The Justice of the Peace
by Hilaire Belloc
Distinguish carefully between these two,
This thing is yours, that other thing is mine.
You have a shirt, a brimless hat, a shoe
And half a coat. I am the Lord benign
Of fifty hundred acres of fat land
To which I have a right. You understand?
I have a right because I have, because,
Because I have, because I have a right.
Now be quite calm and good, obey the laws,
Remember your low station, do not fight
Against the goad, because, you know, it pricks
Whenever the uncleanly demos kicks.
I do not envy you your hat, your shoe.
Why should you envy me my small estate?
It’s fearfully illogical of you
To fight with economic force and fate.
Moreover, I have got the upper hand,
And mean to keep it. Do you understand?
I think about this poem quite a lot; it's one of my favourites. It's only posted a few places online. And I can't really find any commentary of it, except for this one little blurb where someone said that they really liked it because it's a little sarcastic.
And - a little sarcastic? Yeah, just a little.
It's exactly this kind of thinking that people are protesting about at the moment: a complete and fervent belief that property rights are handed down from on high and that it's a natural right that the state will protect your possessions, let you keep your squillion dollars and your penthouse and your yacht.
And how dare anybody question your right to that squillion dollars, question your assertion that you earned it by working hard, as though the things that other people do to keep a roof over their head and food in their belly and shoes on their feet (and books on their shelves and wine in the fridge and the heating as high as they want and a trip to the beach in the summer if they feel like it) aren't hard work and don't have value.
We sneer at Working For Families and middle-class welfare and do not question the underlying reason behind it: that, actually, people who are on the average wage in New Zealand would have difficulty supporting a family on that and paying the usual rates of tax. We judge beneficiaries for still having cars; for having cellphones and computers in their home; for faithfully buying a lotto ticket once a week; for having a beer with dinner, or two, or three - as though our society thinks being poor should mean suffering all the time, not spending your money on anything you want, not having choices and not having the opportunity to make short-sighted ones from time to time because, fuck it, it's a lovely day - doesn't a glass of wine on the patio sound nice?
And we don't question that, that earning the minimum wage if you're working full-time in New Zealand means you probably can't afford to rent a whole house if you're living in a city, not without extra government assistance. We talk instead about how jobs might be lost, as though employers hire people out of the goodness of their hearts and would pay more if only they could afford to, by gum. We talk about that fucking microeconomic graph, the one that says that labour is price elastic and assumes that's true both ways or that it's in any way realistic to talk about a labour market as a whole, as though demand for checkout chicks at the local New World is in any way comparable with the hiring of neurosurgeons, as though the negotiating process works the same way when you're a sixteen year old girl as it does for a sixty-year old grey-haired businessman in a suit worth a month's wages.
We let the entire conversation be overtaken by smirking fools talking earnestly about how hard they worked to get where they are, and who let the subtext run through the conversation like a lead-weighted punch to the face: if you're poor it's because you deserve it. If you're breaking your back cleaning other people's floors and bagging their groceries and typing their memos and organising their offices and driving their taxis and educating their children and - and you're not wearing thousand-dollar shoes and driving a late-model import, it's because you don't deserve any better. Because of course New Zealand is a fucking meritocracy, of course we're a classless society, we left all that behind in England don't you know?
Or the other one: they've got it way worse in those third-world countries where people still die of cholera and little kiddies go hungry and hardly anyone can read. And here we are, in New Zealand, with our public healthcare system and our public education system and our welfare state; why would anyone complain? Nobody is truly poor here after all -- except maybe the people who live in overcrowded state houses or boarding houses with cockroach infestations and dodgy plumbing, the students who have food budgets of $25 a week and who get irate on messageboards when anyone suggests that maybe they should expect better.
Except that they of course are poor because they made poor choices, and they're staying poor because they -- because -- because New Zealand is a land of milk and honey and what's with all the pessimism anyway?
Can't we just all relax, take a chill-pill, get our knickers out of that bunch they're in and take the stick out of our asses.
Nothing to see here.
Did you hear the All Blacks have a game on tonight?
Showing posts with label wages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wages. Show all posts
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Monday, May 9, 2011
this turned out rather angrier than i expected
I do not understand what the problem with lifestyle beneficiaries is.
I will define "lifestyle beneficiary" for the purposes of this post as a person who, for whatever reason, chooses not to seek paid employment in such a way as to cover all of his or her expenses, who does not have any personal relationships such as their expenses are paid for by an individual (or a group of individuals) and who therefore relies on the state for an income. The term obviously usually has negative connotations, but that's what I'm going to talk about. I'm not intending to import them as subtext to this post.
I don't know if there are any good stats to suggest what proportion of beneficiaries are lifestyle beneficiaries. I'd expect it to be small, mostly because the stats I have seen seem to suggest that most people move off the DPB and the dole fairly quickly, and invalid's benefit is of course a different matter.
Anyway, I really don't see the problem.
The government of New Zealand used to explicitly follow policy aimed at full employment. This was, up until the 1980s, a fairly bipartisan thing (as I understand it), and is presumably one of the things behind Think Big and all the other grand infrastructure works of the 60s and 70s. In the 1980s, things changed, and there's been for the last 30 years a fairly bipartisan approach of laisse fair economics.
Talk all you want about whether that was a good thing or not; I think it is genuinely up for debate, at least in some areas.
One of the inexonerable consequences of moving away from state intervention to create and sustain full employment into a situation where you let the market rise and fall as it wishes is that you will end up with people who are structurally un- or under-employed. This isn't, as far as I am concerned, up for debate (and if you are a right-wing economist, you'll probably argue that it isn't a bad thing. That's genuinely up for debate too).
The structural unemployment comes from the fact that sometimes the market will have a few less jobs than people, and sometimes the market will provide a lot less jobs than people. But there are incentives to always having fewer jobs than people: it keeps wages lower, it makes the market more flexible, and blah blah blah classical economics 101.
[Someday I will talk about why I think this is so utterly shit, but today is not that day. Today is about pragmatism.]
So you now have some people who, try as they might, are not going to get or keep a job that pays their expenses. This is a problem: having homeless people dying on the streets is pretty unpleasant plus it turns out that they are people too and not some alien species who don't warrant basic human decency or care!
As a sop to these radical notions of "not being total douches" and "caring about your fellow humankind", the state provides a minimum level of income at a level designed to prevent your unemployed people from dying unpleasantly on the streets. This is not generally a level which will allow them to go on extended trips to Europe, and maybe not even to the other end of whatever island they're on, but they're probably fed and housed and reasonably comfortable. Success!
But! It turns out that not having employment makes most people feel demoralised and shit, which gets compounded by unemployed people living on state funds being told constantly that they're bludging scum who don't deserve nice things. And if they're women: that they should keep their legs closed and not have kids they couldn't afford! Because everyone who doesn't plan and budget for their relationship breaking down has failed as a human being!
Nevertheless, some people who are structurally long-term unemployed manage to find other things to do with their time (whatever those things are), such as they're no longer that motivated to spend 40 hours a week in an environment they probably don't like that much all for a (few? lot?) more dollars in their pocket.
What the fuck is wrong with that?
If you're accepting of the basic bipartisan premise of NZ economic management: that there will be unemployed people; and especially if you're defending that policy on the grounds that it provides market incentives that you agree with --- if you're doing that, where's your problem with people who take themselves out of the market entirely, thus leaving jobs for people who DO want them? And who do so for what they get on the dole, which is effectively 4/5ths of fuck all?
Why do you want some people to be unhappy all the time?
I will define "lifestyle beneficiary" for the purposes of this post as a person who, for whatever reason, chooses not to seek paid employment in such a way as to cover all of his or her expenses, who does not have any personal relationships such as their expenses are paid for by an individual (or a group of individuals) and who therefore relies on the state for an income. The term obviously usually has negative connotations, but that's what I'm going to talk about. I'm not intending to import them as subtext to this post.
I don't know if there are any good stats to suggest what proportion of beneficiaries are lifestyle beneficiaries. I'd expect it to be small, mostly because the stats I have seen seem to suggest that most people move off the DPB and the dole fairly quickly, and invalid's benefit is of course a different matter.
Anyway, I really don't see the problem.
The government of New Zealand used to explicitly follow policy aimed at full employment. This was, up until the 1980s, a fairly bipartisan thing (as I understand it), and is presumably one of the things behind Think Big and all the other grand infrastructure works of the 60s and 70s. In the 1980s, things changed, and there's been for the last 30 years a fairly bipartisan approach of laisse fair economics.
Talk all you want about whether that was a good thing or not; I think it is genuinely up for debate, at least in some areas.
One of the inexonerable consequences of moving away from state intervention to create and sustain full employment into a situation where you let the market rise and fall as it wishes is that you will end up with people who are structurally un- or under-employed. This isn't, as far as I am concerned, up for debate (and if you are a right-wing economist, you'll probably argue that it isn't a bad thing. That's genuinely up for debate too).
The structural unemployment comes from the fact that sometimes the market will have a few less jobs than people, and sometimes the market will provide a lot less jobs than people. But there are incentives to always having fewer jobs than people: it keeps wages lower, it makes the market more flexible, and blah blah blah classical economics 101.
[Someday I will talk about why I think this is so utterly shit, but today is not that day. Today is about pragmatism.]
So you now have some people who, try as they might, are not going to get or keep a job that pays their expenses. This is a problem: having homeless people dying on the streets is pretty unpleasant plus it turns out that they are people too and not some alien species who don't warrant basic human decency or care!
As a sop to these radical notions of "not being total douches" and "caring about your fellow humankind", the state provides a minimum level of income at a level designed to prevent your unemployed people from dying unpleasantly on the streets. This is not generally a level which will allow them to go on extended trips to Europe, and maybe not even to the other end of whatever island they're on, but they're probably fed and housed and reasonably comfortable. Success!
But! It turns out that not having employment makes most people feel demoralised and shit, which gets compounded by unemployed people living on state funds being told constantly that they're bludging scum who don't deserve nice things. And if they're women: that they should keep their legs closed and not have kids they couldn't afford! Because everyone who doesn't plan and budget for their relationship breaking down has failed as a human being!
Nevertheless, some people who are structurally long-term unemployed manage to find other things to do with their time (whatever those things are), such as they're no longer that motivated to spend 40 hours a week in an environment they probably don't like that much all for a (few? lot?) more dollars in their pocket.
What the fuck is wrong with that?
If you're accepting of the basic bipartisan premise of NZ economic management: that there will be unemployed people; and especially if you're defending that policy on the grounds that it provides market incentives that you agree with --- if you're doing that, where's your problem with people who take themselves out of the market entirely, thus leaving jobs for people who DO want them? And who do so for what they get on the dole, which is effectively 4/5ths of fuck all?
Why do you want some people to be unhappy all the time?
Sunday, February 20, 2011
to the middle class (of which I am a member)
My father and I talk about politics. We do this instead of talking about anything else, really - it's very definitely a family trait to get angry instead of sad, and politics almost always provides something to get angry about. Today I rang him and after a couple of minutes of the regular pleasantries (how are you? What've you been up to?) there followed almost an hour of arguing back-and-forth about Where the Left Is and/or Should Be Going, and What's With The Lack of Fight? Good times, man.
And one of the things we've been chatting about a lot lately is how bad we are at selling our policies to the Average New Zealander, when this should be easy because the Average New Zealander would clearly be a lot better off if they got paid more and weren't in so much debt and weren't treated as disposable by their employer.
So we got onto unemployment, viz:
1. It's pretty high at the moment.
2. Youth unemployment is near 20%, which is an unmitigated social disaster.
3. The Government is talking about raising the pension age.
4. The Government is also talking about forcing solo parents back into work (as in, accept this job or your benefit gets cut)
... it doesn't seem logical to me to be forcing older people to stay in work for longer and/or forcing active parents into the workforce when you have real problems in that people are finding it really tough to enter the workforce at all for the first time in their life.
Also worth noting is that you can't receive the unemployment benefit if your partner is in work. So from the Government's point of view, a family that goes from two incomes down to one when one partner is made redundant doesn't matter - that person doesn't affect the unemployment stats. And if that person stays unemployed (maybe childcare costs are prohibitive, so the family makes the choice to have a stay-at-home parent for a few years), then if and when a job comes available and is taken up by a solo parent desperate for a job - any job - so the kids don't starve, the stats look even better.
Of course, yes, yay paid employment in most cases, though if you do basic reading on benefits and poverty you'll learn about the cost of working (economic and social) and - insert the complications I'm not talking about here.
But you can sell welfare policy as:
HAVE SOME BASIC COMPASSION FOR YOUR FELLOW HUMANS, DICKWAD!
or
IT'S A SAFETY NET WHICH IS THERE FOR YOU TOO. DICKWAD!
or
YEAH, SO I THINK YOU NEED A LESSON ON HOW INSURANCE WORKS. MORON.
and you can also sell it as:
- an acceptance that a glut of workers will drive wages down (as in, Economics 101!)
plus
- an acceptance that workers aren't really in a position to be able to bargain as well as employers can (as in, Reality 101!)
plus
- the creation of a situation where people are forced to take jobs they know aren't really suitable because otherwise they face starvation/having their kids taken away from them/homelessness/as you will
plus
- stay-at-home parents in 2-parent households not really figuring in official stats all that well (and there's a lot of women's issues stuff here, which I'll leave to people who talk WAY more eruditely on the subject than I)
creates a situation where the stay-at-home parent may find it really fucking hard to get a job as good (read: well-paid) as the one they had when they do reenter the workforce, and this has flow on effects which negatively impact the lives of the middle classes, like:
- not being able to pay off the mortgage
- not being able to look forward to a comfortable retirement
- not being able to pay the kid's uni fees
- not being able to go on that overseas holiday
And maybe the answer to that litany of woes should be: cry more! Other people have it worse off than you! But I don't think it's a particularly satisfactory one: I don't think paying off the mortage and travelling a bit et cetera should be outside the reach of the dreams of people who are supposedly relatively well-off in our society. I also think that it can be really hard to properly empathise with people, and sometimes it's easier to explain stuff by applying its effects to your own situation, even if that doesn't quite get across the full horror of having to go to the foodbank because you also had to buy your kid a pair of shoes that week.
The choice to not work for several years because you're raising children is not a bad one.* I think that people who make that choice should be able to do so comfortably. I don't think people who are raising kids should be forced to choose between losing their entire income in the form of government benefits or taking on a poorly paid, casual, and marginalised job that really doesn't provide them with financial security. Or, you know, forced to give up on economic aspirations, no matter how small or large or trivial or major, because you can't save for retirement and raise the next generation at the same time.
*By which I mean: raising children is a difficult thing to do, and it should be far more valued in society than it is - we should be applauding women for looking after small children, not insinuating (or saying outright) that they're all a bunch of bludging slappers who got wot they deserved.**
**Not to say that choosing to be in paid work isn't okay as well. Just. Fuck me, can't women make ANY choices without being dogpiled for it?
And one of the things we've been chatting about a lot lately is how bad we are at selling our policies to the Average New Zealander, when this should be easy because the Average New Zealander would clearly be a lot better off if they got paid more and weren't in so much debt and weren't treated as disposable by their employer.
So we got onto unemployment, viz:
1. It's pretty high at the moment.
2. Youth unemployment is near 20%, which is an unmitigated social disaster.
3. The Government is talking about raising the pension age.
4. The Government is also talking about forcing solo parents back into work (as in, accept this job or your benefit gets cut)
... it doesn't seem logical to me to be forcing older people to stay in work for longer and/or forcing active parents into the workforce when you have real problems in that people are finding it really tough to enter the workforce at all for the first time in their life.
Also worth noting is that you can't receive the unemployment benefit if your partner is in work. So from the Government's point of view, a family that goes from two incomes down to one when one partner is made redundant doesn't matter - that person doesn't affect the unemployment stats. And if that person stays unemployed (maybe childcare costs are prohibitive, so the family makes the choice to have a stay-at-home parent for a few years), then if and when a job comes available and is taken up by a solo parent desperate for a job - any job - so the kids don't starve, the stats look even better.
Of course, yes, yay paid employment in most cases, though if you do basic reading on benefits and poverty you'll learn about the cost of working (economic and social) and - insert the complications I'm not talking about here.
But you can sell welfare policy as:
HAVE SOME BASIC COMPASSION FOR YOUR FELLOW HUMANS, DICKWAD!
or
IT'S A SAFETY NET WHICH IS THERE FOR YOU TOO. DICKWAD!
or
YEAH, SO I THINK YOU NEED A LESSON ON HOW INSURANCE WORKS. MORON.
and you can also sell it as:
- an acceptance that a glut of workers will drive wages down (as in, Economics 101!)
plus
- an acceptance that workers aren't really in a position to be able to bargain as well as employers can (as in, Reality 101!)
plus
- the creation of a situation where people are forced to take jobs they know aren't really suitable because otherwise they face starvation/having their kids taken away from them/homelessness/as you will
plus
- stay-at-home parents in 2-parent households not really figuring in official stats all that well (and there's a lot of women's issues stuff here, which I'll leave to people who talk WAY more eruditely on the subject than I)
creates a situation where the stay-at-home parent may find it really fucking hard to get a job as good (read: well-paid) as the one they had when they do reenter the workforce, and this has flow on effects which negatively impact the lives of the middle classes, like:
- not being able to pay off the mortgage
- not being able to look forward to a comfortable retirement
- not being able to pay the kid's uni fees
- not being able to go on that overseas holiday
And maybe the answer to that litany of woes should be: cry more! Other people have it worse off than you! But I don't think it's a particularly satisfactory one: I don't think paying off the mortage and travelling a bit et cetera should be outside the reach of the dreams of people who are supposedly relatively well-off in our society. I also think that it can be really hard to properly empathise with people, and sometimes it's easier to explain stuff by applying its effects to your own situation, even if that doesn't quite get across the full horror of having to go to the foodbank because you also had to buy your kid a pair of shoes that week.
The choice to not work for several years because you're raising children is not a bad one.* I think that people who make that choice should be able to do so comfortably. I don't think people who are raising kids should be forced to choose between losing their entire income in the form of government benefits or taking on a poorly paid, casual, and marginalised job that really doesn't provide them with financial security. Or, you know, forced to give up on economic aspirations, no matter how small or large or trivial or major, because you can't save for retirement and raise the next generation at the same time.
*By which I mean: raising children is a difficult thing to do, and it should be far more valued in society than it is - we should be applauding women for looking after small children, not insinuating (or saying outright) that they're all a bunch of bludging slappers who got wot they deserved.**
**Not to say that choosing to be in paid work isn't okay as well. Just. Fuck me, can't women make ANY choices without being dogpiled for it?
Thursday, January 13, 2011
On the subject of industrial action
Some things:
- a lockout is not a strike
- work-to-rule is not a strike
- if your employees working to the rules of your organisation would result in a lower output than you have contracted yourself to provide then your rules are stupid
- do not expect sympathy from me when you brag about a 20% annual return on investment and yet aren't willing to give your workers a 10% payrise over three years without fucking them over in other ways
- do not expect sympathy from me when you are getting $160,000 in ratepayer subsidy daily to run your transport system (which cannot be run to the rules of your organisation)
- private provision of essential national systems is really stupid and doesn't work
- this is because the government cannot let those systems fail
- at the same time, a government buyout of the system is expensive
- private service providers are not stupid, and know that the system cannot fail
- private service providers are profit-driven
- this provides an incentive for them to run those systems at a level just above that which would force the government to buyout the system in order to keep it running
- this is one of the reasons why, for example, the rail system, the public transport systems, and the telecommunications infrastructure in this country are so faily
- (I admit there are exceptions)
- if you are more concerned about how much you personally pay for a service than you are about the ability of the people who provide that service to earn a decent wage, then you deserve that they show you exactly the same amount of concern: that is, not a bit of it
- there are many people who are not paid decent wages
- this fact is not a sign that the people who earn slightly more than those people (a) should earn less or (b) do not deserve a payrise
- this is, instead, a sign that the people who are not paid decent wages should be paid more
- all this applies to working conditions as well
- no seriously, we in offices rely on low-paid people in service industries far more than they rely on us
- no seriously, we in offices are probably entirely irrelevant to the continual operation of the community
- we should maybe stop bitching then and be grateful that we do not have to work on public holidays or deal with our shitty, entitled asses
Saturday, January 8, 2011
So forget all your duties, oh yeah
- It seems like I read on the internet every month or so that people should not be jealous of the rich, or about how tax cuts favour them.
- However, trickle-down economics? Really? We're riding that old horse again? I thought that the lack of general evidence in support of that set of theories might've killed the beast, but it has risen again and taken the form of that nice bloke who lives round the corner whom you'd just love to have a beer with.
- I just don't fathom the logic: investment/saving is better than consumption (or at least all the literature says so), except from the view of the businesses, who are completely fucked if people stop buying their crap. Investment (unless it's totally bullshitted financial derivitaves completely unconnected from any real product or service) is entirely worthless if you don't have a consumer base. But we get told we need to spend less money! Except then we need to support New Zealand industry! What the fuck?
- Semi-relatedly, there's no real correlation between "amount of effort/skill/knowledge it takes to do a task" and "amount one gets paid for it": which we know because, for example, parents don't get paid; there's also less correlation between "rarity of skillset" and "amount one gets paid" than you might expect.
- The whole "poor people just need to work harder" wank falls down pretty much as soon as the point above is acknowledged.
- So right-wingers turn to "working smarter" instead. Which, yes: it is a much better life choice to be an executive than a professional cleaner; the latter is not an easy job. But there are very few executive positions compared to low-wage positions: even if every person in the latter category applied themselves, most would still miss out.
- And then we turn to "most important to the economy", which is allegedly the reason why John Key doesn't want us to be jealous.
- Respectfully I submit that "most important to the economy" has very little correlation to "amount one gets paid"—
- 1. economies are founded on the people within them:
- these people need to, at a minimum, survive, and probably also need to be able to earn enough to feed and clothe themselves and get shelter and have enough left over to buy some luxuries:
- so the most important functions in society are the ones that provide these things; and by any reasonable analysis these things are provided at the level of the actual exchange of money for goods or services—the Board of Directors or executive floor has very little to do with whether one can buy bread at a supermarket. And they probably have very little to do, actually, with how the bread got to the supermarket and how much it costs; these decisions are made lower-down in the chain of command:
- I don't think that professional work is utterly unnecessary, or even mostly unnecessary. Executives do sometimes make good choices, and they probably have a better success rate (or at least are better at creating a profit) than people without that particular skillset.
- but business continues even in the absence of contemporary corporate management, and we know this because the contemporary corporation grew out of small businesses, in much the same way as the common law grew out of individual policy decisions (or judgements, if you like) made by individual judges in a court of law:
- business does not, however, continue without its workforce. The pretence that it does: that people who wear nametags are replaceable units of economic productivity to be discarded at will, whereas people who have their names on buildings are all honourable and hardworking [men]—well.
- Maybe I'm just jealous because my name isn't on a building.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Biting the hand that pays us inadequately
Youth jobless rate soars to 19.4%
What I said—at comment #72 on the article, is—
@Will #21: "Set the minimum hourly youth wage slightly above what a weekly unemployment benefit works out as when divided by 40."
For the record, the weekly unemployment benefit is $180.74 gross for a single adult not living at home (it's less for adults aged 18 and 19 who still live with a parent). People under the age of 18 are, of course, not entitled to the unemployment benefit.
$180.74 divided by 40 works out to be $4.52 per hour. That is 35.47% of the current minimum wage. Living expenses are of course variable, but there is a limit to how cheap things get; for example, the cheapest room I can find as of today in Wellington is $75/week plus expenses of $20 to $25/week. A very frugal person could perhaps manage to keep their food costs below $25 or $30 a week.
What people continually forget in this debate is that many, if not most, of the people who earn minimum wage or close to it a) do not work full-time even if they would like the hours, b) do not have secure or stable hours, and c) are in fact invested in their source of income. It is this last that bears repeating: people rely on their source of income to sustain them.
If the income people earn through paid work is not enough to live on, the state will step in to make sure that the person survives. I think it would be a fair assumption that most of the people on the dole in our major cities also receive accommodation supplements or subsidised accommodation or a combination. If people are earning, through full-time work, only slightly more than what they would receive on the dole, then they will probably need additional income from the state.
... which effectively means that we the taxpayers would be subsidising employers who are too cheap to pay their staff a decent wage. Awesome! My tax dollars at work!
***
There's a lot more that could be said here. I'd expect most people replying to my comment (if anyone did) to talk about the market a lot, and how people wouldn't take jobs that don't pay them enough money, and to that I would say:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's what the unemployment benefit is for!
But people can upskill so that they can get better jobs in the future!
But all my youth staff members EVER have been totally crap.
I was an apprentice in 1975 and I earned youth rates and it was fine. Kids these days. Don't know how lucky they are. Flat in a 3-bedroom house with insulation? LUXURY.
But we should incentivise employers taking on youth workers!
***
I kind of try, in my posts about politics, to keep calm and carry on. But underneath the bullet points and the attempts at well-formed arguments is a deep well of rage, and it goes something like this:
When you tell me that some people are only worth $2 an hour*, in a city where the cheapest flat I could find (on a cursory skim) costs $75 a week, plus expenses, plus food, plus transport and clothing and so on... when you tell me that, what you are telling me is that some people aren't worth being able to live in a house and eat until they are no longer hungry and have running hot water.
And when you tell me that, I don't have to listen to anything else you say: you're a worm, and yours is the sort of thinking that causes revolutions.
* As some disgusting fuckbag said in a Stuff.co.nz comment thread one day...
What I said—at comment #72 on the article, is—
@Will #21: "Set the minimum hourly youth wage slightly above what a weekly unemployment benefit works out as when divided by 40."
For the record, the weekly unemployment benefit is $180.74 gross for a single adult not living at home (it's less for adults aged 18 and 19 who still live with a parent). People under the age of 18 are, of course, not entitled to the unemployment benefit.
$180.74 divided by 40 works out to be $4.52 per hour. That is 35.47% of the current minimum wage. Living expenses are of course variable, but there is a limit to how cheap things get; for example, the cheapest room I can find as of today in Wellington is $75/week plus expenses of $20 to $25/week. A very frugal person could perhaps manage to keep their food costs below $25 or $30 a week.
What people continually forget in this debate is that many, if not most, of the people who earn minimum wage or close to it a) do not work full-time even if they would like the hours, b) do not have secure or stable hours, and c) are in fact invested in their source of income. It is this last that bears repeating: people rely on their source of income to sustain them.
If the income people earn through paid work is not enough to live on, the state will step in to make sure that the person survives. I think it would be a fair assumption that most of the people on the dole in our major cities also receive accommodation supplements or subsidised accommodation or a combination. If people are earning, through full-time work, only slightly more than what they would receive on the dole, then they will probably need additional income from the state.
... which effectively means that we the taxpayers would be subsidising employers who are too cheap to pay their staff a decent wage. Awesome! My tax dollars at work!
***
There's a lot more that could be said here. I'd expect most people replying to my comment (if anyone did) to talk about the market a lot, and how people wouldn't take jobs that don't pay them enough money, and to that I would say:
- Obviously there are far more people than there are jobs, hence the unemployment rate being so high (there are people who aren't working and who avoid being in paid work for whatever reason, but... not that many).
- The unemployment benefit provides an absolute pittance, but it may be useful in figuring out a bottom line of "the least amount of money a person can survive on".
- The minimum wage acts as an absolute bottom figure of what employers can pay their staff.
- It influences the wages above it, too - so if the minimum wage for young people falls (which I believe can only affect new hires), we can reasonably expect wages in industries where a lot of young people get hired onto the minimum wage to generally fall over time, or to not keep up with inflation.
- In this way, the minimum wage itself partly determines what the market rate is.
- You just have to remember that people have to have an income or they will die. Therefore in the absence of any state control as to the lowest amount that income is, they will take what they can get, because they have to have an income or else they will die.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's what the unemployment benefit is for!
- ... yes. But I thought we all agree that generally it's better for people to be working in paid employment than being on the unemployment benefit?
- #6 is really more about the inherent disparity of power between employers and potential employees. People need jobs (largely) more than jobs need them.
- And if the market for a retail staff member in Wellington city is $13.50/hr, and you need a job, and the only jobs which you are capable of getting is in retail, then... good luck trying to persuade the boss that you're really worth $15. Like, maybe you'll get a payrise once you've been working for a while... but payrises are usually made in proportion to whatever the starting wage was (see #4!).
But people can upskill so that they can get better jobs in the future!
- That's not going to do much about their income situation now, is it?
But all my youth staff members EVER have been totally crap.
- Well, that's clearly not true of all youth employees ever over the entire country. Perhaps you need a better hiring process? Perhaps you're a totally crap employer (it could happen to anyone, really).
- There's also a lower minimum wage for people who have just entered into the job market, which should have allowed a bit of breathing space while you trained them up.
I was an apprentice in 1975 and I earned youth rates and it was fine. Kids these days. Don't know how lucky they are. Flat in a 3-bedroom house with insulation? LUXURY.
- Awesome, I'm glad you had a cool apprenticeship! A quick google search doesn't disclose to me any helpful statistics from 1975. Wouldn't you like to know how average youth rates stacked up against a) the unemployment benefit at the time, b) the adult minimum wage, c) the median wage, d) the average wage and e) some data about the cost of living? I KNOW I WOULD.
But we should incentivise employers taking on youth workers!
- Yes.
- I don't think we should create a situation where the behaviour that is incentivised is taking on young workers just because they're cheaper.
- I realise that taking on people who don't have a good employment history (or any employment history) is a risk.
- But taking on any employee is a risk. As the old adage goes, people rise to their natural level of incompetence. This leads to some awful dullards in senior and middle management (as I have myself experienced in all my previous jobs). It also makes for bad typists, engineers, machinists, teachers, neurosurgeons, baristas, barristers, and plumbers. Incompetence isn't limited to people in unskilled work! People in well-paying jobs aren't, on average, more intelligent or capable than people in jobs that don't pay well.
- The fact of that risk isn't a good enough reason to allow you to not pay people fairly. You want to work in a risk-free profession? Get a different job!
***
I kind of try, in my posts about politics, to keep calm and carry on. But underneath the bullet points and the attempts at well-formed arguments is a deep well of rage, and it goes something like this:
When you tell me that some people are only worth $2 an hour*, in a city where the cheapest flat I could find (on a cursory skim) costs $75 a week, plus expenses, plus food, plus transport and clothing and so on... when you tell me that, what you are telling me is that some people aren't worth being able to live in a house and eat until they are no longer hungry and have running hot water.
And when you tell me that, I don't have to listen to anything else you say: you're a worm, and yours is the sort of thinking that causes revolutions.
* As some disgusting fuckbag said in a Stuff.co.nz comment thread one day...
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