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Comment by influx | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is paying above minimum wage already. What do you suggest they should be paid?

This is reminding me of a discussion about Facebook's content enforcement, where I still don't understand the argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20222594. Pressuring people to miss bathroom breaks is wrong, I'd agree - I'm all for that being legally punishable if it isn't already. But the argument gets to a point where people are simply saying that the job inherently sucks anyway, and the people who are voluntarily doing it in exchange for the money would be better off not even being given the option and being involuntarily unemployed, and if necessary, the company employing them shouldn't even exist if that job must be done. I don't understand it.

I hate saying this, but it comes from a place of privilege. If you've never not had a job, you think just banning bad jobs will mean everyone has a good job. If you've been unemployed, you know you'd rather have a job and have it reformed through continuous work than be unemployed.

The problem, though, is that there are people who have never not had jobs who nonetheless have opinions on what the baseline job should be. Since they've never had to choose between food and a shitty job, they assume that they can solve the problem by just mandating jobs not be shitty.

People who are better at finding and keeping jobs -- are, typically, against minimum wage increase (because they better understand the consequences of such restriction).

Ironically, people who struggle with keeping a job -- are more likely to shoot themselves in the foot by supporting minimum wage increase.

Not everyone else is. People may put up with the 'above average' amazon because everything else in the area is still paying closer to minimum wage. If min wage was raised, it might make it easier to say 'no' to the amazon warehouse gig.

Quite the opposite: minimum wage increase will eliminate many low-skilled jobs and will make it harder "to say 'no' to the amazon warehouse gig".

It sounds like conditions are more of a problem than pay. Maybe there should be less that enforce regular breaks for workers doing monotonous jobs, and maximum hours.

Good luck getting a that kind of law passed in America though. Far too socialist.

A different answer: Pay them when their labor is actually worth.

how do you determine that if not at what the market sets it at?

There is no other way. The market ALWAYS sets it, no matter how strong it’s regulated. The real minimum wage is zero.

But the regulation strongly influences what the market will pay. The trend of allowing companies to have employees sign non-competes for relatively low skilled jobs, for example, depresses wages by impeding competition for labor.

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