NationStates Jolt Archive

I've got a proposal for a minimum wage law, what does everyone think?

Mininum wage law
A resolution to reduce barriers to free trade and commerce.


Category: Free Trade
Strength: Significant
Proposed by: Liberela

Description: ACCEPTING that global trade can be unfair with certain people getting 1p a day and accepting that this is unjustified with companies making huge profits.

I propose EVERY employer MUST pay minimum wage throughout the WA of an amount judged fair by the WA Fairwage Union,
taking the average cost of living into account.

Prison labour WILL be EXEMPT from this resolution as this is a punishment.

The living costs WILL be judged by the mode average cost of rent, food, electricity, water and gas, Education and healthcare in that particular country.

The ratio for minimum wage MUST be 135% of living costs.

ACCEPTING that this could make the WA uncompetitive a Tariff of 350% MUST be enforced on imports from outside the WA for products or services where employees are not being paid over 135% of the living costs. All non-WA imports WILL be monitored by the WA Import Fairwage Union.

This 350% tariff MUST not be allowed for trade within the WA.

This tariff will STOP companies just moving outside the WA for cheaper labour.

Approvals: 4 (Black Empire, WZ Forums, Garsidia, Cordova I)

Status: Lacking Support (requires 105 more approvals)

Voting Ends: Thu May 1 2008

I know it's similar to workers rights bill but it's more comprehansive and has more solutions, e.g $5.50 is nothing in some countries due to living costs!

Two committees in one proposal?

I think this might be illegal because the tariff affects non-WA nations (as it is applied to their exports to WA members).

The tariff doesn't change their law though so it only affects WA law!
This is a tariff charged by the WA nation. So In short I don't think it's illegal!

The tariff doesn't change their law though so it only affects WA law!
This is a tariff charged by the WA nation. So In short I don't think it's illegal!

Even so, the tariff seems like a really questionable thing to include with a minimum wage proposal.

I do like that, rather than choosing one set number for the minimum wage, you have chosen a percentage that allows variations between individual nations. However, I would change it to say "MUST be at least", because our current calculations for minimum wage are at around 150% the cost of living, and we would not want to lower our minimum wage.

This is NOT a matter of 'Free Trade'.
Proposals about a minimum wage beong in the 'Social Justice' category... and there's a separate 'Protective Tariffs' sub-category under the 'Advancement of Industry' heading, too.

In any case, my government will NOT support this proposal. Even leaving aside the point that we regard wage levels as something that should be determined at (or below) the national level, rather than by any international body such as this one, it is a fact that we already do considerable trade with a number of nations that are not members of the WA, and in some cases this is under agreements on Free Trade by which the imposition of any tariffs whatsoever on that trade is forbidden.


Alfred Devereux Sweynsson MD,
Speaker Afar to the World Assembly
for the government of
The Kingdom of St Edmund.

as a nation that does a lot of trade with non-UN nations, i dont think i could possibly support this as written. 350% means our cost of living skyrockets, means our wages must rise, means huge inflation.

There can be a lot of improvements that can be made to this proposal. Overall there needs to be a resolution setting the minimum wage, so that citizens live a reasonable life.

The whole proposal needs to be revamped, so it is a bit more generalized. There really isn't any need for tariffs or a committee, just a simple mandate or two.

What you need to think about is a minimum wage, per hour, per worker, that is enough to live on (i.e: to eat, and to live) but also you need to mandate employers to increase it if the worker has a family to feed.

I am aware that housing and homelessness is an issue that should actually be addressed too.

This is NOT a matter of 'Free Trade'.
Proposals about a minimum wage belong in the 'Social Justice' category... and there's a separate 'Protective Tariffs' sub-category under the 'Advancement of Industry' heading, too.

I already took him to task for posting a proposal with mostly Trade elements under Social Justice, so I imagine he's pretty confused right now. Protective Tariffs might be the solution.


As for a global minimum wage, it's an incredibly silly idea to tie it to specific dollar amounts. I work in the US with a bunch of outsource staff from India. They might make $40K here, and it's barely subsistence living. Back at home in the technology sectors of India (Hyderabad, Mumbai, etc, - not rural areas) they can live like kings on $6k USD.

Forcing a US based minimum wage on the rest of India would result in massive job losses, inflation, a permanent unemployed underclass (well, a much LARGER underclass), and immense social problems. You can't legislate global wages without a clear understanding of global prices and their place in the global economy. The world doesn't work like that.

If you want a minimum wage, then define a reasonable standard of living. That might include the per-capita price of an 1800 calorie daily diet, 50 m² of heated living space, etc, assuming one wage earner per family of 4, then multiply it by a percentage to cover the other basic costs of living. Make that your basis, and perhaps this would work.

Thanks Freesteria I think your points are fair and your point at sweeping it was fair. I understood different living costs which is why I suggested a percentage and the Workers Rights Bill is weaker. While I accept this will leave a risk of short term inflation, I beleive things will even out as companies clean up there act. On Subitastracas point, I can't edit it as it's already in the WA proposals list. I accept I should have consulted everyone in the forums before going to the WA, but I didn't notice people did this til later. I will try and consult first next time. I propose that a bill should be made that forces companies to pay the difference between my 135% wage rate and whatever anyother WA nation will have for employees in that country. Thanks for the help as I am new to all this!

I hope that I did not come off as a supporter of this proposal; the inclusion of the tariff is something I find extremely odd, and it immediately set me against the entire proposal.

I hope that I did not come off as a supporter of this proposal; the inclusion of the tariff is something I find extremely odd, and it immediately set me against the entire proposal.

Oh, OK but the tariffs job is to stop abuses happening abroad!

If you want a minimum wage, then define a reasonable standard of living. That might include the per-capita price of an 1800 calorie daily diet, 50 m² of heated living space, etc, assuming one wage earner per family of 4, then multiply it by a percentage to cover the other basic costs of living. Make that your basis, and perhaps this would work.
Although the minimum wage for those trainees who are still teenagers, or at any rate still quite young, could reasonably be set as just the amount that's needed to support those people as individuals on the basis that they shouldn't yet have families to support.

Although the minimum wage for those trainees who are still teenagers, or at any rate still quite young, could reasonably be set as just the amount that's needed to support those people as individuals on the basis that they shouldn't yet have families to support.

... or perhaps they're being forced into the market early because of disability on the part of the principal wage earner, and need every centavo and then some.

Minimum wages generally aren't living wages. They're just enough to barely avoid starvation if you only work a standard workday. People who have to make ends meet on minimum wage will typically work many more hours, or have more than one minimum wage earner.

That's enough social engineering for one WA proposal. Try to pre-load all the possible contingencies, and it eats its own tail.

If you want a minimum wage, then define a reasonable standard of living. That might include the per-capita price of an 1800 calorie daily diet, 50 m² of heated living space, etc, assuming one wage earner per family of 4, then multiply it by a percentage to cover the other basic costs of living. Make that your basis, and perhaps this would work.

still is going to run into problems with nations of non-humans (everybody forgets about us) Niblonians for example, eat hundreds of thousands of Calories a day. Bears Armed's populace couldnt live in fifty square meters of space. Some species cant work 8-12 hrs a day because they must sleep..... some nations may have geologic conditions making it impossible to work for a certain time for a day.

what might work, is having a committee assess

monetary amount necessary to maintain minimum living standards = L
amount of time possible to work per day = T
and assess minimum wage = W
percentage of living standard to be attained by this formula (i.e. never getting a raise off minimum wage, never working more than ten hours per day or more than 330 days per year) = P

W= (PL)/T

so, for example, if there were ever some country called the United States, with a GDPper capita 46000, and we figure a living standard to be 23000, and we figure people can work an average of 10hrs per day, 330 days per year, to earn 90% the minimum living standard that works out to

W=(.9x23000$)/(330days x 10hrs)= $6.27272727/hour which, if this hypothetical nation had hypothetical minimum wage rates, might be somewhere near what it would be.

[OOC: it absolutely is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S.A._minimum_wages
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html#Econ
]

now if we take http://www.nseconomy.thirdgeek.com/nseconomy.php?nation=Decapod+Ten
to be the state of my nations economy,

GDP Per Capita: $5,653.97
living standard is (randomly chosen rate of) half that, 2,826.45
if we (i have no idea what canonically it really is) take 365 days, 330 workable, 10 hrs per day,

W=$0.77085 per hour...... (dont know what the point of this was..... just wanted to figure out what it would be for another case)

something like that might work. i mean literally, some of the figures (minimum living standard and percentage attainable) are pulled out of my ass, but the math seems close. particularly if there are more than one wage earner in the household.

I already took him to task for posting a proposal with mostly Trade elements under Social Justice, so I imagine he's pretty confused right now. Protective Tariffs might be the solution.


As for a global minimum wage, it's an incredibly silly idea to tie it to specific dollar amounts. I work in the US with a bunch of outsource staff from India. They might make $40K here, and it's barely subsistence living. Back at home in the technology sectors of India (Hyderabad, Mumbai, etc, - not rural areas) they can live like kings on $6k USD.

Forcing a US based minimum wage on the rest of India would result in massive job losses, inflation, a permanent unemployed underclass (well, a much LARGER underclass), and immense social problems. You can't legislate global wages without a clear understanding of global prices and their place in the global economy. The world doesn't work like that.

If you want a minimum wage, then define a reasonable standard of living. That might include the per-capita price of an 1800 calorie daily diet, 50 m² of heated living space, etc, assuming one wage earner per family of 4, then multiply it by a percentage to cover the other basic costs of living. Make that your basis, and perhaps this would work.The outsourcing actually has a overall depression of wages and long term bad for an economy that must then rely almost exclusively on non-manufacturing forms of income. That's what Rome did and look at what happened to it.

However the solution isn't this porposal.

What is, would be a way to keep overall payrates for equivalent jobs to within 20% of every nation. It allows for some benifit with outsourcing, but that also has to weighed with currency rate, transportation costs, etc.

Within the 20% margin universally it has a stabilizing effect.

That's enough social engineering for one WA proposal. Try to pre-load all the possible contingencies, and it eats its own tail.

I think that is the key here in this case. Without reading the text of the proposal, but scanning the title, I'm inclined to think "Social Justice" proposal. Would Liberela really have to tie a minimum wage into any metric (even if based on local standards)? Couldn't another approach be to just call upon nations to establish livable minimum wages?

... or perhaps they're being forced into the market early because of disability on the part of the principal wage earner, and need every centavo and then some.

Minimum wages generally aren't living wages. They're just enough to barely avoid starvation if you only work a standard workday. People who have to make ends meet on minimum wage will typically work many more hours, or have more than one minimum wage earner.

Hmmph! Well, I’m still inclined to think that if we’re talking about the ‘minimum wage’ that might be established for individual trainee workers then that should be set at a level suitable for supporting only those people as individuals, rather than for letting them maintain families too. Unfortunate though the people in the situation you described are, I would prefer to refrain from using those exceptional cases to set our baseline. After all, any “decent” society will already have other ways of helping to support those families that have lost their former primary breadwinners — either through charities, as is the case in St Edmund, or through tax-funded ‘welfare’ systems — whilst any non-“decent” governments might well just weasel their way around this WA-decreed requirement anyway. (Getting around these rules as they’re currently drafted would be easy enough, as I’ll explain later on in these comments…)
That point aside, however, I see four potential problems — at least two of which would almost certainly be applicable to all such proposals, although I think that the other two should be solvable — that would make drafting any really efficient proposal on this topic difficult.

Firstly, as the representative of ‘Decapod 10’ has already pointed out, there would be considerable difficulty involved in defining what any such minimum income must be capable of providing to its recipient, bearing in mind the considerable differences that exist between various of the many sapient species that have populations within the WA’s member nations. In fact, there could be some problems involved in defining such a level for just one single species, too, given the existence of differences in environments and cultures across which its members might be spread: Consider the fact that Humans need significantly more calories to survive if they are living and working in very cold conditions than they would if performing similar roles in balmier climes, for example… and, for that matter, isn’t the Frisbeeterian suggestion that the size of family to be covered should consist of four people itself rather culturally chauvinistic — and not necessarily “universally” applicable, even just to Humans — in itself? After all, there could easily be societies within the WA in which it is normal for all adults (rather than just one per household) to work, within which polygamy or polyandry is widespread, where a “One child per family” law is firmly enforced, or — if we consider other species too, rather than only Humans — where offspring are often produced in large litters…
The only really workable way around this point that I could see would rely on the use of terms such as “adequate” and “reasonable”, rather than on more detailed specifications, but that would leave the less pleasant of the regimes represented here with rather wiiide loopholes to exploit…

Secondly, the other “universal” problem that I see concerns the question of taxation. The WA can legislate on the subject of minimum wages as much as it wants, but the differing levels & forms of taxation applicable in the Assembly’s so-diverse member nations could still leave the people concerned with quite wide differences in ‘real income’… and we can’t simply say that the minimum wage in each nation must be high enough to provide certain resources after tax, because of the existence of nations where the tax rate is apparently at 100%… in which, I presume, everybody works for the state and receives rations of food, shelter, clothing & so on in return.
(This point provides the easy way around the proposal’s requirements that I mentioned earlier: There’s nothing to keep any government that considers the specified minimum excessive from hitting the workers involved with “regressively” high levels of taxation, and then returning the excess [as ‘economic subsidies’] to those people’s employers…)

Thirdly, there’s the fact that all of the proposals on this subject I can remember seeing have assumed full payment in cash, with the worker then buying all of their needs from whichever sources they choose, but we really need to consider also those situations — which I’m sure are quite common — in which the workers receive some or all of what they need directly from their employers, as part or all of their “wages”. I’m not just talking about the aforementioned “100% Taxes” regimes here, either: The provision of (or subsidising of) meals, accommodation, clothing and/or housing for employees by their employers, in partial or even complete lieu of cash wages, is widespread in the cases of armed forces, hotel staff, ships’ crews, farm labourers, staff at boarding schools, and various other lines of work…

And fourthly, a workable draft would need to distinguish — as this one, so far, does not — between full-time & part-time workers rather than apparently setting the same minimum wages for the members of both categories even though the part-timers might well be doing jobs just to supplement their households’ existing incomes from other sources (e.g. the wages of somebody else who works full-time as the household’s primary breadwinner, the same worker’s income from another job, family-owned-&-worked smallholdings, interest paid on investments, pensions, student loans or grants, or ‘welfare’ payments…) or just for “pocket money” if they are in a household where somebody else is the primary breadwinner. If this equality of results is insisted on then that would be unfair to those people who are working full-time, and the most probable result — in absence of any further legislation that would keep the relevant part-time jobs in existence no matter how uneconomic they had thus become for the employers — would be the disappearance of opportunities for part-time work and thus actually a worsening (rather than the desired improvement) in the former part-time workers’ economic conditions…


Alfred Devereux Sweynsson MD,
Speaker Afar to the World Assembly
for the government of
The Kingdom of St Edmund.