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A Living Minimum
February 4, 2014 - 9:40am
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A Living Minimum
How long would it take for the economy and market adjustments to render any new living wage level below the poverty line once again? We can look at the increase in bread prices alone in recent years to get an indication. Unless the stock market is abolished or brought under strict control, anything obtained or granted in the struggle for a living wage is destined to be corrected in such a way as to produce the same hand to mouth existence in poverty, representative of a temporary reprieve at best. Poverty is bad enough without the indignity of having people engage in chase the tail activism.
What about having it pegged to some other index subject to inflation or market forces? I'm no economist, but I imagine if it didn't keep a living wage more or less steady (likely), it would set up a kind of Strangelovian doomsday device where two values careening out of control would eventually turn the entire system to ashes.
If you pegged the wage to inflation, and the index wasn't rigged somehow, it would by definition keep up.
The system would eventually implode as well if the value of labour were cadenced to value of production. That is, if it wasn't pegged accordingly, the same problems would arise on a cyclical basis, along with a renewal of similar arguments for a living wage as are being put forward now, all negotiated under similar political constraints. It might work if profit were capped to a percentage of the value of the production, minus the cost of production. The tax portion could be set to take into account the remaining proceeds.
If there was deflation (as there is now) would the wage go down?
A Few Dollars More - Labor Pursues the Impossible Dream of Being Middle Class