu 1y ago
You mean, how do we further exploit minors? Send ‘em to the mines and the meat packing plants for $7/hr because they’re only kids!

marcus_holmes 1y ago

How are you supposed to live if your job doesn't pay you a living wage?

sarchertech 1y ago
The OP is specifically talking about high school students who are supported by their parents.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  What was the last job you had that calibrated your pay by asking if you were a dependent? Should someone make less if they are married? Should adult parents be paid less if they live with and are supported by a child? It is irrelevant.
  - nullc 1y ago
    It's not a question of anyone asking. Lets imagine that there is a job with parameters (including wages) where only high schoolers would take the job. Should that job be required to pay above the market wage to make it also attractive to independent adults? Then what job will the highshoolers have? If I've got to pay a full adult wage anyways, I'm probably not going to employ a highschooler. It creates a deadweight loss. In this example are kids that would benefit from working, at low wages, from both the experience and income and they're left out. There would be useful work done that probably just doesn't get done, creating harms in the form of missing products and services. Now sure, non-existence of a minimum wage would create other harms and losses so there is a balancing act-- but in the special case of students being discussed here those other costs don't apply. (and that's also why in practice there are minimum wage exceptions like the 'youth minimum wage program').
    - toomuchtodo 1y ago
      This is a bit of a wild way to explain away "we're going to pay people under 18 less because we think we can justify it." Just raise the minimum wage and pay them the same. If they don't take the jobs, they don't. If the jobs go unfilled, raise the pay to a clearing price where they are. If employers can't make the economics work, that's unfortunate. How you see this issue is likely governed by where on the spectrum between "human" and "labor" you see a person, admittedly. In this context, we're going through contortions to argue to pay people less by age "because we can."
      - nullc 1y ago
        Have you ever lived in poverty? Have you ever earned minimum wage (or below)? I have and I am extremely grateful for the oppturnities it brought me and the life I was eventually able to make out of it. There are myriad ways to dehumanize a person. One is saying they should be denied some opportunities they would freely choose to take out of a paternalistic desire to help them. It's a complicated subject, you don't need to justify your position by besmirching the empathy of those who have views you disagree with. Reasonable people can simply disagree!
        toomuchtodo 1y ago
        Yes and yes. It is why I believe there is no room for negotiation and weaseling out of paying humans a wage required that enables them to live with dignity (as it relates to a minimum wage) [1]. Edit: > There are myriad ways to dehumanize a person. One is saying they should be denied some opportunities they would freely choose to take out of a paternalistic desire to help them. It's a complicated subject, you don't need to justify your position by besmirching the empathy of those who have views you disagree with. Reasonable people can simply disagree! I don't know what else to tell you my dude. McDonalds made $14B in profit last year. I can show you many examples where the economic resources surely exist based on the profits being made, in whatever industry or vertical you want to pick from, to pay people a living wage. I'm not saying no profits, I'm not cheering on communism. I'm simply arguing for the existing system to pay people enough to survive in comfort, regardless of age, with some combination of decreased profits and increased costs. If I can show you the economic value and wealth exists, and we still go through contortions to argue we cannot pay living wages to people (when the evidence is robust that we can), I can either come to the conclusion that someone has not built a robust mental model on all of the variables in play or they just don't think we should pay people enough to live. We're just arguing unnecessary economic system complexity (living wages for some, lower wages for teenagers even though a majority of minimum wage workers are not teenagers [2]) to paper over exploitation for some combination of consumer excess and shareholder returns. No attempt at dehumanizing is being made. [1] https://livingwage.mit.edu/ https://livingwage.mit.edu/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43840936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43840936
  - eadmund 1y ago
    Jobs calibrate pay in the same sense that employees calibrate labour: employers strive to pay the least they can for the most labour; employees strive put in the least labour to get the most wages. A job which doesn’t offer enough to live on will be less appealing to those trying to live on their own, but fine for high schoolers.
  - apercu 1y ago
    But that’s the republican way. They get to decide based on their values and biases the worth of everyone else.
- marcus_holmes 1y ago
  High School students do not work full-time, by definition, and so therefore are never going to earn a "living wage" in the sense that that phrase means. The whole "but kids" argument about minimum wages is a pointless distraction from the actual debate, which is "should there be full-time adult jobs that pay so little that those doing it are living in poverty?". Personally I think it's obvious that the answer is "no", and any society that answers "yes" needs to take a good long look at itself and what it's actually trying to achieve.
- const_cast 1y ago
  But such a distinction is worthless - there's no rule anywhere saying only teens get minimum wage It's a completely bullshit argument that says "see, it's not so bad" but purposefully pointing to the small subset of people who are in the most advantageous circumstances. It would be like me arguing the Great Depression wasn't so bad and then pointing to some group of people who were immensely wealthy and therefore managed to get through the Depression mostly unscathed. It's just... bad arguing.
nullc 1y ago
By living with friends or family, state assistance, and/or charity. How are you supposed to live on 0 wage? Inevitably for some people that's what a minimum wage means: There is some work with some wage less than a minimum for which this person in this place could work, and they can't because of the minimum. Among other considerations any minimum wage has to balance that harm vs the harm for people who would be paid fairly more with a higher minimum wage. It's also just the case that an extremely small portion of the public makes minimum wage, and since they're exceptional each of their situations are exceptional in its own way.

toomuchtodo 1y ago

Easily. If the job cannot pay a living wage, it should not exist. We'll get there with structural demographics eventually (pushing up wages as labor supply diminishes as the fertility rate continues to rapidly fall), but it would be nice if we could not make so many people suffer in the interim ("time value of life"). Several states are removing child labor restrictions due to "labor shortages," for example. So, you have to starve the beast of underpaid labor. We have the means, it's a choice. We could make a better choice, but if we don't, demographics dynamics will make it for us. https://usafacts.org/articles/minimum-wage-america-how-many-people-are-earning-725-hour/ https://usafacts.org/articles/minimum-wage-america-how-many-... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=labor%20shortages&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://joshbersin.com/2023/09/why-we-are-entering-a-secular-labor-shortage/ https://joshbersin.com/2023/09/why-we-are-entering-a-secular... https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-demographic-reversal-and-what-it-means-for-the-economy/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-... https://wallethub.com/edu/states-employers-hiring/101730 https://wallethub.com/edu/states-employers-hiring/101730 https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attack/ https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attac...

d4mi3n 1y ago

High school kids don't work full time year-round. If they are working full time through the year, they likely aren't spending much time in school and whatever work they are doing should bring in enough money for them to not be homeless, starving, or unable to meet other basic needs like healthcare. I'd further note that the government and it's taxpayers pay the toll regardless of whether or not we increase the minimum wage. We just end up paying the cost elsewhere in a way that's dollar for dollar a lot less efficient (policing, ER visits, homeless shelters, etc.) Arguments aside, what do you feel would be an appropriate minimum wage for someone working a job in the US? What factors go into that number? In what situations does that number change?

Larrikin 1y ago

Why should age matter at all if the person is doing the exact same job? Children already get paid less than minimum wage when there are jobs they legally can't do. The owner of the McDonald's I worked at in high school loved hiring 14 and 15 year olds because he could make them do every single menial job there except cook the food. They were run ragged same as the rest of us for the bonuses only the manager got.

platevoltage 1y ago

here we go. Fine. make a law that adults have to be paid a living wage so that this talking point can disappear for good.

sarchertech 1y ago
I don’t think it’s that easy. Creating multiple classes of workers with different wage floors creates new problems. It’s also possible that the increased artificial demand for high school labor pushes their average wage to just below the adult minimum wage.
- platevoltage 1y ago
  I mean, I know it's not a perfect solution. This was just one of those talking points people use to justify keeping the minimum wage low, or eliminating it all together. These same people will also say "these minimum wage jobs are for people just entering the workforce, not people in their 30s/40s etc."

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

meltyness 1y ago

The only response I want to read about this starts with, "Historically, the lurch and jerk of technical progress, paranoia manufactured by ubiquitous media, government financial overreach, and heavy-handed speculative projections shattered the ability of many organizations to establish meaningful turnover and generational handoff ..."

jrflowers 1y ago

> How can anyone justify paying a high school kid who works part time most of the year a living wage. Pretty easily. Once you consider how productive an even below-average worker is in the US, the idea of running a business so poorly that you can’t make bank while paying somebody a living wage seems pretty embarrassing. While the “teenager” line is often vilified as a sign of unfettered greed (which it is), in my experience it’s been more of the respite of folks with so little business sense that it boggles the mind that they would be an employer. I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business” out loud with a straight face, there are some folks that gleefully proclaim stuff like that as if they’re talking about something other than themselves

nullc 1y ago
High average productivity can just as well come from aggressively not employing anyone that doesn't drive the revenue per head-count forward. I suggest that the below-average workers productivity is inflated by aggressive fat cutting-- and that we'd be better off as a society if we made more room for novice and trainee employees. But this has gone off-topic of the subject of minimum wage because very few people actually receive minimum wage in the US. > I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business” An inexperienced new employee can easily be a net loss for a long time as they mess up more stuff than they produce while they learn. This isn't tolerated by a lot of modern business philosophy so the jobs and industries that work like this increasingly just don't exist in the US.
- jrflowers 1y ago
  > An inexperienced new employee can easily be a net loss for a long time as they mess up more stuff than they produce while they learn. Yes. It is an employer’s responsibility to train or fire employees that are harmful to the business. If they can’t manage to do that, that’s a failure to operate the business at the most basic level. Insisting that there exists x or y groups of employees that intrinsically deserve to be paid less than a living wage is tantamount to asserting that an employer or manager is entitled to have their planned failure to operate the business subsidized by that same group that they insist on hiring. Again, it’s not just greed behind the “[teenagers]* don’t deserve a living wage” spiel. It also tends to expose laziness, lack of imagination, entitlement, an active disdain for work, a lack of grasp on business fundamentals, etc. In other words, a lack of the bare minimum aspects of intellectual capacity and discipline necessary in somebody tasked with employing people * it is not uncommon to see “teenagers” replaced with all manner of groups that any incompetent manager or employer might foist the responsibility for their failures upon. There is nothing special about them as a group

notjulianjaynes 1y ago

Most minimum wage workers are not teenagers https://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-workers/ https://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-workers/

maxerickson 1y ago

I expect you mean requiring a living wage. Or do you really think there are 0 high school kids that are capable of earning more?

apercu 1y ago

You mean, how do we further exploit minors? Send ‘em to the mines and the meat packing plants for $7/hr because they’re only kids!