> If my job requires menial labor or involves getting berated by customers (many retail jobs), personally I would absolutely not work.
Maybe that's a good thing. It's insane how people in service industries are treated - like they're less than human. Shifting some power to them and giving the job a little more of an air of dignity or status would probably help a lot.
And the pay would obviously go up. People would be willing to do the job if it means life or death, but not for minimum wage - and that's a good thing.
I've also seen within the same organization how such people are treated.
For example janitorial workers. At an old workplace of mine there were three shifts of at least two workers three during the day. Then they were cut to just one worker per day and evening no nights. One person frantically running from bathroom to bathroom not even getting to the other tasks that had to do like vacuuming.
Then they cut their hours to part-time for all but two workers. At minimum wage it was barely livable on 40 hours per week.
They also ask the night worker to come in the next day with less than a seven hour gap from the previous shift.
Even at the punch clock they were scolded for punching in or out a mere 1 minute off from the time to work or end.
I could tell when talking to the staff many of them felt defeated and this was the only job they could do. They just had to sit there and take it.
Guaranteed income (GI) would at least buffer some of the anxiety. I could also see businesses knowing it existed would cut worker hours to part-time. But if part-time plus GI was enough then the worker has the power.
> Guaranteed income (GI) would at least buffer some of the anxiety. I could also see businesses knowing it existed would cut worker hours to part-time. But if part-time plus GI was enough then the worker has the power.
This is the biggest advantage I see, and shows why you wouldn't even need a living wage. You need a sufficient amount of money so that if a worker is being abused they can say "fuck it, I quit" and be able to live until they find another job. Being able to do that should prevent a fair amount of abuse in the first place.
I don't get it... why not raise minimum wages to reflect local cost of living? IE, why tax all of us instead of the businesses not paying enough for their employees?
Because it impacts all of us. Imagine the impact on crime and homelessness if there were UBI. Quality of life would improve for everyone. I'm happy to pay my taxes if it goes to that.
The problem is that it takes a strict authoritarian governmental control because you need to regulate the prizes of everything that's deemed necessary to prevent subsidizing controlling third parties.
Take housing for instance: rent would rise a lot when people suddenly get x more. People pay because they have no choice so the x transfers directly to the controlling third party in the end, completely negating any possible benefit but for those already in a non-vulnerable position.
I don't think rent control is the policy of a "strict authoritarian government". Regardless, I don't agree with you that rent would rise considerably or that it would negate any benefit.
Why would rent not rise? Landlords know you have X more to spend now. Why would they not raise prices, altruism? You think that's their reason behind renting out property?
Same with the telecommunications pseudo-monopolies: you really think they won't try and tap into that resource even if a little? Communications has become almost as vital as housing the last decade.
Companies will do everything they can and the public is capable of paying to increase their revenue.
Because people can decide to go live in another place, quit their job and get another one in the new place.
One of the reason some people do not move is due to being comfortable and at travel distance to their job.
Under this light you can see what happened to several European cities with high rent due to University: as soon as Covid made students go home to their parents as classes were online, there was a huge drop in rent prices.
You could bundle welfare, food stamps, other social programs, medicare, etc. add a tax break/no tax for anyone making less than $20K. Put it all into one system and call it UBI. You the tax payer are still paying the same thing.
It will fail unless the government gets easy money from eg producing oil like Emirates. Otherwise someone needs to produce stuff. We already have a big inflation problem that is directly related to policies that rain money on those not working. Let's not make things even worse, please.
UBI incents more people to work compared to current policies, because it smooths out any disincentives that occur from clawing back existing subsidies. It's precisely because "someone needs to produce stuff" that we should be rewarding people for their increased productivity. The increased "bargaining power for workers" that results from UBI is entirely consistent with this goal.
> We already have a big inflation problem that is directly related to policies that rain money on those not working.
We have inflation because of sustained fiscal and monetary stimulus through a period of sharp restrictions on economic activity being sustained after most of the restrictions ended; the fiscal stimulus has already been withdrawn, and monetary stimulus is slowly unwinding.
But that really doesn't have much bearing on a tax-funded UBI, which—unlike deficit-funded airdrops—is redistribution, not general stimulus.
Of course. Printing money inflates its supply. And increasing the demand for products (by providing easy money) without increasing the supply of products (and actually decreasing it by restricting work) will lead to higher prices. It is economics 101 and it was tested by many countries eg Germany before the WW or more recently Venezuela.
Sorry, yes, printing money leads to inflation. I was asking for evidence that "We already have a big inflation problem that is directly related to policies that rain money on those not working." is the source of a large portion of inflation instead of the multitude of other reasons that money is printed. Of the recent $4 trillion coronavirus payout, only about a fifth of that went to workers or their families[1], and even that isn't all to people who aren't working.
I'm not an economist, but I do listen to a bunch of them. My understanding is that printing money doesn't necessarily create inflation, and the real story is far more complicated than that. That it also depends on things like: the overall economy, how that money is being spent, demand pull, cost push, public fear of inflation (which causes ->), how much money is circulating vs how much is being pooled (investments/into banks/under the mattress), and more.
ometimes first order approximations (or "basic principles") lead you in the wrong direction. My understanding is that economics is full of pitfalls like this.
The conclusion is derived from the basic principles. Of course if even more money was given directly to non productive people the prices would increase even faster!
We do ask the general question of "what costs are we willing to bear to reduce the amount and human toll of actual slavery". Actual slavery is illegal, certainly, but there are still instances of it happening, even today[1,2,3]. We could spend more resources to further reduce the number of cases where this happens, and there are plenty of people saying we should. In theory, a complete enough surveillance state, where the movements of all people and all monetary transactions are tracked and analyzed, might even be able to get the number of such instances all the way down to zero, but that seems a lot less likely to be a good tradeoff.
So yes. We do the same for non-wage slavery. We do the same for any bad thing that trades off against a different bad thing.
Not only bad things, but also everything can be traded off against some other thing. That doesn't mean we should. There's an economic value assigned to human life, but we don't let someone kill another one by paying a markup.
We should get rid of wage slavery. We can then work on the economic consequences.
Even a small amount of income gives breathing room. That's the idea here. A full UBI would mean there's no chance of suffocating. I'm saying that we can dip our toes in first and we should still see effects. It isn't an all or nothing scenario as many put forward.
It isn't just organisations that put pressure on people, it is mostly customers.
One example is delivery workers. Everyone expects their packages to be tracked which resulted in total surveillance of delivery workers with extremely tight time slots. Competitors that didn't expand here were soon left behind because the profit margin of that industry is extremely low.
Janitors are similar. People will take the cheapest option and the companies that exploit the best with prevail.
This is a selfishness that cannot be denied and in my opinion would make a basic income impossible. Prices would just soar to a level where this income is of little consequence.
Sensible laws for worker protection to restrict selfishness can better the situation more efficiently.
Damn. In our office (well before Covid), we were explicitly given training on how to behave with janitorial workers - to be polite and clear the workspace if we are working late hours and not make a mess of things for them and increase their workload. Well, this was an EU company not an American one, so far more respect for blue-collar workers.
Agreed, isnt this exactly whats been observed from pandemic financial aid? Increased pressure on employers to pay more and give workers a better work environment? Maybe someone has a better link to back that up but heres one at least.
Also isnt there some possibly-not-totally-fantasy narrative where at least some of these jobs become automated in response to workers not wanting them and its maybe a good thing?
~50 years ago Keynes predicted by now no-one would have to work menial jobs because everything would be automated, freeing up people to work a few days a week and pursue creative endeavors.
While we have automated things, we are nowhere close to that today. A lot of current menial jobs CAN be automated today, but the cost of labor is cheaper than designing and deploying automated solutions.
Having higher cost of labor will incentivize more capital solutions to menial jobs (automation, substitutions), which will change societal patterns a lot (maybe you should expect a machine to take orders at every restaurant) but could certainly lead to a happier 'steady state' long term.
Many years ago I worked as a solderer/assembler. One day I said to a supervisor "You mean there isn't a machine that can do this job? Seems easy to automate." Their response was "There is a machine...but it costs more than you do."
From that moment on it was very clear to me what my value to the company was. Combine that with the long hours, low pay and constant watching over my clock in times made it very easy to just "walk" from that job with no notice.
The worst part was knowing that there were people who had been there 20 years and had (seemingly) no upward mobility during the entire time. After 6mos I was moved up to QA (with an insignificant pay increase) and I realized that I was as high in the company as I was going to get without someone dying.
I have no issue working...but if I am going to be poor while working 56hr weeks...why do it?
Good correction. The Keynes essay I am thinking of is from the 1930s, which is almost 100 years ago now! It was probably inspired from Russell's thoughts.
i just read his essay "in praise of idleness"[1] (1932) and what sticks out is how nothing has changed wrt how capitalism works:
"Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?"
>~50 years ago Keynes predicted by now no-one would have to work menial jobs because everything would be automated, freeing up people to work a few days a week and pursue creative endeavors.
Well that's not the outcome automation is having but quite the opposite. Automation means fewer jobs for some, meaning those left without those jobs have to compete for a brutal job market to make rent when unemployment runs out, it doesn't mean they get to prop their legs on the table and pursue arts and other hobbies.
The automation utopia where everyone is free from most work cannot and will not happen under the current economic model where all the benefits of automation are vacuumed by the private companies developing them and the governments have to deal with those left without a job and support them with taxes taken from those who still have a job.
Used to be that everyone worked brutal hours six days a week, even children. The working class wasn’t called that for nothing. All this work yielded a very meagre and fragile existence.
Now we have 40 hour 5 day weeks as standard - already a utopia compared to before automation started with the first industrial revolution. People are even talking about 32 hours. These tiny work hours buy us a king’s ransom of goods, and probably half of us are either retired or too young to work.
Added to this, we’re seeing the best job market in history.
If you can find the cloud inside this silver lining, your eyesight is to be applauded. Perhaps you had modern eye surgery giving you 20/20 vision.
Note that pandemic financial aid has often been conditional on hardship and has been intermittent. This makes it not a great model for basic income.
I think it's likely a universal basic income (small at first --- not a "living wage" yet, but enough to provide everyone with more security and to eliminate some conditional benefits programs, EITC, etc) would be a good thing. But it's really fairly unprecedented, despite efforts at research.
A big question to answer is about paternalism in benefits-- what's the right amount?
We have a big contingent of people angry when other people buy luxury goods or candy with SNAP. We're also worried that if we don't provide housing or food assistance to the poor-- putting strings on the money ensuring it's used for those purposes-- they wouldn't eat. We end up with this wacky system where there's restrictions on the money that are ineffective at preventing abuse but also strikingly effective at preventing poor people from using it to systematically improve their situation. We also incur massive costs for these administrative controls compared to just giving money out, and create benefits "cliffs" where improving your income reduces your net resources.
Minor correction; pandemic financial aid for individuals has been conditional on hardship. The PPP on the other hand just required businesses to pinky swear that they'd retain or bring back employees. Then the "loans" were completely forgiven.
Fewer workers means fewer goods and services. If demand remains constant or increases, you get inflation. The pandemic caused supply chain issues, but this wouldn't have been as big of an issue had demand been artificially pumped with the stimulus. In many places, such as the ports, productivity is at an all-time high, but they're still bottlenecking consumers.
There were many anecdotes from employers complaining about unemployment benefits, but the systematic data collection gave mixed evidence. I concluded the impact varied across industries.
On the other side of the coin, in my career I've had colleagues so bad that I would gladly pay them NOT to work. They created a toxic workplace and made everything worse. Unfortunately the majority of them would likely not take UBI (in two cases they were the owner/boss). However, if UBI kept just a portion of troublesome workers out of the workforce, then that would be beneficial as well.
UBI would likely help most in this case by giving employees the power to comfortably seek new work. Bad bosses survive mostly on apathetic employees that empower them to get away with being awful while looking productive because of their team.
The more power you give to employees the faster people will jump ship from bad bosses to good ones - and the awful ones will have a harder time keeping their positions.
UBI would probably end up disproportionately filtering out non-troublesome workers. Non-troublesome workers are more rational than troublesome workers and would take a small reduction in pay in exchange for less headache. The troublesome workers that actually enjoy conflict would stay in the workforce because they can't find the same opportunities for conflict elsewhere.
Maybe. Many jobs can be automated, but it was cheaper to just hire minimum wage people to do a job. If the pay required to find people got to be too high, automation would happen more rapidly.
"a capitalist society" is not a binary attribute. There can be elements of capitalism and elements of "socialism".
Private property can coexist with government supplied housing for instance.
In the "capitalist" USA a lot of the military industrial complex lives off government handouts. Why not the people too? The cakes and cookies we should earn ourselves, the meat and potatoes (and housing) should be a right for every citizen
Not necessarily. Society is made of people; some things can be automated in a non-capitalist way (e.g. free software) even by capitalists. Though, of course, we will have to struggle to avoid the dystopia.
Capitalistic societies still have taxes. Any realistic UBI proposal would have to funnel some of the efficiency gains from automation toward constructing a strong social safety net.
Revenue per employee, usually. (There are many measures of labor productivity, though.)
Really, you'd just want to tax corporations over a certain size that are both highly automated (i.e. high revenue per employee), and have lopsided compensation structures (which could be measured by CEO to median worker pay). If a company successfully automates a bunch of jobs, and then makes that money rain equally on all their remaining employees, I'd have no problem with it. I only think they should be taxed if they try to distribute those gains exclusively to the executives and shareholders.
> makes that money rain equally on all their remaining employees, I'd have no problem with it.
why would the remaining employees, who have no invested capital into the business (with which the automation is driven by), receive any of the gains from said automation?
The people who invested the capital into the automation reaps the profit. In this case, it's often the shareholders in the end.
> The people who invested the capital into the automation reaps the profit.
Yes, that's how it works today. That's not how I'd like it to work.
Many people here get a significant portion of their compensation via RSUs, ESPPs, and other profit-sharing initiatives, and any company that decides to extend these benefits to lower level workers should be treated favourably by the tax system.
i.e. > just with the quality of the result and with who reaped the rewards.
Maybe we should leave terms like capitalism and socialism out of the discussion because no one can agree on their meanings so they just become fighting words and their usefulness to the conversations are less than meaningless.
Then I'm confused what you are meaningfully adding to the conversation with your comment? The parent to your comment already suggested what you are stating.
If a job doesn't need doing, why waste a human's labor on it?
Though that said, I remember not too long ago a lot of people saying "oh if minimum wage goes over $15 we'll just automate the jobs" and now the McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen.
> McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen.
Who's pouring the drinks at your McDonalds? Over the past five or so years, the robots have taken that over. McDonalds has never been a stranger to labor savings, although I don't think they use burger conveyors like other chains, they do lots of little things. They've also been putting in two lane ordering all over the place, which increases throughput.
All these things work together to reduce the people hours to put together an order. Sometimes that means one less person on a shift.
Here's a discussion from 2002 where someone says 'all the new McDonald's have serve-yourself-drinks' but older stores still had them behind the counter. At some point, most existing stores retrofitted self-serve, too. Other chains had it way earlier for sure.
The ones I've seen (yes, at McDonalds specifically) are terrible, take forever to use, are abusive in attempting to push crap on the user and make some (what I'm sure are higher-margin) items easier to buy than others, and are yet another case of pushing labor onto the "consumer" and calling it automation(?!), like "automated checkouts" at grocery stores—a fucking lie, the buyer is doing almost as much work as paid workers used to, "automated" would be if you could just let go of your cart and a machine took care of the rest while you waited.
Or like shifting from having workers fetch items for you to modern-style stores where you have to find everything yourself (that change was long enough ago that the idea that you should feel put-out at having to do this part of a store's job is lost to time). Or filling your own drinks, which is at least semi-compensated by being able to refill as much as you want or even "steal" an extra cup, but since a large soda costs the store pennies that's not much of a benefit.
I'm struggling to think of a consumer-facing "automation" that wasn't actually just making consumers do more work. It's bad enough that we have to do the work of regulating prices (think of the time and brain-space you devote to figuring out whether the sale price on, say, apples is actually a decent one, keeping that figure/heuristic up-to-date, et c., now multiply by your entire shopping list, now multiply by the entire population)
I don't think the comparison to AI is apt since meal making robots do currently function and are in restaurants right now. It is literally just being rolled out slowly.
Still, it seems that even those that clearly are solved problem can be done badly. Recently KFC rolled out here. And their kiosk seem to miss the basic options to customize the meals. Like just removing things. Can't do that with meals... Have list of extra options of stuff possibly not even in the product... Actually they don't even tell anywhere what is in their burgers. But I digress. All other chains including the local one manage to have these options present...
So in the end automation won't always solve everything immediately...
Pandemic driven wage increases haven’t been happening long enough to drive just too much automation yet - supply chains and all that would greatly limit how fast that will roll out. It will be interesting if in 5 years I’d wages stay at current levels how much automation displaces them.
This looks more like deskilling than automation. There's not someone constantly on the fryers in most fast food outlets, this just makes it a button press instead of having to learn by sight/smell/feel when something is done. That can make things a little faster, but at 30% faster you're paying now paying a whole person's salary to... save at most a person's worth of work, with a much bigger business risk if anything goes wrong.
That’s because we rely on China for parts to make the robots and there has been a huge shortage. At least in America, we need to back to being self reliant. Software is not going to eat anything without hardware.
It’s all happening in Asia and we outsource our manufacturing to them. This won’t end well for America.
Speaking as someone who has worked in a factory, you couldn't pay me a six figure salary to go back. And most of the things were automated already, at least as much as reasonably could be.
I think that is more a testament to the lives we now live as Software Developers more than anything else. It's not uncommon to find anecdotes of others on HN talking about how they maybe work 2-3 hours a day and take home 150k+ a year.
I started working my freshman year in high school in 2008 as a busboy at a local restaurant making $4.50/hr + tips from the servers working that night. I couldn't even drive yet so I pocketed most of that money and was grateful for the opportunity. (This ultimately allowed me to build my first PC and I allowed me to get into programming.)
I moved from there to another local restaurant with a similar job title, but quickly moved up into working in the kitchen as a line cook. I think I made $8 or $9/hr when I got the "promotion". After graduation I wandered around some and eventually ended up as an asst. manager at a Burger King.
Now, over a decade later, I can sometimes look back nostalgically at my time in food service, but I don't know that I would ever go back, for any amount of money.
The things I am nostalgic for are structure, a defined start/end time, and being able to leave work at work. The pay was awful, the people were generally nice enough, but there's always a rude customer at some point or a manager with a power trip. I don't miss waking up at 5am to man the drive-thru, or going home after midnight smelling like grease.
If I woke up tomorrow with no qualifications to write software, I would sooner go into a back breaking trade than go back to retail.
I think we will see automation really start to take over these retail spaces in 2022. In my city (Dallas), pretty much every single fast food restaurant has mobile ordering or a kiosk available. My local Kroger expanded their self checkout lines and after 10pm, there are no more manned checkouts open. I've frequently had to scan and bag a full cart of groceries using self checkout (which sucks).
The past two years have opened up a lot of time for these giant corps to invest in R&D as the labor pool shrinks. Through the perfect storm of chip shortages and labor shortages, we haven't seen a large scale roll out, but I'm confident it's coming as soon as parts and installers are available.
Oh, I definitely feel like I'm working in the top 1% of jobs now.
Full time WFH since significantly before covid, it's B2B so even though I'm nominally on call, that's just a nice chunk of extra pay for maybe 1-2 calls a year. I do work hard when required, but it's not as required any longer, so I end up with a lot of free time when there are no issues to solve and I use that to go the extra mile to keep my customers happy.
Depends on the factory and what you're doing there. Last time I worked in a factory I was debugging printer-eating robots, shooting high powered lasers at things, and blowing stuff around with blasts of compressed air. (And I got to program all those things).
You haven't really debugged things until your tests involve forklifts and 10t cranes. O:-)
Fortunately people are working to make that kind of thing less necessary (though it can't be eliminated completely of course; someone still needs to watch and maintain the machines).
I mean, this isn't completely unsolvable--better AC would've made things better. But it probably wouldn't be that economical, because industries like that are rather price sensitive.
I think this is an honest perspective, but it directly contradicts the article which is saying "basic income would not reduce people's willingness to work." Menial labor or being berated by customers rather clear-cut example, but most jobs have moderate amounts of unpleasantness, and given the choice many people would opt out of working altogether. There's a lot of unpleasant work that needs to be done to keep civilization going!
There's a big difference between "I am willing to work, even though I can get enough money to survive without doing so" and "Under those conditions, I am still willing to work at a job that dehumanizes and degrades me constantly, for very little extra money."
So labour costs would go up, things get more expensive, and there are still no incentives to be civil because that cost is spread amongst all customers.
If $X was enough to live (even if meagerly), then why would a worker put up with a new wage that is $X less than previously?
The worker would only continue a "shitty" job, if they get a better deal than before. So it makes sense to conclude that wages would cost more to entice a worker if said worker was able to obtain a UBI.
Jobs that would be popular and enjoyable, would be sought after - and those wages would drop.
Much as we might agree these workers overall have more money - from whatever source - it does not follow that the pay would go up for crap jobs. The pay need only be high enough above the post tax increase from the UBI baseline to fill the spots. Maybe it won't they populated by people who need to feed their family anymore, but perhaps by college grads who need to feed themselves because UBI is eaten up by their student loan repayment. All we can guarantee really is shifting the bracket of the likely talent pool's need for a few extra dollars. Humans aren't alike in the level of income above which they're no longer in desperation for a few extra bucks.
In addition it would incentivize companies to actually invest into research and development instead of wasting money into dead-end financial schemes and bullshit jobs. Everyone wins.
> Shifting some power to them and giving the job a little more of an air of dignity or status would probably help a lot.
I agree, but is this feasible or wishful thinking?
As a society, we’re decidedly split on whether we should wear masks or should or should not get vaccines, despite the science or despite whatever seems like a rational decision. (Admittedly I’m introducing my bias here).
Would raising pay for retail workers or people acknowledging that we need to treat them with respect - would either of these actually lead to the right outcome? Or would it fuel another voice that vehemently sees these jobs as a stepping stone and not entitled to respect and dignity?
I think what it would do is balance the power a little toward an employee’s favor instead of a customer. Right now there are people that have no choice but to work these jobs. So a company can institute a “customer is always right” policy because it keeps the customer around and they really don’t have to consider their employees feelings- they are easily replaced. Customers only act like assholes because they can get away with it- abuse the clerk, the manager comes out, customer gets free stuff. But if there was a basic income there might be fewer people willing to put up with abusive customers. If a company has a hard time replacing employees then it might have to reconsider their policy to be more like “accommodate reasonable customers but abusive customers can be kicked out.” This would probably happen over time, not immediately after implementing a basic income but I think it’s a good thing.
But I think the overall idea that companies would have to put a little more effort into their employee’s well being would be borne out if a country could commit to a basic income for long enough for the effects to shake out.
This is good behavior that companies would be forced into, not because of morals like respects and dignity, but because a mass exodus of employees would eventually hurt profits more than keeping unreasonable customers around.
Also, I think we've all seen the reddit threads about someone standing up to a rude customer and not getting fired. Those employers exist and seemingly are operating their businesses at a profit.
Hell, we have professions now that demand respect (cops) and magically, the vast majority of the population seems to be able to grow up and not act like a child when confronted with an undesirable situation.
I don't think anyone in retail is asking for an undo burden by the rest of society when demanding humane treatment in their workplace.
> Hell, we have professions now that demand respect (cops) and magically, the vast majority of the population seems to be able to grow up and not act like a child when confronted with an undesirable situation.
By law in most situations you must comply with the police officer. Not really the same.
The fact that "karens" have become a meme is largely due to this. Working retail has always been filled with absolutely terrible customers but in this day and age we're actually shaming them instead of feeding bad behavior with passive silence.
As you pointed out, it's not possible to achieve consensus on things like vaccines and masks, I don't think we should expect any differently in any sort of proposed change. There are always going to be opponents.
If we always chose not to do something because it would be met with resistance, then nothing would happen ever. The US passing the civil rights act was met with vicious resistance as it was happening, should it not have happened because there were critics of the law? Ultimately, I think we do need to raise pay and facilitate a higher level of discourse in those kinds of environments., regardless of what detractors will say.
Maybe that's a good thing. It's insane how people in service industries are treated - like they're less than human. Shifting some power to them and giving the job a little more of an air of dignity or status would probably help a lot.
And the pay would obviously go up. People would be willing to do the job if it means life or death, but not for minimum wage - and that's a good thing.