Minimum wage in Alberta going to $15 an hour.
- Thread starter JLM
- Start date
Just thinking of a situation that was brought to my attention lately. My son works periodically for a moving company. Sometimes he's moving heavy objects like pianos. Sometimes the boss thinks if the distance to move is short like under a hundred feet or so, he should just pick it up and carry it. The son thinks it would be smarter to spend 5 minutes securing it to a dolly, possibly saving damage to his back and breaking the piano
Which involves putting some thought into it, no?
One can flex their muscles picking up rock A and moving it to place B over and over again, that's hard work. Putting some thought into the process one can, sometimes anyway, find a way to accomplish the same or even more of the task through other means. This involves exercising your grey matter a little, also hard work, to reduce the stress on your body (in this example), the less stress on your body, the less tiring thus enabling more to get done, which also makes it working smart.
Yes, that's the "smart" part.
Right. Like when you're moving rocks, move them downhill wherever possible. Gravity can be your friend. You still work hard (moving the rocks) but by working smart, you can work less hard and accomplish the same, or conversely, work equally hard and accomplish more.
"Grey matter" doesn't get slipped disks!
I followed this sys-sophistic reasoning to a point; however, suppose one's task were to roll the rock uphill. What then?
Back to Big Macs. How would Shakespeare react to the inexorable demise of his favourite fast food if $15 CDN per hour were to become the minimum wage? Sadly, I suspect.
Quote:
"Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second guessiness and mere oblivion,
Sans bun, sans meat, sans taste, sans everything."
$15 per hour does not go far enough; a "minimum wage" does not address fundamental structural problems within the system. Instead of just moving the sliding scale of what constitutes the "working poor", we really need to put an end to poverty and have those normally shut out of the economy take a seat at the table and also provide them with every opportunity to become "job creators" themselves. Enough of this trickle-down crud.
Agreed. Not everyone wants to work. Lots of folks have other things they'd like to do that they find more interesting or edifying than trading their labor for money - they ought not be punished for that by being forced into doing something against their will and then on top of that have THEIR labor price-tagged arbitrarily by someone else at rock-bottom.
I find it funny that those who usually scream the loudest about "freedom" and "liberty" often have little problem in seeing those at the lower end of the economic scale, those who have no lust for gold, forced by the system into working in jobs that they hate against their will and paid a wage they also had little to no say in just so that they can survive within a system they had little to no say in creating. It's a sociopathic world.
I'm not quite sure what sort of system you are advocating here. The idea that hard work and ingenuity should be rewarded proportionately is certainly right of center in the political realm, but anathema to left leaning social/economic equality. The philosophical arguments fall short when faced with the realities of greed and laziness which, while not exactly pervasive in society are still forces strong enough to screw up a well meaning system.
Even hunters and gatherers have to hunt and gather or they starve. To live without labour is like training one's mule to get by without eating. A saving on feed but, alas, a loss in mules.