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Comment by fzeroracer | Hacker News Reader

What job skills exactly are you learning doing minimum wage jobs in 2019? That always seemed like a bit of a meme to me, considering if you've already held one minimum wage job before then you've already learned everything they have to offer practically.

This might be different if companies were interested in training employees but they aren't. So what happens with no minimum wage is that you have a class of workers who work over 40 hours a week yet have to survive off of government assistance.

The government is literally subsidizing the profits of that company at that point. So why should companies get away with being a drain on society?

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Job skills to learn for people who can't get a minimum wage job can be

- Getting to work on time and every day.

- Functioning in a workplace without getting in fights.

- Sobriety.

- A basic knowledge of English.

Once you've mastered those, McDonalds will be happy to hire you.

Those aren't job skills. Those are all things you learn as part of your basic education.

So again, what actual skills do you learn on the job? If your argument is that we should remove the minimum wage to help people who can't make it through the educational system, I think the actual argument is that our educational system is fucked and needs to be fixed. Even then, most of the unemployed have those skills you've mentioned but aren't hired for any number of reasons unrelated to their competency or wages.

Those are definitely skills many at the bottom lack. They weren't part of my basic education, but I'm sure we went to different schools.

Regardless, people without those skills exist. Us HN people never meet them, and have a hard time imagining their lives, but they're still out there.

I completely agree that our educational system is fucked and needs to be fixed. I don't see how that would help the people who already went through the fucked up version, even if it ever got fixed, which I think we can agree isn't likely the next decade at least?

To learn about how the "permanent underclass" lives, You could do worse than reading "Dignity": https://www.amazon.com/Dignity-Seeking-Respect-Back-America/...

I am very, very familiar with how the poor and poverty stricken live considering I've been there and have been very public about my and my family's experience.

Which is precisely why I find framing arguments around removing minimum wage as some benefit to the poor to be rather disgusting, because it does absolutely nothing to solve the problem.

A job which can't pay shit isn't going to help you survive when the rent is due and you're earning $5 or less an hour. Even moreso if you're disabled and companies further take advantage of your desperation to work you into the ground until you break.

This isn't about helping the poor, it's about allowing companies to fleece them harder.

I honestly can't understand how people think earning $5/h is worse than earning $0/h.

I'm not being sarcastic. It's such a bizarre mental contortion.

Because the way the American social safety net works, you often wind up losing more than $5/hour worth of benefits to get that $5/hour job.

Many low wage jobs are physically demanding, have terrible (or no dependable) schedules, and offer limited hours so as to avoid having to offer benefits. It's not uncommon for low wage workers to juggle two or three jobs in order to get enough hours of paid work to survive. The problem then is that it is very hard to manage schedule conflicts between the jobs when they occur. Too many conflicts can cost you your job. I've seen this happen many times.

Check out this article in Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/life-af...

Also highly recommend On The Media's multipart investigation into poverty in America: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/projects/busted-ame...

> Because the way the American social safety net works, you often wind up losing more than $5/hour worth of benefits to get that $5/hour job.

Yeah, the marginal tax for the underclass is a huge problem!

If you lose $12/h in benefits by taking a $10/h job, most people won't take the job. Not because they're lazy, but because they're sensible rational people.

That's a big poverty trap we've built.

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