In the airport-turned-town of Seatac, Washington, a ballot proposal to institute a $15/hour minimum wage clings to a narrow lead and faces a certain recount, while in Seattle a state socialist candidate has won election to the city council on a platform including a $15/hour minimum wage for the entire city. Across the United States, campaigns to institute hikes in the minimum wage are gaining momentum, including in Canton, Ohio, where news that a group of Wal-Mart employees has instituted a mutual aid program for those among them who don’t have enough to eat has spurred local officials to demand a substantial hike.
As a working class activist, my first impulse is to support such calls, as I support anything that seems likely to help my side in the ongoing class war. However, not only will hikes in the minimum wage probably wind up hurting the people they are supposed to help, such hikes address the wrong problem anyway. The trouble isn’t that we are paid so little; it’s that the government, through a constellation of policies, makes living much more expensive than it ought to be. We are hungry in the midst of plenty, and we are stuck paying Trevelyan’s price for Trevelyan’s corn.
Workers are paid to produce, and increasing the price of employing them will do what increasing any other price does — incentivize economization and substitution, or in simpler terms, push employers to drive fewer workers harder and to replace them with machines wherever possible. Automation is coming, as it has always been coming, and the day will come when fast food restaurants find replacing fry cooks with burger bots and cashiers with pay kiosks economical. A $15/hour minimum wage will merely hasten that day, and in the meantime drive employers to demand ever more from already exhausted, minimally staffed crews.
But the inability of workers to support themselves decently, much less support their families, on the wages they are earning is a real problem, and one that has a real solution — bring down the government. As Charles Johnson documents in “Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty As We Know It,” and as many of us who have lived in poverty and among the poor know first-hand, the poor are beset on all sides by a litany of state interventions that limit their options and raise their costs of living. Health care is priced out of reach by state-backed cartels; self-employment is made a distant dream by business licensing and insurance requirements; governments at every level openly state a desire to continually raise the price of housing and such increases are nigh onto universally celebrated as policy triumphs. Even food, the most basic stuff of life, has its price openly and deliberately inflated as a matter of state policy, ostensibly to protect family farmers but in reality to fatten the purse of agribusiness.
Raising the minimum wage is a short term solution that creates more problems than it solves. Doing so only hastens the replacement of workers with machines, and without addressing the basic structure of state capitalism, with its socialization of costs and policy of ensuring that gains in productivity accrue to owners, not to workers, such a development would be disastrous. Rather than frittering with the details of the system hoping to achieve social peace and general prosperity, we should smash the entire thing and build a new order in its place, an order built on free association of free individuals, an anarchic order. Rather than pleading for scraps from his table, let’s hang Trevelyan and take the corn.
Citations to this article:
- Jonathan Carp, A higher minimum wage is not the solution, Gary, Indiana Tribune, 11/29/13
- Jonathan Carp, Don’t raise the minimum wage; bring down government’s expense instead, Libby, Montana Western News, 11/29/13
All of this is empty rhetoric. It may be true that the root of the problem lies in the state's monopolisation of social welfare provision; but to deny people who can barely make do with what they earn a raise in living standards while we still live in a state-capitalist system is absurd.
Saying we need to "smash the government" means nothing in practice to those who are currently trying to make ends meet. In this article you offer no actual game plan for how exactly we're supposed to go about doing it. At the moment, the only effective choices for people with regard to what the state does is either social democratic reformism and neoliberal corporatism.
If we had built up a voluntary network of mutual aid societies and self-managed cooperatives (which we should be actively doing right now) THEN we could talk about getting the state out of the way. Until then, when the only alternative to statist welfare is throwing the unprivileged to the whims of the corporate controlled market, I'm willing throw my hat in with social democracy.
Sadly, I fear that the higher minimum wage is such a cause célèbre among the statist left that no rational argument against it will suffice. My guess is that it will become the rallying cry for Dems over the next couple of elections (led by -gosh maybe- Elizabeth Warren), resulting in around an $11 min to be phased in over a few years. That way the unintended consequences (job losses, higher retail prices, etc.) will not be so easily traced to their source. But the intended consequences (not meaning the publicly proclaimed ones) will be manifest. Warren will be elected Prez and fewer jobs will mean more people dependent on the state for their well-being. More dependency = more power over the dependent.
I apologize for not elaborating a fully articulated vision of a future society along with a detailed road map on how to achieve it in a six hundred word op-ed.
The trouble, however, with "social democracy," and particularly the social democratic proposal to increase the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour, is I think pretty clearly laid out in the article. Here is a photograph of a fast food employee with a fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage: http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/201…
"but to deny people who can barely make do with what they earn a raise in living standards while we still live in a state-capitalist system is absurd. "
Is it less absurd to allow thousands of regulations that prevent them earning a living as they want and complain about low wages? Wages aren't low because insufficient force is being used on employers. They are low because these workers don't have a viable alternative to low-wage work. That won't change by forcing employers to fire those who aren't worth the new minimum. That's what a minimum wage law does, forces people to fire the less useful. What would help is if things like the taxi medallion system was eliminated, allowing thousands more poor people to become self-employed taxi drivers. That alternative pushes up the demand for labor thus increasing the income of both the drivers and those they formerly competed with for wage labor.
Look fundamentally I can't take the minimum wage seriously as an anti-poverty measure. Firstly because historically it was an anti-WHITE poverty measure. Secondly because it's like forcing the chemist to provide free asprin for your headache while I continue to punch you in the head. If I did that you would somewhat doubt my concern for your pain. By restricting the ability of the less educated, the poor, the disadvantaged of all kinds to wealth creation opportunities they are clearly showing that they don't really care about poverty. So why give them more power?
"Saying we need to "smash the government" means nothing in practice to those who are currently trying to make ends meet"
It means that what we need to do is stop government interferring in the ability of the poor to make a living. That is not nothing and it is not empty rhetoric.
No one is asking you to lay out a detailed plan for a future society. What would have been sensible however would have been to simply suggest a few things we could focus on – in the here and now -instead of raising wages. Just saying "smash the government" is useless. What does it even mean to someone who is working a minimum wage job? That you want to blow it up with a rocket launcher?
Unless you can suggest some practical solutions which can be implemented right now to improve people's lives, your end up alienating those whom you should be most trying to reach.
Plus, it would be one thing to say we should focus on things other than raising the minimum wage (which I would agree with in fact) but to actively oppose raising it makes you into the unwitting ally of the business class.
Carp, either knowingly or unknowingly, hides the underlying poverty of his economism behind extra-economic abstract bumper-sticker final solutions – "smash the state." Individuals are atomized and alienated from each other under his intrepretive model. Authentic solidarity and collective action are sacrificed on the alter of alleged ahistorical economic "forces." Although Carp describes himself as a " working class activist ," his interim solution between currently existing capitalism and freed markets is really just another form of applied austerity currently championed by the elite. When questioned, he writes snidely: "I apologize for not elaborating a fully articulated vision of a future society along with a detailed road map on how to achieve it in a six hundred word op-ed." He can't, because resistance is futile. If the argument of futility fails to enforce the reigning orthodoxy of "market" submission, then the fall-back method of control is to redefine resistance to impersonal "market" valuations as "immoral." Isn't this just another version of vulgar capitalism justifying the status quo?
Again, six hundred words here. It's a hard limit for these sorts of pieces. The idea is to get people interested and curious, not to supply all the answers in a complete Theory of Everything.
"to actively oppose raising it makes you into the unwitting ally of the business class."
Or, or, it makes me the ally of the folks who are going to get replaced by robots when all this do-gooderism takes effect. There's that, too.
" Individuals are atomized and alienated from each other under his intrepretive model. Authentic solidarity and collective action are sacrificed on the alter of alleged ahistorical economic "forces."
Are they now? Fascinating! I've got one guy above who is mad that I didn't pack enough into six hundred words, but you, "Jackson88" (pseudonyms are very 1990s, incidentally, we're on to real names now), can somehow deduce details of my "interpretive model" and calculate my feelings on solidarity and collective action. Is it in the comma placement, maybe?
"Although Carp describes himself as a " working class activist ,""
Because that's what I am. A member of the working class who is an activist.
"his interim solution between currently existing capitalism and freed markets is really just another form of applied austerity currently championed by the elite"
Questioning the wisdom of price floors for labor = "applied austerity." Okay. Again, here is a fast food worker under capitalism with a $15/hour minimum wage: http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/201…
" He can't, because resistance is futile."
Actually, it's because these things are supposed to be right around six hundred words. You may have noticed the links to fuller elaborations of the critique?
The real solution is to organize some method of giving everyone currently working such a minimum wage job vulnerable to automation the exact machines that would otherwise replace them or their equivalent in capital(because fast food is not what everyone wants to do even if circumstances have dictated that is what they're currently doing). This would need to be ongoing as jobs are increasingly replaced by machines so would be a costly venture but in principle there is no reason this wouldn't be viable. However, considering that there hasn't been an anarchist or guild socialist effort to do similar for those already unemployed for reasons I cannot fathom(there's the fact we don't tend to be wealthy, but we do live in the age of crowdfunding) I doubt this will be seen as a good idea.
If a real solution isn't being proposed, why not raise the minimum wage? In fact, raise it to a non-insulting level of 100$/h for every job. Many people will become unemployed rather quickly but it will be so pervasive everyone will recognize that something needs to be done and then we might suddenly become more serious about real solutions that aren't the false dichotomy of "be able to live on your wage but you'll probably become unemployed anyways" or "suck corporate dick, if you're not happy with your life and job you're just not sucking hard enough".
Look for something from me in the near future on concrete actions we can take, Mr. O'Connor. As much as I can fit in six hundred words, I promise.
And why exactly would those workers get replaced by robots?: because the business class owns and controls the means of production and value production more than providing people with the means of living.
The very fact that an entire job can be replaced with a machine should imply that there is no reason to have anyone employed in the job. But because of the capitalist system, instead of advances in technology leading to a decrease in work, it leads to people needing to find new work because of the internal logic of the system itself: work = enough income to be able to live well.
Ergo, if you wanted to get ordinary working people to focus on something other than the minimum wage, why not Basic Income? Unconditional Basic Income would decouple income (and hence the means of living) from work, and enable most people to pursue occupations they find fulfilling and socially beneficial, as opposed to just having a job because that's what you need to get money. We don't need cities full of cheap taxi drivers, doing monotonous work just to earn a living.
What you're effectively proposing at the moment on the other hand, really is just another form of austerity that will end up hurting workers and unwittingly aiding the capitalists.
To Mick Price,
Poor people shouldn't have to "make a living" they just need to have the means of living so that they can have the capability to pursue things other than useless menial jobs that are of no real benefit. As I've said above, an unconditional Basic Income would provide that through decoupling income from work and liberating people on the low end of the socio-economic scale from dependency on either the state or capitalists for the means of living. They would be able to engage in work that's (1) fulfilling, and (2) of actual social benefit rather than just existing so as to keep the mechanism of the market system running.
Your solution – end regulation so people can become cheap taxi drivers and such – just creates more useless jobs that we don't need.
Because as you said, they 'value production more'. Employers would likely just hire people to manage the robots, ironically paying them even less to do so in the long run in terms of scale as they rack up windfall profits. And with a minimum wage along with this new technology, they'd simply create a yet smaller captive employee pool, a 'specialized' class of robot repairmen, leaving even more unemployed and barred from the market as employers adjust their budgets to gain as much profit as possible and to cede as few of these profits to other humans as possible.
Worst of both worlds, really, and the minimum wage doesn't address the fundamental problem here. Look, if the state decided we should all be paid $100 per hour I would celebrate as it sounds good in theory, but I wouldn't believe it would be sustainable for very long. But tactically I'd love the state to rack up the minimum wage as high as possible, accelerating the dysfunctional nature of capitalism for all to see.
You are a self-described "working class activist." One online reference defines activist "as an especially active, vigorous advocate of a cause, especially a political cause (adjective)." What does your working class activism entail? IOW, what do you do concretely to advance the interests of the working class? Even more concretely, how do you advocate or how would you advocate on behalf of fast food workers if they sought your counsel to increase their hourly wage and hours?
Where's this unconditional basic income going to come from if not the state; and if it's coming from the state, how is it going to liberate poor people from dependency on the state?
If somebody needs a ride, and he's willing to pay someone else to drive him where he wants to go, it's not really a useless job. Maybe not the most fulfilling occupation imaginable, but better than flipping burgers while wearing a paper hat and being nagged by some petty tyrant manager.
I cannot speak for Mr. Carp, but geo-anarchists like Leo Tolstoy and AJ Nock argued in favor of transition from the current tax system to a land value tax system. This ensures cheap land, less speculation and a more free and equal society.
"Where's this unconditional basic income going to come from if not the state;"
Well, it depends on what you mean by 'state.' Opposing the 'state does not necessarily mean opposing all forms of cooperation, community, socialism, etc.
I cannot speak for Eoin, but as for me (a geoist) I believe in an unconditional basic income provided through a land value tax. Ideally this 'tax' (which really isn't a tax) would be enforced by the local communities. However, practically, I don't have a real problem with a national or state government passing such measures as I believe they both ultimately lead to decentralized power.
AJ Nock advocated this as did Leo Tolstoy and numerous other lover of liberty and justice.
It costs seven billion dollars annually in tax payer funded assistance programs to subsidize the poverty wages of fast food workers: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-15/m…
Why shouldn't fast food consumers absorb the costs of a wage increase instead of tax payers? Why does Carp focus only on the potential loss of jobs without mentioning corporate cost shifting? I can't wait to read Carp's promised justification in his upcoming article.