Summations Only

I didn't respond because it made no sense. If we have minimum wage then we have minimum wage, and it's against the law to hire someone for free, because $0.00 an hour is well below the minimum wage. If we don't have minimum wage, then there's nothing to stop the business from hiring the guy for $2.00 an hour or whatever. If it only generates $3.00 an hour they don't need someone to do it.And, look. I still don't understand the justification that looks at a situation where a business can't make money hiring a guy at 7.50 to do 3.00 of work, and responds by making the worker take a 100% loss. Doesn't it make a lot more sense to force the business to take a 60% loss? The business doesn't have kids at home and a grandma who might be eating cat food tonight. Non-responsive to point, so let me repeat - having a bunch of overworked workers provides more justification for paying somebody, because now you can take some tasks off of everybody else and have one employee do $10.00 an hour's worth of work for $7.50 instead of $3.00. They "hired" hundreds for the Queen's stupid Jubilee. Didn't pay them a cent. If they needed so many, if the need was so urgent, then clearly they needed it badly enough to pay - except that they didn't. They just stole people's labor.

Which I don't advocate. Which is currently not possible.So I ask again:Did you read anything I wrote? Anything at all?Edited by Jon, : No reason given.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

The current talks by the govt. are about making it compulsory. Give or take a little, yes.
You get a roof over your head and food on your table.
How 'acceptable' this is, is open to discussion.

What makes you think that reading your posts allows us to figure out what you are trying to say?You LOL'ed at my previous 'No' response, but you clearly missed the point.

Well, it'd be possible where there's no minimum wage, like in industries where tips take the place of wages.But, again - if we have the minimum wage, there's no way to have the "unemployed" do "unpaid work" for businesses because businesses can't hire someone at a zero wage. If we don't have the minimum wage, then there's no reason - except cheapness - for a business to pay a zero wage if they're getting valuable work out of the employee. Did you? When are you going to realize that the reason we're disagreeing with your arguments isn't because we haven't read them, but that we have read them and discovered that you're wrong?If there are fixed costs to bringing an employee on board to do work, then those costs are present - by definition - no matter what the wage is. Paying a zero wage doesn't eliminate those fixed costs; or, if you think it does, you've yet to explain how. Again, given a business that wants to increase its profits by having work done and a lot of people who want to exchange their labor for money, there's no problem here that can only be solved by "unpaid work for the unemployed" nonsense. The solution to that problem is paid work for the unemployed, who, by virtue of getting hired, stop being unemployed. It's a win-win.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Because I was pretty clear in Message 16 about exactly what I thought. Nowhere did I argue for stealing labor, yet that has been crash's focus in all his replies to me so far. When someone thinks that doing work doesn't cost more money than not doing work, the only reasonable response is to laugh at them.

The scheme is mandatory in the sense that if you don't comply with it welfare benefits are stopped for a period of three months. LinkAs for whether job seekers allowance (that is what it is called here) provides a livable amount to live on - I would personally say not. But others would disagree. As I understand it such benefits are lower in the UK than other comparable countries: LinkIn absolute terms the amounts are 56.25 per week for those under 25 and 71 per week for those over 25.I hope that goes some way to answering your questions.AbE - The average weekly wage in the UK is approx 450 er week apparently (if that adds any context)Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

As I said: you completely missed the point - as usual.And talking of laughing at people:
If doing work costs more money than not doing work then how do businesses ever make a profit? That would be a first.

But we do have a minimum wage, and that means a lot of people willing to work for $5.50/hr are unemployed. Of course there is. The business, for example, may be providing something of value to the unpaid worker, such as job training experience, chances to network with potential job references, etc. You'll notice that that's what I said in Message 16:

quote:

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Jon in Message 16:

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The unpaid workers should be compensated according to the income they generate for the company; that way the government is not funding the profits of private businesses.

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OR:

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The companies that participate should be required to submit a plan for training each unpaid worker they take on that shows they will actually be teaching the worker essential job skillsas opposed to simply having them do something lame that anyone can do without training, such as socking shelves, which doesn't help increase a person's later employability.

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Did you read that, Crash? Did you notice me saying that employees should be compensated for their work? I think that is exactly what I said; I'm not sure what you're trying to prove with repeating it. Precisely. Except we live in a society where it is against the law to contract work from someone for less than a certain wage, even when the work you want them to do does not justify that minimum wage. This has the unfortunate side-effect of keeping certain people out of doing work they could otherwise be doing.Jon

Isn't it obvious? Some work generates income greater than the costs of doing that work, other work doesn't; were there enough of the former type of work available, there wouldn't be unemployed people. You and Crash merely enjoy misreading people. If you read my words for what they are instead of what you think they are, then you'd have no problem understanding my most simple points.But you're a troll. I've no more to say to you.Jon

You are also exempt from certain charges e.g. Poll Tax.
And rent (up to a certain level) is paid for.(I am not arguing that the amount is generous, merely trying to help Rahvin have a more complete understanding.)

If you look at your table it appears that there are two outliers, the UK and the US.One argument made here is that paying folk not to work discourages folk from working and so will end up with no one willing to work to create the base to pay those not working. Yet Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands are among the most productive and most industrialized nations today.So is anyone asking them how they seem to be able to do what is claimed to be impossible in the US and UK?

Not from what you post.Let us look, shall we? So, by your own logic, you should laugh at yourself. Well, let's try that... Posting contradictory statements will never make your position clear.

And so the solution is to pay them $0.00 an hour? Please help me understand that. Yes, that's the part I don't understand. The way we compensate employees for their work is with their pay. But you propose "unpaid work for the unemployed." It's right up there in the title of the thread. So I don't understand how it compensates anyone to not compensate them. I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm trying to get you to clarify your position, since it still appears to be incomprehensible nonsense. Since I joined this thread, I've asked you the same question perhaps four times now, and it's the question I'm still trying to get you to answer: What problem exists that is solved by making people work for free? The fixed costs of employment don't disappear at a $0.00 an hour wage - you've just explicitly agreed that they do not - so how does a $0.00 an hour wage solve the problem that some labor doesn't justify the fixed cost of employment? It's a simple question. Is there some reason you've been ignoring it? So hire them to do work that does. Again, I'm not seeing the problem solved by hiring people at a $0.00 wage. I'm not even seeing the problem solved by ignoring the minimum wage - if you can't justify bringing an employee on for $7.50 an hour to do $5.50 worth of work, then transfer $2 worth of work, or more, from one of your existing above-minimum wage employees to the new hire, and pay him $7.50 an hour. Then lower the wage of the employee whose work you alleviated. There may be a minimum wage but the only granularity in wages is that people like wages rounded to the nearest nickel.Look, I can't buy a 4 ounce Coke, for any price, even though sometimes I'm only 4 ounces thirsty. Coca-Cola doesn't make any money selling Coke in shot-glass-sized containers. But the solution to this problem is for me to buy a 12 ounce Coke and just get extra-refreshed. It's not to force Coca-Cola to give me their products for free. The problem of the fixed overhead costs of distributing Coca-Cola to consumers not being justified by the profit at such a small volume isn't solved by a zero price, it's exacerbated by it. Same with this "unpaid employment" nonsense.

So we're not just talking about "unpaid work for the unemployed," like volunteering.We're talking about taking the absolute most desperate class of citizens, and compelling them to work, without pay, under threat of homelessness and starvation.That is slavery, plain and simple.The notion that these workers are somehow "compensated" through "gaining work experience" is an obvious post-hoc rationalization.This is nothing more than a work-around for minimum wage laws and a boon for the corporations that "hire" these individuals. The state pays the unemployment benefits, not the corporations, and the state-provided benefits seem to amount to below minimum wage; if the state were to hire these people at minimum wage to do the same jobs in lieu of unemployment benefits, the workers would make more money, yes?In the US, unemployment benefits eventually expire. Is that also true in the UK? Because if you also allow the clock to keep ticking on the benefits while your slaves work for free, that's even worse exploitation, as they'll wind up homeless and starving even with compliance.That's the sort of thing that leads to violent uprisings. When the poor are starving, they'll eat the rich, and all that.