On Wed, 20 Aug 2008, William "Chops" Westfield wrote:
> What DOES seem to happen is that certain things become "not worth  
> doing", resulting in greater waste overall.  For instance, when we  
> tear down a lab setup, tens of pounds of tangled cat5 cable go into  
> the trash (or e-waste bin) because it's essentially not worth paying  
> anyone to untangled it, and not even worth having the people who take  
> it down try to do so in a manner that doesn't tangle it in the first  
> place...

I have to call you on this one.  This is a terrible argument against 
having a minimum wage.

I throw away floor sweepings every day because unless I could pay someone 
$0.01 an hour to compress it into bricks to sell, it's just not worth 
keeping.  What a waste.

As for the cable, if it actually is worth something, the minumum wage is 
not stopping you from doing anything about it.  You can sell that used 
cable to someone else who can do the work themselves.  Either a cable 
recycler (which don't really exist) or some homless guy or the teenage kid 
of one of your workers who wants extra cash.

We will always need a large pool of unskilled labor, it's one of the 
foundations of our economy and industry.  Not everyone can be an astronaut 
or a CEO, even if everyone were smart enough to do it.  So it seems to me, 
that it's only fair to make sure the people in those jobs don't live in 
abject poverty. 

--
Ian Smith
www.ian.org
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