I’m just curious; those who are against the idea of a minimum wage.
Do you think it should be legally required to pay any wages at all, …
In fact, my mother graduated from HS during the Great Depression, and because she had no work experience, no one would hire her even though she could take shorthand and type 120 words/min. So she approached an attorney and offered to work for free for the experience, and he agreed, adding, “That’s cheap enough for me.” After she proved herself on the job, she began to be paid. She was single at the time, but under the proposed “living wage” arrangement, her employer would have had to pay her enough to support a family of four, and she would never have been hired.
One of my relatives came to the US during the age of mass immigration, and he had to bribe a foreman to hire him on his first job, a kind of pay in reverse.
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or do you think it should be legal for someone to hire a worker and instead of paying them anything, give them room and board in lieu (ie: a live-in nanny or housekeeper, or a farm hand, or ranch hand).
These types of agreements have been made in the past and probably exist even today. Up until about the early '60s, this was the case with the military. A soldier was provided a roof over his head, clothing, three meals, medical, training, transportation, recreation, and even some educational opportunities. What little pay he received was for incidentals. When I was in, I heard of one individual who never left the base because, “If it’s not on the base, I don’t need it.”
Bottom line on this is that a person does what he has to do in order to be hired, and once in the door he is not locked in for life but moves up from there, provided he is willing to apply himself, i.e., make himself more valuable to his employer.
There is also a miss-perception on the part of some that drives debates like this. I’m retired and got into a discussion about the economy with someone who said, “But there are no jobs!” [read: it’s Bush’s fault]. Meanwhile, not a mile down the road was a supermarket with signs all over the building “NOW HIRING”. Just to prove he was wrong, I got a job at the store starting at $7 per hour.
“Someone once defined a social problem as a situation in which the real world differs from the theories of intellectuals. To the intelligentsia, it follows, as the night follows the day, that it is the real world that is wrong and which needs to change.” – Economist Thomas Sowell