Do low end employees not deserve a living wage?

Define “high income”
Define “living wage”

Everyone deserves a living wage.

Of course they deserve a living wage. Even more. Their work is the hardest and least appreciated.

Very true @dammitjanetfromvegas but since it requires very little skill or training most employers feel they can pay slave wages for it.
And we get idiot excuses for paying slave wages like it just stepping stone type job, or it’s just teen agers earning party money we don’t have to pay a wage they can live on.

Not if it’s going to diminish MY pile. Ignore the fact that i have more money than I can count. That’s irrelevant, as is the fact that my wealth may well depend on those people remaining hungry. No, it is much better that low wage workers are denied the pampered disincentives to hard work that a living wage provides. Things like vacations or leisure time. Much better to instill the bitterness and resentment to build determination toward the emulation of those like myself and thereby rise to exploit the poor yourself.

Low-end wages and the cost of living are inter-dependent. It isn’t as easy as raising the minimum wage, because that would raise the cost of living.

Anyone who works full time should earn at least enough to get by. Anything above that level should be determined by the market and the value generated by the worker.

Of course they deserve a living wage.

If I knew what a living wage was, I might agree.

Ahem…moving swiftly on

What a truly ridiculous notion.

People do not “deserve” an income, and much less “a specified income”, for no other reason than that they show up day after day at a particular place and stay there for a certain length of time which may or may not be set by someone else.

Perhaps if they were cattle or pets, then they would be owed a certain minimum standard of living and care, by virtue of the fact that they would not then be free agents to come and go as they wished, to take their heads out of the yokes, to walk outside and do something else that they might prefer. Or do you consider people to be akin to cattle and pets? Is that your idea of “employment”? That people give up all free will and agency of their own and simply submit to the whims of an employer, tempered somehow by a benevolent government who looks after their welfare and tells the farmer that “it’s time to change the hay!” or “this one needs more water!”

How utterly and obscenely absurd.

People deserve what they negotiate. They deserve what they earn. They deserve whatever exchange they work out with whomever they work it out with, and they deserve to be treated fairly in the process. They deserve to improve themselves in whatever way they see fit – including walking out the door and finding another job or making one of their own if they decide that would bring them more happiness, more cash, more satisfaction or adventure – or whatever floats their boat.

Your idea is flawed, because desperate people willing to do anything to provide food and shelter for their family are not very good at negotiating better working conditions.
Tell that to a large corporation such as walmart I will work for you but I need better health benefits and $2 an hour more , see how far that goes for ya.
Your views leave the desperate even more ripe for being exploited, that is utterly absurd.
As for walking out the door yeah right, tell that to the bank or the landlord I left because I want to find something better, yeah great but they still want the rent or payment on time.
Your idea of negotiating isn’t wrong but there has to be minimum guide lines like a living wage to keep people from being exploited by large or even small business.

Well, speaking as someone who has grown up in a low income household, my parents are the most hard working people that I know and many of the people that we know work hard to get to where they are now. They may not have a college education and they may not have started from even the lower-middle class, but they work in trades that require days of manual labor and they endure harsh conditions and bosses that treat them like trash because they know their employees cannot live without the job.

Many of the adults that I grew up around don’t have any fancy certifications and they have been working hard day after day in the Florida heat to put a meal on the table for their families. The people that work in these low-end jobs should be the most respected because they are the ones who keep our streets clean and they are the ones who deal with our waste and they are the ones who keep the trees from falling on your house or disrupting the power lines and they are the ones who make sure you have an ample selection of food and products to choose from. They pave the roads and work in the fields.

They may not require much training or years of climbing up the corporate ladder, but they definitely don’t work in these grueling conditions and endure their boss’s tyranny so that they can only make end’s meet.

If you are speaking about fast-food workers, of course they deserve a living wage. As I have said, they are often treated like garbage by their employers and their customers because they know they can get away with it. Many of the fast-food workers in my area are either single mothers or teenagers who need to find work to help the family. That is the only work that they can find at the time and they do not see these jobs as a career option. They see it as a way to put food on the table for their families until another, much better, option comes their way- and it often does not because of their limited opportunities for success.

These people deserve a living wage just like everybody else because they work for it. Everyone deserves at least the opportunity to live and hope that their children can become more than they were.

Totally agree @BBawlight, there has to be minimum guide lines to protect the low end workers,such as living wage.

Deserve?

This depends on education level, experience, competence, professionalism, etc.

As by what you mean by a so called living wage I assume you mean a generally higher wage.

I mean a wage that doesn’t require a Government handout just so they can put food on the table at the end of their work week.

@SQUEEKY2 it is your idea that people need “looking after” that is flawed, and has gotten us to the point where more and more people – mostly as “classes of people”, not individuals – need “looking after”. That is, the uneducated; the elderly; the poor; the disabled-in-some-ways; new immigrants, etc.

I agree completely that some people – individuals – require a kind of compassionate and paternalistic care of the type that you allude to with the call for “living wage” and such other calls for “care for classes”. But I’m not talking about those unfortunate individuals. Rather, about people who can look after themselves – though it may not always appear that they will.

People – all “decent” or presumed decent people, regardless of intelligence, beliefs, age, ability or infirmity, education, wealth, class, status or any other outward manifestation of those things or other differences among people – universally deserve a certain minimum level of respect and decent treatment. That should not require such an explicit statement, but since we can’t see each other and you don’t “know” me you may not believe that I harbor such feelings unless I make them explicit. So there it is.

In the economic arena, however, where people “do something to earn something” from whoever will exchange with them for whatever it is that they will do, prices matter. Prices signal scarcity, and tell players in the marketplace – and by players I mean “all actors”, not just “players” in the sense of gamblers and scammers – where to concentrate their talents.

When we start to make demands that someone with untapped ability, such as someone lazy and working at half-capacity or less someone like me as a teenager, for example “must be paid” in a certain standard that could support independent living, the same way that one may compassionately pay, say, an imbecile who could not possibly do anything more complex than sweep a floor in an organized shop or store, for example, then you remove the economic incentive for that person to want to better himself. And it’s fine if people – individuals – have no desire to better themselves; that’s not my concern.

But it would be very wrong on a societal basis to encourage that by demanding that employers pay “at least X” to every person in their employ, no matter how unqualified for other work, no matter how little they care to improve, and no matter how minimal their contribution to the employer’s success.

Because “the employer’s success” is the other half of this equation that you – we – ignore at our peril. As we have seen already with the “fight for fifteen” that seems to have been sweeping the country (the USA) earlier this year, employers are now more spurred to replace those individuals with machines who do their more or less rote jobs at no additional cost beyond the purchase, operating and maintenance expense. This removes an important first rung on most people’s career paths: that first job that sucks so badly and pays so little that it creates a drive to want to do better.

^ This.

There’s a perspective problem here. And it’s about the way things are supposed to work under capitalism’s sacred “free” market paradigm, and the very observable contrasting actualities on the ground. For the truth is that nowadays the way things shake out, the innovation and creativity in our system is pretty much restricted to schemes which facilitate the transfer of wealth to the top. Such innovations as the substitution of part time workers for full time employees to avoid paying mandatory benefits. The thing rarely appreciated as this phenomenon unfolds before us is that this game though obvious as hell is being obscured through incessant and relentless obfuscation from those benefitting from the setup. As ever more numbers of us qualify for some form of government assistance and people who can find jobs discover that 2 or 3 of what jobs exist are required to make ends meet, the big picture is missed or rather ignored. For the actuality is that those at the bottom and even in the middle have been squeezed pretty much to the limit and that now what our entitlement programs are ACTUALLY about is the transfer of wealth from our future to the top. Those who decry our indebtedness are correct in the unsustainability of the current model, yet there is great reluctance to recognize where all that money is going.

The cognitive dissonance is breathtaking, @stanleybmanly. In one minute you decry supposedly “free” markets, and in the next you rail about employers acting rationally to avoid having to pay “mandatory benefits”. What part of “free market” includes “mandatory benefits”?

Surely the next regulation made by our overlords to “fix the free market as regulated”, and which causes rational actors to again act rationally – but not the way you want or the regulators expect – will earn a new rant … against the rational actors.

More and more I think I’m just wasting my time here.

What I decry is the fact that the ballyhooed model of capitalism is no longer in effect. You know, the old saw about the rising tide lifting all the boats. Then there’s that other bygone fable- the so called first rung job. It is not one bit inconsistent to claim that the free market is NOT free.
,and I’m not railing at all about the rational behavior of employers. Greed and selfishness, the maximization of profit, all are indeed rational, and you will never catch me complaining that those reaping the rewards under the present setup are anything but rational. What I’m saying, what I’m always saying is that things are increasingly ordered such that wealth is accumulated at the top through devices and schemes excluding productive work, products or services. which benefit the society overall. These schemes bypass the standard much hyped vision you project of the way things work, and amount to money actually being extracted from the society overall instead of being put to productive use. Exactly WHO is it you view as regulators and overlords if the rich are getting richer and everyone else is sliding toward destitution? It cracks me up when the folks walking away with all the money whine pitifully about overregulation and claim that the fault lies with bungling, inept heavy handed government. If you actually believe that this huge theft is possible minus the thieves controlling the government, you have my sympathy.

Well, of course thieves are in control of government.

Part of the genius of our three “separate branches” of government – and the intended “citizen-legislators” who would have been serving two-year or six-year terms as Representative and Senator, respectively, and the citizen-President all jealously guarding their respective spheres of influence against each other and the Judiciary under the watchful eyes of electors and State governments (in the as-proposed model where Senators were not directly elected by the voters). None of the Founders anticipated decades of service in government by most elected officials, a government that would accumulate so many cookies in the cookie jar and pass them out to so many, and certainly never imagined a government that would rule “so much”. Government itself has attracted many of the thieves and their spouses. (Why there isn’t more question about how thoroughly middle-class folks such as the Clintons accumulating tens of millions of dollars through “public service” and the stated salaries therein, I will never understand.)

What it all means is that there’s a lot more wealth to be had in government – and more power on top of that – than could have been dreamed of so many years ago. And a far more apathetic electorate, and ignorant of the most basic “enumerated powers” of the Constitution. That, or willing to be bought off by small trickles of the rivers of money flowing into Washington DC. And so it grows, with little oversight, far less of the “separate branch” jealousies and in-fighting that Adams anticipated (instead, more collusion) and more money and power accumulating in DC. Let’s talk about the “amazing coincidence” of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s husband making a billion-dollar commission on the land acquisitions required for California’s federally-funded high speed rail – a thing that is certainly NOT ‘required’. No one bats an eye.

I maintain that the extractions of wealth to some of those at the top – and yes, to those outside of government, too – which certainly occur, have relatively little to do with capitalism and everything to do with government. The solution to the problems of Big Government is not … more government. But it’s the only one that’s been tried for the past two hundred years, sometimes faster than others, but never “less”. The ratchet only turns one way, it seems.

However, as bad as things appear sometimes, the “rising tide” does lift all of the boats. We rightly complain about those who accumulate wealth from no discernible effort or contribution on their part, however, the poor do not as a rule “get poorer”. Even the poorest citizens – even non-citizens – among us enjoy better standards of living than even much richer people of years ago. The tides raise us all. The goods and services available to all of us routinely now, and at generally better and better prices year over year – and which are all and only attributed to the competitive marketplace that demands “better, faster, cheaper, prettier, more features” (and yeah, sometimes “flashier, too much cheaper, and uselessly cluttered” – it’s not a perfect process, after all) – we seem to take those things for granted.

But they aren’t gifts from government.

You certainly do go on don’t ya?^
Like you said big Government baad, well with a living wage and no that isn’t a wage they can buy a Penthouse and a Bently with but a wage that doesn’t require Government handout out at the end of a 40hour work week.
You know if these ditch diggers, floor sweepers receive a wage that they can eek out a living on with out Government help you might just get your dream for a smaller Government.
As for thinking if they get this they won’t have the motivation to move up, some might not and some won’t be able to but the most will.
There has to be minimum guide lines to keep these low end workers from be exploited which I feel most of them are right now.
Negotiating, that works if you have a degree or a trade to barter with but for the common labourer what do they have?Only a strong back and a need to put food on the table,that again is why the need for a living wage.
I suppose you think safety regulations are bad as well??