Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.
"Enough for accommodation, transport, food and basic services"
That's how a minimum wage works. What you pay your workers depends on the market, their value to the business, the price you are being paid by the customers, local conditions, exchange rates etc. But what you pay must be a minimum wage.
I certainly wouldn't shed any tears of Walmart wasn't "a thing".
I'm not interested in what people think they are entitled to. Your argument has shifted from 'there shouldn't be a minimum wage' to 'maybe it should reflect where you live' to 'people want more money to live where they want'.
Make sure that you take this on board: I don't care.
My argument hasn't shifted, I stated earlier that things like Works Councils are far more effective than minimum wage laws, and I stated that unless minimum wage laws are going to be done at a granular enough level to be meaningful and have some link or correlation to cost of living, they're rather pointless. (which I still believe)
One of the problems with Walmart is the clout they have with suppliers because of their size. They can muscle prices that are unavailable to their mom-and-pop competitors. No free market there, either.
A lot of work is like that. You don't need umpteen years of education, a masters and half a lifetime of on job training to stack shelves. And neither do you need 3 hours of training. It's 'hey kid, put these boxes on these shelves and those boxes on the other shelves'.
One wonders why such jobs should exist at all. The elephant in the room is that they are ceasing to exist, and soon there will be no jobs for a lot of people. We have a labor revolution coming as sweeping as the move from agricultural to factory work, only this time it's a move out of work altogether. There are some big bumps in the road ahead, for instance, trucking. One of the few jobs that an unskilled worker can get that actually does pay a living wage is truck driving. There are three and a half million truck drivers in this country. Sooner or later most trucking will be by autonomous vehicles. What will we do with these drivers (mostly men) who really don't have the skills to do anything else in a modern economy?
We're having the same problems in Australia. Two of the big supermarket chains lean very heavily on producers to supply at rock bottom prices. In some case, growers have left their produce rot in the fields because they were losing money digging it up, boxing it and delivering it to the supermarket. So everyone cuts corners and you get tomatoes and carrots and other food stuff at low prices that taste of...nothing.
"Enough for accommodation, transport, food and basic services"
I voted for Clinton in 1992 & will always regret it and should have voted Perot. In 1996, I had come to my senses and voted for Bob Dole and I think Perot should have stayed out of the 1996 election.
”Going-to-market” has always been a thing in most societies…except now companies own the “entire market”, rather than just the land that the market sits upon.
Truck drivers (like most anyone else) can learn to do other things.
Driving a truck isn't "unskilled"...however, more accurately put, it's not a job that confers skills that would be well-suited for other jobs in the similar pay range.Truck drivers (like most anyone else) can learn to do other things.
And, for the record, it’s not unskilled.
So then it would stand to reason that a provision suggesting that a mom & pop shop in a rural area being forced to increase their labor costs (due to people living in big cities miles and miles away from them not making enough to live on) could create an even bigger challenge for them correct?
Perhaps so, but then I'm not arguing for a minimum wage. Mind you, I think there should be such a thing, on a "prevailing wage" sort of principle to keep individual employees from exploitation. But it is not a useful way to increase substandard wages to a liveable level. Workers are going to have to do that themselves.
No, that I don't agree with. There are ways for big unions to address the problems you raise, and in this country unions (whether you call them works councils or not) need to have serious political clout, maybe their own political party.
