Wage War: Employers Stealing Millions from US Workers

drinkthe-koolaid:

supersoygrrrl:

stfuconservatives:

Breaking news: despite what Republicans and Libertarians would have you think, employers are more concerned about their bottom line than their employees.

-Jess

Posting this to facebook. I can’t wait to see what all the libertarians who argue with me about how abolishing the minimum wage/all regulations on business because business always acts in the best interest of employees will argue for this one.

Getting rid of the minimum wage may make some sort of sense from a strictly mathematical & theoretical standpoint. I personally don’t think that it does, even if you remove the fact that we’re talking about actual people with actual families.

That being said, we are talking about real people and real families. Businesses are machines, machines designed with one goal mind: maximize return on investment. With no miminum wage laws, these corporations will pay their employees as little as possible. Libertarians like to believe that if the companies’ pay is too low, they simply won’t be able to hire anyone. This is their vaunted “invisible hand” horseshit.

Unfortunately for them and their classroom theory, the reality is people who need money just to survive will be forced to take whatever jobs they can find. There is no real “free market” in this country; or in the world for that matter. The scales are unfairly tilted toward employers as is. Removing the few protections left to average every day working people is not the way to repair our economy.

The argument against minimum wage they’ve given me before is if a company pays too little why, employees will simply just leave and find a job that pays better! Because that’s practical, especially in a recession. But in this magical world where that happens once everyone leaves for companies that pay better, the original shitty paying companies will be forced to pay better wages to lure employees back. And by abolishing minimum wage it’ll actually make employers pay people more because it creates libertarian’s favorite thing ever -competition!