Me: wages should be able to pay for someone’s home, food, family, and everything else needed to survive in our society
Someone on this site: what about small business owners though?? Why can’t they underpay, abuse and exploit labor?? This isn’t very American of you ://
Fun fact: according to most estimates, between 70% and 80% of American small businesses are partnerships or sole proprietorships that have no employees beyond the owning partners, and thus are not affected by minimum wage laws in any substantive way. Like, what are they going to do, report themselves for underpaying themselves?
(When folks talk about minimum wage laws screwing “small businesses”, by and large they’re almost never talking about actual small businesses; they’re talking about outfits with hundreds or thousands of employees that have managed to squeak in as “small businesses” on various legal technicalities. This is especially the case in the US, as the US has some of the most permissive definitions of “small business” in the world; depending on the industry they’re in, an American company can have up to 1500 employees and still qualify as a “small business”. By way of comparison, an Australian company typically loses its small business designation at 15 employees.)
