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Comment by dundercoder | Hacker News Reader

I’ve often pondered this too. I think it is ok for jobs to exist that aren’t intended to provide a living wage due to the nature of the job, perhaps targeted for seniors in high school, or someone looking to add their very first entry to their resume.

But what happens when those are the only jobs available for someone who _needs_ a living wage? I don’t know the answer.

An example comes to mind of someone who gets caught needing to work two or three of these jobs just to make rent, who doesn’t have time to get educated, because there is no spare time. I would like to think that this is where some outside intervention supplements that persons income so they can devote a few hours a week to learning a trade. In my limited experience with state programs for this, it feels nigh impossible.

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> I think it is ok for jobs to exist that aren’t intended to provide a living wage... But what happens when those are the only jobs available for someone who _needs_ a living wage? I don’t know the answer.

The root of the problem is that a "living wage" in New York City is way, way too high. This is because the rent is too high, which is in no small part because of local housing policy, which does not want to see more apartments built, preferring to play games with rent control. (And economists are fractious in general, but the consensus position that rent control is destructive is as strong as the consensus of climate scientists on anthropocentric global warming.)

(In part this reluctance to build is because of other broken policy, such as the transit-construction policy, which means that new subways to these new apartments are impossibly unaffordable.)

But referring to it with the "living wage" mindset, we set about blaming employers for being evil, instead of fixing the broken housing policy. The consequence is that people who needed the higher wage to begin with are even more likely to be unemployed, as their employment is no longer profitable, and entry-level positions (for people who didn't get a fancy college degree in engineering, anyway) are unavailable.

There are other policy failures, of course. For instance, New York's education policy continues to fail its most vulnerable population, preventing them from obtaining skills that would render their labor more valuable.

> But referring to it with the "living wage" mindset, we set about blaming employers for being evil, instead of fixing the broken housing policy.

Not really, maybe you have the connotation between "living wage mindset" and "blame employers as evil". But as an American living abroad in Switzerland, where a strong currency exists but is undesirable, no federal minimum wage exists, no local minimum wage exists (except in 1 Canton), and labour is well represented in the political economy (>50% workers under coverage of various Collective Bargaining Agreements), it's clear there's a lot of wiggle room where things are not black and white, where we could try to push for a culture that both respects the commons and community as well as individual freedom. This different mindset and culture is why a "livable wage" works here despite the lack of regulation and without workers demonizing employers and vice versa.

I don't think such a mindset could be adopted by most Americans but it certainly shows there's no reason for a black-and-white mindset of "livable wage advocates" == "employer haters".

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