I continue to read about low wage “low skilled” jobs with the implication being that the low wages are justified by the assessment that the skills required are ordinary, common, and of no real value.
The most common reference is “burger flipper”.
Can anyone imagine the monotony of working over a hot stove for eight hours a day in the din of a busy kitchen and surrounded by the greasy air of the deep fryer?
Before asking how much this person should be paid, ask yourself how much you would ask to be paid, knowing that you would be doing this as your full time occupation.
Please share widely!
Please forgive the dated allusion to an ancient Saturday morning adventure TV show that only those of us of a certain age remember. It was NOT politically correct.
Setting: The Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded by hostile Indians on the warpath.
Lone Ranger: What are we going to do, Tonto?
Tonto: What’s this “we”, white man?
I think I understand the context and intent of the thread-starter. I share the feeling that it addresses a crucial question. I fear that it comes dangerously close to assuming the outcome of the question it asks.
The most important point — and the motivation for my Lone Ranger/Tonto allusion — is that there is no “we” that has the ability to assign a value to ANY commodity in a market economy, at least directly. The second part of the question therefore has no meaningful answer.
Even the first part is problematic — the question of “What are ‘skills'” also asks about something that is an epiphenomenon of the same market economy that establishes the value of any resource that is bought and sold. A “skill” is whatever a buyer wants to purchase from a supplier.
The short answer is that “skills” are whatever the market economy says they are, and the value of those skills is established by the market economy.
It seems to me that a more constructive question is something along the lines of “What can we do to make the market economy benefit all of us instead of just the ultra-wealthy?”
As we’ve discussed before, I suggest something along the following:
With these structural changes in place, no American will be forced to be a burger flipper in order to provide for their family. Employers will have to adjust their compensation and working conditions accordingly.
Why can’t we pay burger flippers what they are worth?
The so-called ‘skills gap’ doesn’t hold American workers back — the way we value labor differently does.
Every job demands skill from workers — the only difference, as far as pay is concerned, is where those skills were learned.
As we saw during the pandemic, we interpret skills very differently depending on our perception of class. Seemingly “professional” white-collar workers continued doing their high-paid jobs from home, while low-paid workers received “hero pay” of a paltry buck or two more an hour as they continued to make, stock, and sell the food and basic supplies that our country needed to survive.
For each employed burger flipper, we already do.
Each unemployed burger flipper must wait until some burger joint offers them wages they’re willing to accept or take an existing opening at whatever wages the burger joint currently offers.
You know as well as I do that this at best overstates your case.
Surely you’ll agree that the skills required for brain surgery are not self-taught from experience.
Perhaps you’ll also agree that trades like electricians, plumbers, welders, and so on require specific skills. A variety of alternatives already exist for acquiring those skills. On-the-job training is one avenue, as are traditional apprenticeship programs. Vocational training is one of those options. That training has been included in Democratic Party platform and policy for decades.
While it’s certainly true that every worker who does any job acquires proficiency at that job from experience, that proficiency is generally reflected in a resume or CV. Some employers value such experience, some do not.
We’ve already talked about the mythical “labor shortage” and its roots. There have been lots of headlines about “supply chain disruptions” that tend to reduce to the same thing.
Many workers are no longer willing to accept certain jobs at the wages currently offered for those jobs. There will be “labor shortages” and “supply chain disruptions” while the economy evolves to a new equilibrium for wages.
That new equilibrium will be different from what it was before the pandemic. The wage rate will be set by supply and demand in that new equilibrium, just as it has always been set by supply and demand.
Market forces, like natural selection, tend to have brutal and unpredictable outcomes. Government has been attempting to mitigate those brutal outcomes for most of the modern era. Minimum wage laws certainly influence wages. As minimum wages are increased, employers increasingly invest in ways to reduce their dependence on labor. Federal wage and price controls have been a disaster each time they’ve been attempted.
It is no more possible to force a particular outcome from a market economy than it is to change the acceleration due to gravity.
Market forces are not natural. They are manufactured. There was a time when the American citizen thought nothing of buying a product made by a child working in a factory – in fact they may have felt that they were doing a good thing for the child and society in general.
This is just sophistry and hand-waving. Market forces are as real as gravity and evolution.
Every person should be paid a living wage.
Obviously some jobs require more specific training than others.
Yes, there was a time when the majority of people felt this way. There was a time when we valued the labor of our fellow citizens. Now, we do not. We have been taught to value the items and services alone.
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Every American should have access to the basic necessities of life. “Wage” is irrelevant — we are in a post-labor economy.
Yes indeed, regardless of the objections from some dogmatists.
Is it a “post labor” economy or is it an economy that no longer values labor as much as it once did? It seems that laborers have been convinced that the 20% share of the economy that they get to distribute among them is fair and the 80% that the rentier class gets distribute among them is fair, with the assumption that the rentier class is actually adding value, or what Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs referred to as “God’s Work”?
In earlier times, economists viewed banks as the “sterile class” in terms of where value is created. Today, the tables have been turned.
To me, it appears that the rentier class has successfully convinced the working class that they are each other’s competitor and cause for any poor results.
To make big money, I mean really big money, things like a college degree, hard work, inventing a better mousetrap pale in comparison to the route of really big money and that is to join the rentier class. ….or tear it down.
It is both.
This is precisely analogous to numerous souls who wrote long pieces about the “desires” of objects in the millennia before modern physics was discovered by Isaac Newton.
In earlier times nations used a gold or silver standard to back their currency. In earlier times, bank failures were routine and disastrous.
This kind of rhetoric — complete with special jargon and vocabulary meaningful primarily within the rarified atmosphere of the intellectual bell-jar of those who coin the jargon and vocabulary — strikes me as more satisfying to write than to read.
It is already well-established that wealth networks are scale-free, and that in the absence of active regulation to change their behavior will evolve such that a handful of participants will have an enormous amount of wealth and an enormous number of participants will have a handful of wealth (or, in the modern era, negative wealth).
It is counterproductive to make moralistic judgements about who ends up where in a wealth distribution, because the distribution is a natural system that follows well-understood rules to arrive at its predicted and well-understood state. It has little or nothing to do with whether a given participant is a moral hero or reprobate.
Another scale-free distribution is the distribution of earthquakes. A handful of places will suffer enormously intense earthquakes. An enormous number of places will suffer a large number of tiny earthquakes so minor that they can only be detected by sensitive instruments.
A region that suffers from a magnitude 8 earthquake is not the subject of God’s punishment, in spite of what ancient societies once believed. Sodom and Gomorrah, if they ever existed at all, were destroyed by tectonic events. The behavior of their residents had nothing to do with it.
The participants at the top of the wealth distribution network are not there because they are inherently more greedy or less caring or whatever.
The most effective way to address the enormous wealth concentration disorder that our society now suffers from is to stop pathologizing the participants and instead focus on the system.
Our government must intervene to regulate the behavior of the wealth distribution network. That has nothing to do with making value judgements about those in any region of the network. It has everything to do with changing the parameters that control how wealth is transferred.
It specifically means reducing “preferential attachment” — the coupling between the amount of wealth of a participant and the amount of wealth transferred to that participant.
In practical terms, it means applying and enforcing tax policies along the lines of those I’ve already sketched elsewhere.