A better metric: "How much do jobs pay that are easily available to me?" (And so in this sense, the wages of Wallmart and Amazon seem to be very much relevant for many.)
Another metric: "How long does it take to earn enough for my baseline expenses (rent, food, health, retirement money, etc.)".
In my opinion, this is the only valid metric.
If a business cannot pay people enough to live, the business should not exist. Businesses do not have more of a right to exist than the workers that make them up. Full stop.
I'll assume you are talking about full time all year jobs. Each one of the baseline expenses defined above are not nominally set in stone. They are different for every person. I might define baseline food as beans and rice, while others might define it as steak and lobster. The same goes for the other baseline expenses defined above. This is why allowing individuals to make decisions is so important. If you want to dismiss the idea of any one person deciding for themselves what that baseline is, there would have to be a group(gov't/union) to decide what these baselines are. One problem I have is if you allow some group to decide what this baseline is, you lose your ability to decide as an individual what your baseline is. Additionally, resources that could have been allocated to you are now allocated to dealing with the regulations and or bureaucracy.
Furthermore, some individuals do not need that baseline, whatever it may be. A child supported by parents may have other expenses covered. A retiree who just wants to be employed to stay sane, may not need all the wages and benefits that a parent of three may need. Paying them less does lower the market price of labor though.
> Businesses do not have more of a right to exist than the workers that make them up. Full stop.
I agree. The opposite is true as well. Businesses, aka transactions between people, have just as much a right to exist as the people that do the transacting. Setting aside the statutory protections that LLCs, corporations, etc. provide, a business can be a single person hiring people to do work for them, or a single person who does all the work for themselves(eg. cobbler). The right to interact with others for goods and services is a fundamental right.
And such quibbling over definitions is irrelevant when people can't even afford the more affordable of the two.
Business cannot exist without two parties transacting. Businesses can exist without ownership. That is if you do not consider a persons labor to be "owned" by them. There does not even have to be capital exchanged. Bartering for labor can and does happen.
Capitalism was good for the time between feudalism and the industrial revolution, but now we have an excess of goods, food, and housing yet corporations are creating artificial scarcity in order to continue enriching a few people at the expense of everyone else.
We have enough empty housing in California alone to house all homeless people in the US yet we still have people living in the streets. We have people starving while we produce enough food to not only feed all of the US but also Africa, yet corporations throw away good food to create artificial scarcity to protect the profits of a few.
Forming cooperatives owned by the workers who make up the business would be a good step in the right direction, and making the excuses like 'some people don't need that baseline' is horse shit. The purpose of a system is what it does and those jobs aren't just filled by young people, there are older people who should be retired worming minimum wage jobs. There are people trying to support their families in those positions. If those jobs are meant for kids, why are the business open during schools hours?
If we work together we can improve living conditions for all humans
It feels deeply infantilizing to me, and will absolutely cut off the bottom rung of society and hasten the unprepared and unskilled towards the coming AI cliff in my opinion.
I personally did not have my own shit together enough to earn minimum wage, not quite, at the very start. $15/hr+ starts to become a mountain that the least well-off cannot land a position earning, or cannot stay competitive at that rate, in some parts of the nation.
This is the most salient point in my opinion when discussing minimum wages. Employers have to decide which potential employee can produce enough to make up for the wages that they pay. The higher the minimum wage goes, there are less opportunities to get a career started due to not being hired. Experience is highly valued in almost every field. If you cannot get a low paying job just to build some experience in your resume, you delay or never get the next high paying job. Minimum wage ends up crippling the very people it was meant to help.
With the AI cliff that you discuss, productivity will increase even more than it did in the industrial revolution and there is even less of a reason to continue with our absurd current system of making a tiny out of people rich at the expense of everyone else.
