Fact is, the neighbor is screwing this girl out of the two bucks an hour she should probably get for doing the job. Whose fault is that? The government's for including a minimum wage exemption for exactly this situation, the neighbor's for his ignorance (or willingness to use her), or the girl's for agreeing to work for free? Who benefits?
Actually both benefit. The job gets done at a price the employer deems fair. The employee gets paid for a price they deem fair. Who are we, who are not party to this contract, to say they are not benefitting? Why should someone who is wise in the value of a dollar be forced to pay a foolish rate for a job that is not worth it.
The girls example is outstanding in that it illustrates a menial task of watering plants, that should have zero skill knowledge needed outside of maybe reading basic instructions and knowing how much water a 'cup' is. The job may take only 15-30 minutes, but yet some third party states she is being cheated if she is paid less than minimum wage for her time. Both parties agree that the job is not worth minimum wage and agree to a verbal contract to do the work for less and both are happy.
The fact that another neighbor wants her to water the plants and is willing to pay a higher wage is fine too. Maybe she can do both. After all, the job isn't very long for the first place. There's no reason why they have to interfere with each other. But let's also say that amount STILL isn't minimum wage. let's say she got paid 4 dollars from the first job and 7 from the second while the minimum wage is 10 an hour with a mandatory 1 hour pay. She just did 1 job for an hour's work making 11 an hour. Both jobs paid less than minimum but she still made more for the same amount of time.
Who loses here? Nobody except the lazy bastard who maybe told the neighbor "I'm not gonna water your plants for 15 minutes unless you pay minimum wage. He's the only loser here for he gets nothing.
There is no right to a 'living wage'. There is only the right to freely negotiate work for pay for your benefit as you see fit to earn without interference from others on the value you place on your labor.
hah... you know what else? This illustrates the unfair advantage of subsidized labor as well. The girl can afford to work for sub minimum wages because her lifestyle is subsidized by her parents. Joe next door trying to make ends meet for example, would not be able to do this type of work because he would not be able to pay expenses on his lifestyle, and he can easily be underbid by those who have their expenses taken care of by an outside source of income. Instead Joe next door would have to pass on this job for it is both not worth higher payment or longer hours to support him, and the market is met by those who do not need to be paid as much to meet their expenses. Therefore, no one is being cheated for it is a job market that Joe cannot participate in for it would never meet his financial needs. In this manner, nobody is cheated and we also show how subsidized vendors can underbid and skew the market place.
Now if the little girl wasn't there, and these people need someone to water their plants, they may look to finding other ways to water their plants, like time release waterglobes or some sort of automatic sprinkler. In this case, there is some minor to major capital outlay at the beginning of say 30 dollars and suddenly the plant watering 'industry' in this example vanishes all together, leaving no market for Joe or anyone else to bid his services in. After 3 uses of this system, it has paid for itself in use and then the rest is savings of capital to the plant owners who never have to worry about paying someone to take care of their plants again.
Now, you can start making the "it's not fair" argument, but that fails on it's face too. It is also not fair to force a plant owner to overpay for services that can be negotiated cheaply and employ someone for what they feel is fair, OR prevent them from buying labor saving equipment like water globes to eliminate the need to hire someone. You are infringing on their enlightened self interest in which to save themselves money and still complete a necessary task. This is called increasing productivity as well.
When people yowl about fairness, they often forget you need to be fair to the person with money and a job that needs to be done as well. It's also always to satisfy their own distaste for doing the job, and never really out of actually caring for the individual working for less than what THEY would do the same job for. For instance, if you wanted me to work in a restaurant as a waiter or cook, my going rate is 1 million dollars an hour as a net payment, not gross. Why? Because I hate hate HATE working with food. If you are not willing to pay that much, I won't work in your restaurant no matter how much you beg. Am I being unfair and unreasonable? No. I have set my price in the market. If someone's dumb enough to pay me that to work in his restaurant, you bet I will! I'll be the best damn employee they had for about a month or until he goes bankrupt which should be in about two days if that long. Then I'll be retiring and setting up my trust fund to never work again depending when he ran out of money to pay me.
Wow... quite the economics lesson you are getting. Maybe I should charge for this. Nahhhhhh.... Consider it a free sampler of my wisdom and knowledge for now. I'll make you pay for other stuff later. heh heh heh.
