Businesses do not have an inherent right to exist. If you can't pay a living wage, comply with regulations, and be profitable, your business model is not valid and your business should fail and close.
Predictions of dire consequences rarely pan out. Fast food employees in Seattle are earning $15-20/+ per hour and prices did not double - in fact they're not significantly higher than in neighboring counties with lower wages. It turns out that labor costs are only a small fraction of overall costs.
Employees also do not have a right to any particular career. That's nice that people have a dream to make anime for a living. I hope they get to realize it. But the world does not owe them a particular wage for what they want to do just because it's a job that they want. If you can't make enough money doing a certain job, maybe go get a different job then.
I'm not convinced that workers shouldn't have any rights or protections. That sounds like a pretty extreme viewpoint. Or just one coming from an employer's perspective where I can see why you might desire no limits on treatments of workers.
It is quite common in highly capitalist societies, workers should be thankful they get a couple of pennies if at all.
They should learn to be hard workers, saving all the penies they can, never be sick, and some day if they don't die before it, living the dream of being their own boss.
Nobody has a right to a business to exist or any particular job exist and yet nonetheless there are the rules of the game that people must abide by to make society works.
>But the world does not owe them a particular wage for what they want to do just because it's a job that they want
Sure we do, we call it minimum wage. Of course the ceiling is unlimited but there are defined floors.
There are just plenty of loopholes and a lot of off the clock overtime that complicates things. Not just in anime but most of the Japanese workforce. That's a whole other topic to discuss, though.
>>But the world does not owe them a particular wage for what they want to do just because it's a job that they want
>Sure we do, we call it minimum wage. Of course the ceiling is unlimited but there are defined floors.
A minimum wage doesn't guarantee "a particular wage". It only guarantees that if an exchange of money for labor occurs, that the price paid will meet the minimum. However, it doesn't guarantee that the transaction will occur, and if you're unemployed your "wage" is arguably $0.
There is no job that is ok to pay nothing or as good as nothing. It doesn't matter what "career".
If a job needs doing by a human at all, then that human does indeed deserve a reasonable baseline which allows them to exist and even do so with reasonable dignity.
As time goes on and jobs are done by machines, and there are fewer and fewer jobs that require a human, then the output and ownership of those machines simply should one way or another be distributed enough to have the same effect.
All they have to do to earn that is not be being a criminal right at that moment.
And this extends to people who can't do anything obviously productive too. Even a sick old grandma doing nothing but telling stories to kids for one hour a week is productive, and we have no excuse not to provide for even the ones who can't even do that.
Because even if "the Earth is a life boat", we don't exist in an environment of hardship with fixed and insufficient resources where there just isn't enough food and building material and energy to go around.
There simply is no excuse for the way we treat some people. They didn't do anything wrong enough to deserve it, and it is not forced by physical limits.
Talking about what value someone provides to earn their existence is just a way to rationalize taking advantage of others. None of this equates to "I will be forced to spend 20 years learning medicine to give my time away for free to bums!" But even if it did, why is that a bad thing exactly? Because it's what, like slavery? You mean, slavery is bad after all?
These are not slaves. They are free to leave. Nobody is forcing them to work at this job for so little pay. There are plenty of other jobs that pay better. They should go get one of those if they want more money. If enough of them did, the supply of animators would fall and pay would increase.
It doesn't matter if "they are free to leave". There is still no excuse for the employer to pay less than a livable amount for whatever work they get.
If it's 500 freelancers competing for the equivalent of 2 1-day jobs, the employer still has to pay something reasonable for a days work to 2 of them, and nothing to the rest. Or the granularity can be smaller like per hour, but the per hour rate is still some minimum that actually works.
It doesn't matter what the powerless individual worker is ostensibly "free" to do.
People can offer to pay whatever they want. Other people can choose to accept it or not. The point where what people offer and what people are willing to accept intersect determines the price.
If you don’t like the amount being offered, then don’t accept it. This is not very complicated.
Animators are not powerless. It’s not like they are coal miners in a company town and this is the only job available for miles around. Nobody has to be an animator.
Honestly, if a friend came to you and said “my job sucks! They work us to the bone and pay us nothing!” Would you give them a speech about how their employer is evil and they are powerless or would you help them find another job?
There is an enormous power imbalance even in the absence of collusion between employers (which is common). It is difficult and expensive to find jobs, to change jobs, and to move. Many people literally cannot afford to move to a different city for a job. Many employees can't even get a day off to go to a medical appointment, much less apply to a different job. Companies can wait, get loans, and compare offers for dozens or hundreds of candidates. Those candidates need to pay their bills today.
It's particularly egregious in the US where healthcare is tied to employment, meaning that for many people a gap in unemployment would bankrupt them trying to pay for medication or care without insurance. The ACA was insufficient - policies through it are still incredibly expensive with high deductibles, and the lack of a public option for those ineligible for Medicare (or whose state governments declined medicare coverage for them) leaves them beholden to their employer.
Mandating a wage where it is unprofitable to employ people so the business folds or lays them off does not seem like it would help anyone in that situation.
I'm sure there are people who, at times, are in difficult situations. But those are usually not permanent. Are you telling me that someone gets one shitty job once and that is it? They permanently have that one job for the rest of their life? Empirically, that is not what happens. People do change jobs one way or another.
Yes, healthcare in the US could be better, but the article was about animators in Japan, so that is not really relevant. These aren't retail workers with no marketable skills or training. They're talented and well-trained to even be able to get the job in the first place. They just happen to want to work in one very over-saturated, highly competitive industry. Not just animation in general but specifically, anime. Anyone who could get a job there could probably get any graphic design or other job requiring art talent, they're just choosing not to because they want to do this one thing, and in the process driving down the price of labor.
If it's "unprofitable to hire people", raise your prices. If people aren't willing to pay those prices, your business model is a failure and your company is not a benefit to society.
It is detrimental to society to allow capital owners to pocket all the profits and drive the cost of labor down.
Are you inherently saying that the Japanese anime industry is not following regulations? Because they are, and they have been surviving this way for decades and have no problem finding people who want to work there.
You skipped over the first clause of the sentence: "If you can't pay a living wage"
japanese animators are not living in the streets, homeless and starving so I am not sure what this "if" is about
I bet they aren't living great either, when compared with western consumers with bookshelfs full of anime.
You just moved the goalposts.
Not at all, they deserve the same quality life of their bosses, getting rich from western money while exploring passionate slaves, in modern feudalism.
>Not at all, they deserve the same quality life of their bosses
That can't happen by definition unless you get rid of inequality altogether, or engage in shenanigans like defining them as "contractors".
> If you can't pay a living wage, comply with regulations, and be profitable, your business model is not valid and your business should fail and close.
The required amount of money to earn a "living wage" is extremely high because of government interference in the economy! And whether you personally find a business model morally "valid" is not a good reason to make economic changes. People deserve a cost-benefit analysis before their livelihood is taken away. The economic consequences of increasing the minimum wage will be just the same as previous attempts. More automation, less customer service, more unemployment among low-skilled workers.
> The required amount of money to earn a "living wage" is extremely high because of government interference in the economy!
Where the line that separates goodwill custody of the commons like roads, public education, enforcing contracts and laws and "interference"?
That's a good question but presently it's fair to say that governments are way past that line. It would be a great start with governments committed to not spending more than they earn and printing money to cover the deficit. At least this would stop the hidden tax of inflation.
Every time politicians decide to do good somewhere they do bad everywhere. It's not that bureaucrats are evil and incompetent (although many are) is just that free markets are the ultimate resource allocation tool and government intervention is necessarily inefficient and make us poorer.
> free markets are the ultimate resource allocation tool and government intervention is necessarily inefficient and make us poorer.
I'm fascinated - does this hold under all conditions? Can we depend on free markets to efficiently allocate resource during an all-out war vs government commandeering industry, war-bonds and rationing goods?
> It would be a great start with governments committed to not spending more than they earn and printing money to cover the deficit
Do you think government should be in charge of setting a monetary policy? If not, should anyone have that role among private entities? Or should industry just duke it out with against occasionally adversarial nation-states
> I'm fascinated - does this hold under all conditions?
Maybe not.
> Can we depend on free markets to efficiently allocate resource during an all-out war vs government commandeering industry, war-bonds and rationing goods?
I don't think we should base our choice of economical system in the eventuality of an all-out war. Regardless of what I think in the event of an all-out war government will try to appropriate the resources it wants and gear the economy towards its needs because it can. A free market always efficiently allocate resources however I imagine the goals of the economical agents would be closer to preventing the destruction of wealth and human life than winning a war at all costs but this is context dependent.
Ukraine is an example where people from all over the world on their own volition contributed to the war effort in ways beyond what state violence could achieve. And Russia is the opposite example, top-down and dysfunctional.
> Do you think government should be in charge of setting a monetary policy? If not, should anyone have that role among private entities? Or should industry just duke it out with against occasionally adversarial nation-states.
People should have the freedom to use whatever they want as exchange medium. I don't know what is best but the current system with unsustainable growing debt do more harm than occasional adversarial nation-states could.