I know that people have a weird aversion to thinking of people as resources and labor as something that's bought and sold; but, to be frank, yes, what you're doing is trying to sell your labor. Whether you're a cashier at McDonald's or the CEO of Apple, you're selling your labor. The question is always what people are willing to pay to buy that labor and for how long. You're selling your labor every day, even with a nine to five job.
The reason why the fight for fifteen movement is so dumb (well, one of several) is that the people fighting for it refuse to acknowledge the reality of subjective value, comparative advantage, and, really, supply and demand.
My own work history is enough to debunk the labor theory of value. I worked Imax projection for a couple of years as an employee at a multiplex for $10 an hour. When I worked the same job on Dunkirk, I made $500 a day plus travel and lodging. That's not because I was working harder or gained a new skill - actually, it was easier than most of my work at the multiplex because it was a 2D show. What changed was the availability of qualified candidates who were willing to take five weeks out of their lives to do the job.
I don't care whether or not you think that employers should care about the quality of life of their workers when they're not at work. That's not their job. Their job is to evaluate whether or not your labor is worth the money that they're spending on it. It also has to be that way. If employers regularly spent more on labor than the company was taking in from the labor, everybody would be losing his or her job because the employers are overly subsidizing labor that isn't valuable.
So, let's finally be real, you are a commodity. We are all commodities. All hiking the minimum wage does is hike up the price of buying your labor. Just like everything else we buy, when prices go up, people buy less of it. With prices how they are, sometimes rather than getting a black coffee, I splurge and get a Red Bull. If the government raised the minimum price of energy drinks to $15, I would probably never buy one again.
Finally, this is a movement of ideologues placing their ideals in front of individual choice and reality. The price that I charge for my own labor varies. For the same cinematography work, I've charged nearly a $1,000 a day when the market was good and I needed to pick and choose my projects. During Covid, being that it was illegal to even gather and shoot movies for a while and most of the population was irrationally scared out their wits to the point that they were refusing to gather, I was willing to take whatever anybody was willing to pay. Yeah, usually my day rate is above that $15 minimum that y'all are asking for; but, sometimes a take $0 an figure that I'm betting on myself if it's a good project and we're shooting on a format that I love or something like that.
Therein lies the rub. If you really believe that it should be illegal for a person's labor to be priced lower than $15 an hour, you're making illegal for people to make those calculations. If you really believe that, you're not just saying that a seventeen year-old who has been in and out of juvenile hall and can barely read and is willing to take less money just to give himself a fresh start, get something on his resume, gain a reference, and show his worth should either be completely priced out of the market or he needs to find a super charitable employer; you're also saying that I, shouldn't be allowed to agree to work sixteen hours a day for no money if it means that the cost of my salary would be the difference between shooting 35mm anamorphic or having to settle for digital. If you're morally, intellectually, and legally consistent, you're depriving people of that liberty.
Now, some of you may come in and try to tell me that you are willing to make some of those exceptions. No, I don't believe you. This movement has been going on long enough that I've seen every argument against any exception tossed around every day. A lot of you will still insist that the employers are just niggardly and can afford to pay more. No, that's not how it is. That's just the myth that the word "corporation" or the title "business owner" equates to something like Scrooge McDuck.
This is wrong on every level. Just stop it.
