Thinking the private sector gives fair value salary to employees by free will is not serious ....
Private sector are there to make money , not to give fair value to anyone .
Just look at history in multiple countries and you will see decent salary vs corporations are always a war .
Just look at empirical evidences in the last few decades.

Btw OP, everyone answer you pretty quickly on the first page imo .

What evidence do you have that a business like Target, for example, doesn't pay its employees fairly?

There were definitely some solid responses to my question, but I never got a response to this:

Labor is a fundamental way to provide and add value. I believe you agree with this and you said as much. I believe no one denies that Labor literally does the Work (in every sense of the word including the physics sense). The work is what adds value to existing stuff for other people to consume.

Now with any group of people doing work, be it a bunch of people in a factory, or in a software dev team, or a bunch of politicians, or in the case that we are discussing here - everyone in a society, the question we want to answer is : what is the optimal process to efficiently do that work? How should we organize to best do the work? This is a big question that is difficult to answer because there are many potential solutions, each solutions have many pros and cons.

Capitalism is simply one of those many solutions. I fully believe that it does add value to society. But my point is that it is Not a fundamental core way to add value, it is simply a man-made process. And this man made process has many cons, namely:

1. The rent seeking nature of assets aka money aka capital.

2. Distribution of value disproportionately favoring asset owners instead of labor. (Again here, the concept of asset owner itself is a man made concept that individuals can own assets. This is part of the invention of the process, not a fundamental value add like Labor.)

I would argue that the capitalism process that we have today has many benefits:

1. Efficient distribution of labor. Labor skills are well matched to the need of those skills.

2. The needs of consumers are well met, for the most part. (There are issues of course, Monopolies, bribes, regulatory capture, false advertising)

As you are aware, there are so many other pros and cons....

Anyways my main point is that Labor is the fundamental and single core thing that does the Work and adds Value. The process on top to best effectively use this labor does not necessarily have to be capitalism, it can be any of the many other processes we don't have time or space here to discuss.

I do believe that Capitalism does add value in the form of efficiently leveraging Labor's Work to output more Value. But the reward system of this process is lopsided against those who do the labor, which is insanely unfair (as well as unproductive and inefficient for producing max value add to society), since they are the ones literally doing the work.

Were speaking economic in general .
Of course some company act in a better ethical way , but they aren’t the norm .
If it was the norm , the wealth gap wouldn’t be that big right ?

The concept of paying fairly or not has two levels of meaning. When we say "pay fairly", is the scope:

1. Given the current rules of the game, is a company paying fairly? I think this is a moot question as long as the company is following the rules.

2. Is the current set of capitalistic rules fairly reward employees (Labor) vs employers (asset owners)? The answer is mostly subjective. Some people believe that labor should be paid 0 (slavery), on the other end, some people believe that there should be no such thing as individual asset owners, everyone in the society owns all assets equally.

Given the incentives of the current capitalistic rules, I would argue that the goals of any and all for profit companies are litterarlly that:

maximum profit.

Some companies think short term profits and max exploit their workers short term - we think this is unethical such as low paying short term retails and gig workers.

Some companies think long term profits , and max exploit their workers over long term, which many of us consider "ethical", but the ethical part is just a side effect.

vast majority in the middle tho, CCF. Right?

Nope.

There is a relationship between the cost of labor and the demand a business will have for labor but wages are not tied directly by the profit they generate for the employer. At least not as a rule. Some employees get commissions or bonuses that may be based on performance. Most can't be so easily quantified. Besides, labor is always an expense and is always paid as little as possible. Obviously.

This is true in both the private and public sector as both operate within budgets.

Nice Koch talking points you got there though.

And nice University you went to where they didn't know how wages are determined. lol

If you give any thought of anyone besides yourself regarding wages and standard of living you're branded a leftist.

Even on a forum like this that people consider left leaning.

So I suspect the first option is the more popular. If people will admit to it or not is another story.

Totally agree w you RFD. It's an accepted fact, employers pay employees the minimum they can get away with. This is regardless of how much profits the company make.

Sixsevenoff you're 100% off. Look at graphs of wages over time vs productivity. Guess where all the profits from the abundance of productivity go? You guessed it to the rich asset owners.

One would have to be the stupidest employer in the history of capitalism to pay employees based on how much profit the company is making without having to do it. Imagine walmart increasing wages over the last 20 years based on profits their billionaire owners accumulated. Well they wouldn't be billionaires if those billions went to their workers would they?

The only sector (approx.) where profit is really taking into consideration to determine the employees salaries are in the major sports leagues like NBA,NFL,etc.

AND EVEN THAN, being the most skilled In the world for example , already gaining huge amount of money , those athletes still need to group together as unions to have a fighting chance vs the owners .

Imagine how the ordinary little guy has basically no chance by themselves without unions vs those same class of top 1% wealthy ....
Just looking at history of the working class throughout history you see that to have any chance of a decent living you actually need to fight for it .

When I hear wages are rightly levelled in the private sector makes me so piss .
And yeah there is a line which is very difficult to draw but it isn’t subjective imo ...
The line of when the wealth gap becomes too big , it hurts the economybfor one simple reason ....
any spending is the income of someone else and vice versa .
More you cut wages , less the economy benefits from it cause you need costumers !
A lot of people think economics works in a linear fashion when it actually isn’t .
Diminishing effect and exponential function appears all over in economics while the majority of politician and citizens think in linear terms .

At some point , debts is destructive , interest rates aren’t efficient anymore , etc...

It is hard to find a good balance in economic but it definitely exist and it isn’t just a subjective goal.

There is a reason the mash equilibrium is so effective in economics .

I personally find all the people complaining about student debt to be selfish when we have private prisons and people dying because of lack of health insurance. Going to college is a luxury.

I think being selfish is fine. What else do you want people to do?

And if you're gonna complain about selfish, you choose people w student debts to do it with?

Keep focus man, your real enemy is not them.

Your real enemy divides us and rule over us.
Your real enemy is cunning.
Your real enemy has infiltrated your mind and made you point fingers at your fellow slaves!

Edit slaves is a little extreme, indentured servants is more accurate.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybe...h=2718a7a15179

Picture the pie. Picture the majority of people have a sliver of the pie. Picture them complaining and asking for a little more. Picture yourself next to them telling them they are selfish. Picture the rich being happy and smug as **** that it's working again in their favor.

I’m too tired to respond to this in more than a sentence or 2. Sleepy Bryce says let 700, 000 people out of prison/jail. Then you can do college affordability. Also, technically I’m still part of the 1% so there’s that.

I'm assuming you referring to this: "Some people believe that labor should be paid 0 (slavery), on the other end, some people believe that there should be no such thing as individual asset owners, everyone in the society owns all assets equally."

Most people have no idea what capitalism is nor any other isms, so we would really never know what most people want.

One thing that is certain is that everyone wants to own more stuff and have more wealth regardless of what ism it would be under. So given a fair vote, the vast majority will want to distribute the wealth evenly. So no people are really not in the middle, they are close to edge.

But we will never have a fair vote, and the brainwashing of decades is ingrained. People will actively vote and work against what they actually want if they understood the options well enough.

While I completely understand the sentiment behind this, it really isn't a great way to look at things in the end. It's basically limiting society to addressing one problem at a time, whatever is deemed most serious. If government has X billion dollars and were deciding whether to use it to fix prisons, health insurance, or student debt, then it would probably make sense to prioritize the first two over the latter. But it rarely works that way.

Power is less about money than people think. Of course Billionaires are relatively powerful but they aren’t as powerful as District Attorneys and Sheriffs. At the end of the day people can take everything away from you with power not money. You can get into student debt, get into a minor misdemeanor incident and then have your career vanish like it was nothing. Since I actually do work on these issues, I’ve seen so many people get like a dui charge or a possession charge or a domestic violence charge and then lose a liscense for nursing, education, sometimes disbarred from law etc etc.

At the very end of the day there’s two types of problems money problems and health problems. And money problems are not problems.

All the more reason not to make reform on some issues get in the way of reform on others! IE if it's just a matter of will, then fixing student debt shouldn't impede prison or health reform.

Maybe you are super sleepy right now but your last sentence is insane if intentional. People risk their lives and kill for money. Money is what allows some people to live and have dignity.

Also regarding prioritizarion, the number 1 priority is wealth gap/inequity and definitely not prison reforms and not even health insurance. If people have more money many of them will not even have to deal with the prison system. And obviously health insurance issue can be alleviated by having money.

Having money allows people to have more free time. Free time to be with their loved ones, to learn and grow, to contribute to their community, to take financial risks to start a business and innovate, reduces money related crimes as well as mental well being related crimes. It directly solves many many problems in our society and indirectly make many problems no longer a priority.

This can be an interesting discussion and i think most people that I have seen on this forum (as opposed to BFI) would be somewhat in agreement however, absolute statements like the above that are so obviously wrong have no value and tend to ruin such discussions from being productive.

Your statements are so obviously flawed that one single example sinks it.

Here's What Really Happened at That Company That Set a $70,000 Minimum Wage

Dan Price decided to pay all 120 employees at least $70,000. Grown men cried. Profits soared. Then things got really crazy.


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Yes, one single example and you cannot say 'well that is the exception' as your statements allow for not a single exception.

I can provide myself as example two as I have owned and run businesses and NEVER paid the minimum possible. Always put in aggressive profit share.

1. You probably overlook ...."can get away with" ending of my statement.

2. What is the example supposed to demonstrate? You didn't spell it out so I'm not sure what you want to say with it. You want to say that he's an example of an employer not paying minimum? Like you say of course there will be exceptions.

3. You're right we should not use absolute statements. Every variable particularly related to humans is going to have a distribution around some center/average/median. Humans do things based on incentives. The current capitalistic rules strongly incentivizes employers to pay the minimum they can to employees. You know so they can maximize profits which is the sole purpose of a for profit company.

For low skilled /easily trained roles, they can pay the absolute minimum with no care about burnout or goodwill of the employees because these employees are easily and cheaply replaced. Companies go for MAX EXPLOIT MODE.

For higher skilled jobs, they do care albeit not much about goodwill and burnout but only because they care about maximizing profits, not for any other reason. The calculation is simply that now it is more costly to replace him/her so the acceptable churn rate is lower than for low skilled labor.

Regarding profit sharing, very few companies do this.

If the right or whoever argue that wage is already tied to profits, then I for one propose a law that require companies to pay employees bonuses based on profits.

At the bottom of that article is a blurb of a guy bragging he pays a Filipino lady 4 dollars an hour. It kind of proves the truth of what I said as a general statement.

And fwiw Price is a small businessman. The big corporations do things much more methodically and with no soul. Not to mention the many small business owners who don't mind fleecing their customers and employees (see Rush in your article..lol)

We're dealing with human nature. We all want as much as possible as easy as possible as a general rule. We all also have some virtues that we express.

It is interesting that the same people who will say a private business owner should run his business as he sees fit pile on a guy who doesn't exploit workers to the fullest. It's a commentary on the system.

Why can't we complain about all of those things ?

I do agree that eliminating college debt seems random. People knowingly took it on so in theory you have to account for moral hazard. But given the bail outs that corporations get people naturally want to be bailed out too.

I think allowing normal dissolution of the debt is the bare minimum you can do though. And perhaps renegotiating terms to stop bankruptcies.

Just erasing it ? I mean, I have no problem with that but it's not really something I lose sleep over. I worry about wage stagnation much more.

Rflush , checkcheckfold and Bobo fett, of course you’re right. I was just very sleepy.

One minor point : the statement I made about money problems not being real problems was told to me by a powerful businessman one time. It might not be “true” but there’s a lot of truth in it. You’re not going to care about your stock portfolio when the real problems hit; cancer, jail, divorce settlement etc.

the example i gave could have 'got away with' paying his employees less. In fact he got sued and fought for paying them 'more', so there is no question he 'could have got away with it'.

So yes my exception does break your absolute rule.

it is such an error and break down of logic in debate to speak in absolutes when any person can quote a single instance to then prove your point wrong.

The person often doing it then retreats to 'ya well that is just one example' which then i will simply quote a '2nd'. Well that is just two examples they say. And so on and so on. SO what then is the point of the absolute?

'Generally' is the key to what you say.

I can 'generally' that there is a large degree of truth to what you guys say in most commoditized labor type businesses.

However I can say 'generally' that is rarely the case in corporations that generally have 'knowledge workers with high mobility'. In those industries the dynamic is generally the opposite where companies generally pay far more to try and keep their employees from jumping ship and to inspire loyalty.

Perfect example would be to look at how Amazon treats employees who work in their warehouses versus how they treat those who work in their AWS unit which is one of the highest paying tech units as compared to even other high paying peers.


And lots of employees, even outside tech have that type of mobility (options for high paying employment) such that companies cannot simply offer them the lowest possible number possible and those companies do not want to, as they realize they pay a big cost getting those people in, training them, and then seeing them jump to a company not trying to pay them 'the lowest amount possible'.

What you say is mainly true with regards to more commoditized work where the labor component brings little unique benefit and thus can be easily replaced or retrained.