by thenewgreen
As Jason Brennan, a philosopher at Georgetown, puts it, "this presupposes that if you hire someone for, say, 40 hours a week, you owe him enough money for him to lead a decent life". If the value of a worker's labour is less to her employer than the cost of a reasonable standard of living, why should the employer be on the hook for the difference? Subsidising the worker, to bring her up to a certain baseline mimimum, counts as a subsidy to the employer only if we think that was the duty of business all along—to pay workers not only a wage commensurate with the market value of their labour, but also sufficient to finance a life of a certain dignity and security. Mr Brennan goes on (using the example of Bob, a McBurger employee):Isn’t it more plausible to think that if there’s some enforceable positive duty to provide Bob with enough stuff to lead a life, that all of us, together share this burdensome duty, rather than just Bob’s employer? Why should Bob’s employer, specifically, be the one that has to bear the burden and lose all this money to keep him alive (at whatever level you consider decent)? This just seems like a kind of moral outsourcing to me. Why not instead Bob’s neighbors, parents, friends, or sexual partners? Bob does McBurger a service, and McBurger pays him for that service.