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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (886206)	9/8/2015 10:42:58 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1576159

"In such a world, " it makes sense to quit paying for electricity to run pollution equipment on your smokestack, (or even buy equipment in the first place), and it makes sense to pay less than minimum wage and no overtime to your (12 year old) employees. Doesn't make sense to install expensive safety equipment when you don't have to pay medical and funeral expenses for your workers. Doesn't make sense to spend money on water for them. California settles heat-death lawsuits, agrees to do more to safeguard laborers ocregister.com

To: combjelly who wrote (886206)	9/9/2015 10:00:41 AM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Recommended By i-node Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576159

No in this case I assume that employers are not (generally) altruists, at least in their hiring practices. They may occasionally hire someone borderline or pay someone more than they have to in order to help them out, but greater costs to employ people generally aren't good for employment and wages. This has nothing to do with Austrian economics, its a standard basis of economics that fits well with classical, neoclassical, monetarist, Keynesian, Austrian, even (to the extent I understand it) Marxist economics. It also has nothing to do with a level playing field, in fact to the extent the employer has market power and advantage in negotiations, its easier for him to pass along the costs to the employer in the form of lower wages or other negative factors for the employee that save the employer money. In the real word a relatively minor extra cost like this would likely have effects that are marginal, won't effect every employee, and can be swamped by other major factors, but they are still real, esp. when its not a one time extra cost but a continual series of extra costs as we have in the real world. History in the last few decades supports the conclusion based on common sense and economic theory. There have been a lot of extra costs pushed on employers, but cyclically adjusted profits have grown. Benefits (sometimes mandated, sometimes just popular) have also grown, but wage growth has been weak. (Not as weak as its sometime portrayed, for example by looking at household income when the average household is smaller, but still weak.)