Anti-Capitalist Sentiment (with some morality)

[Renton]

-.-
I am disappoint

Now I understand your point about the risk of losing one's job, and I agree I was probably somewhat callous in dismissing that risk, but that risk is constant regardless of what an employee is paid. Other risks are mitigated by salary jobs, though.

When you take a salary or hourly job, you're choosing to be paid a guaranteed amount, and you kind of pay a premium for that. There's inherent value to a guaranteed paycheck that makes the money actually more valuable than if it were the same amount, only variable week to week.

For example, what is worth more:

1) 50,000 dollars in payments distributed evenly at 1,000 per week for 50 weeks.
2) Getting paid a random number between negative 1,000 and positive 3,400 every week for 50 weeks (total ev of 60,000).

Unless you are rich, its probably correct to take 1).

People who argue for profit sharing are trying to kind of have their cake and eat it too. You either take the salary and the risk-mitigating benefits that come with it, or you accept the risk of loss and ruin that comes with being a part of a business. You dont get to choose both. Now if an employer decides that profit sharing enhances the productivity of his people such that its a good investment, or if the just is feeling charitable this Chrismas, that's his prerogative.

...so you're saying...
The market gets to "decide" what a person's value is, but a person gets to decide how the profits are apportioned.
?

I guess? It makes no sense for an employer to pay his employees any more than wages they would agree to. It's the same thing as paying 1.50 for a 1 dollar apple at a fruit stand. The employer owes it to his clients or customers to minimize his costs, and labor is one of those costs. This works to everyones benefit as it drives down the prices of everything and helps to spur innovation.

If you pay a mentally disabled busboy less than other busboys because he's not savvy enough to bargain with you, then there's a problem.

If an employer conceals or manipulates information that an employee would need to know to fairly assess the value of their position in relation to the wage offered, then there's a problem.

That's a crass example of the basic problem of incomplete information, but I'll bite anyway.

First of all, this problem is becoming a thing of the past with the information age. It's becoming more and more difficult to rip people off as information about prices becomes more and more easily available.

But even in your example of a mentally disabled busboy, the system is already naturally taking care of him, because the "going rate" for busboys in a geographical area is usually a pretty narrow pair of figures. Put simply, restaurants aren't going to waste time posting a job offer for a stated wage that is completely off the reservation. The information is just too freely available for employers to get away with such shenanigans.

Now theres still the problem of them specifically offering the disabled busboy a lower wage, but that is why mentally disabled people have proxies. Parents, family or (if you're socialistly inclined) social workers are there to fix this complete non-issue.