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2004-09-19 - 6:19 p.m. - they had this shit figured out 5 years ago... Proposed Congressional Minimum Wage Hike Costs Employers Their Rights Wednesday November 3, 1999 By: Robert W. Tracinski Minimum wage laws assault businessmen's individual rights by forcing employers to pay workers a wage that may exceed the workers' value Suppose that a politician suggested the following measure: The current labor shortage, he explains, is putting a strain on businesses, who now have to pay higher wages to keep their workers. So in order to help them, he concludes, we need to impose government-mandated wage caps; he calls this proposal a "maximum wage." If any politician dared to propose such a plan, everyone would be up in arms--and justly so. They would denounce the plan as an attempt to turn workers into slaves by depriving them of the right to negotiate for the wages they consider acceptable. Why, they would ask, should the rights of workers be sacrificed to the needs of businessmen? By what right? Notice, however, the completely opposite reaction to current proposed increases in the minimum wage, or the so-called "living wage"--an even higher minimum wage imposed by some city governments. When it is a matter of sacrificing the businessman to the workers--when it is a matter of abrogating the businessman's right to negotiate on wages--when it is a matter of treating the businessman as a slave to the needs of others--no one dares to offer any moral opposition. There are many practical objections to these minimum wage plans--for example, that they will cause higher unemployment, but why is there no concern for the rights of businessmen? Employers, like the rest of us, have to make decisions about what they can afford. They have to decide how many workers they need to hire and how much they can afford to pay them. Businessmen base these decisions on how much value an employee brings to the company; if his work creates more than $10 per hour worth of value, for example, an employer will be willing to pay him that much. But if his labor is not that productive, then hiring him at that wage would require that the employer operate at a loss. Yet that is precisely what the wage-law advocates demand. They want to mandate, by government edict, an increase in the minimum wage from $5.75 per hour (California's current minimum) to as much as $10 per hour or above (in some "living wage" proposals)--and they expect the employers to pay these wages by operating at a loss. This is the equivalent, in your own life, of the government arbitrarily doubling the price you have to pay for a car, for rent, for food, or for any other necessity. That would be considered monstrous if it were done to a regular person--but not if it is done to an employer. The employers, in the eyes of the wage-law advocates, are different from "regular people"; they have no right to decide how they will spend their own money and no right to decide what their workers' labor is worth to them. Why doesn't the businessman have a right to do these things? Because he is making money. The current economic boom, activists complain, is not being "shared" by everyone. While businessmen are making money, some workers are barely getting by. So their needs, in this view, trump their employers' rights. These workers, of course, are free to negotiate for higher wages--but to do so without government intervention, they would have to convince their employers that they are worth it, say, by acquiring new skills. But this would be a two-way trade: to get more money from their employers, they would have to offer more value in return. But the advocates of wage laws don't want a two-way trade. Workers, in their view, should not be required to earn a higher wage; instead, the workers need only assert their needs--and their employer must therefore be forced by the government to provide for those needs. To these activists, the businessman is a not a person with rights. He enters into their calculations only in the way a bank enters into the calculations of a felon: they're where the money is. Lots of money is being made in this good economy, the wage-law advocates observe, and the businessmen have most of it--so let's go grab it. The idea that this money belongs to someone, who has a right to decide how to spend it, never occurs to them. This assault on individual rights should be condemned. If we recognize the rights of workers to negotiate for higher wages, we must also recognize the employers' right to negotiate. To do otherwise is to make employers into second-class citizens, forcing them into involuntary servitude to their workers. |