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Bill: Establishing Minimum Income

Details

Submitted by[?]: Democratic Socialist Party

Status[?]: defeated

Votes: This is an ordinary bill. It requires more yes votes than no votes. This bill will not pass any sooner than the deadline.

Voting deadline: February 2101

Description[?]:

A government is defined by how it treats its weakest citizens, and we feel that the government needs to support citizens incapable of supporting themsleves or who are not being supported by others. While we want to keep them from starving, we do not want them to be comfortably living off of the money provided, so the minimum income is low, thus insuring they have incentive to get a job.

Proposals

Debate

These messages have been posted to debate on this bill:

Date17:44:18, August 22, 2005 CET
From Sotsial-Demokraticheskaya Partiya
ToDebating the Establishing Minimum Income
MessageWe support this bill, Min. wage is important in a nation like ours. We suggest the min. wage be around 7.50TRA

Date19:38:53, August 22, 2005 CET
From Liberty Party
ToDebating the Establishing Minimum Income
MessageWe have yet to see any convincing evidence that the existence of a minimum wage increases employment (indeed, evidence appears to exist to the contrary).

Unless someone can make a very convincing case as to why we need to add to the size of government, add to bureaucracy, reduce liberties, increase red tape etc etc etc, all without harming the economic health of our nation, TLP will vote NO.

Date21:24:33, August 22, 2005 CET
From Democratic Socialist Party
ToDebating the Establishing Minimum Income
MessageHow is it reducing liberties exactly? I'm sure people all over Trigunia would be hurting if their liberty to starve to death was taken away. People will want to work because any work at all will be better than their life on the government's tiny minimum income. It is simply to ensure people manage to keep themselves clean, clothed, and eating so that they can find a job, not enjoy any for the finer things in life.

Date23:55:13, August 22, 2005 CET
From People's Equality Party Of Trigunia
ToDebating the Establishing Minimum Income
MessageOh the poor employers, if this bill passes, they will be forced to pay workers adeqaute wages for survival. My heart goes out to them, they will no longer have the liberty to under-pay laborers who need a certain degree of money to survive. Please, unless you want to make housing and food free, I suggest there be a minimum wage.

Date01:01:24, August 23, 2005 CET
From Radical Conservative Party
ToDebating the Establishing Minimum Income
MessageIt may sound crazy, but I'm against. It's bad for the economy.

Date02:28:22, August 23, 2005 CET
From Liberty Party
ToDebating the Establishing Minimum Income
MessageDSP, it reduces liberties because before two parties could contract at any rate they wanted. Now the state is denying them that right. That is a reduction in liberty.

PEPOT, The employers already pay workers adequate wages for survival. Otherwise the workers would be not surviving. If they weren't surviving, they wouldn't be working, and if they weren't working the employers wouldn't be making any money. The employers, as you have so astutely observed, want to make money, therefore they would have to pay the next bunch of workers more than the people who didn't survive. By definition that will end up being adequate to survive.

Date02:37:40, August 23, 2005 CET
From People's Equality Party Of Trigunia
ToDebating the Establishing Minimum Income
MessageYou know what's really bad for the economy? Starving people. What's the point of working when one's labors won't even provide for their essential needs? Starving people also tend to have a negative attitude towards the goverment that let's them starve. Just ask 18th French workers, and the king they beheaded.

Date05:55:45, August 23, 2005 CET
From People's Equality Party Of Trigunia
ToDebating the Establishing Minimum Income
MessageSo we should trust Private individuals to pay their workers because they need workers to survive? Is that what Workers are? Cattle? They give enough so that the cattle will survive and give their milk? Well, there never seems to be a shortage of cattle. Samething for the worker, because the private individuals know that no matter how low they pay their workers, someone will work for less. Of course, there are limits to human reproduction and human population, and sooner or later they WOULD have to pay for their worker's survival, but how many people have to starve before that happens? I just don't a see the harm with a minimum wage. If private individuals don't want a minimum wage, they are perfectly free to leave. I think they would find it rather convenient just to pay for basic needs

Date08:34:49, August 23, 2005 CET
From Democratic Socialist Party
ToDebating the Establishing Minimum Income
MessageFirst I'd like to make sure the PEPOT understands that we're talking about a mininum income (the government giving people earning less than a certain amount money) and not a minimum wage (forcing employers to pay at least a certain amount to workers), as it is unclear from what they have said.

However, what they have said still stands, and actually, we disagree with them. It can be seen in several countries across the world that the employers don't even have to pay them enough to let them live like cattle. Where there is no minimum wage or minumum income employers often pay people far less than they need to survive, forcing them to take 2 jobs. This is when the hours of even one of them often exceed the EU's rules of only 48 hours a week, and they are still only managing to just avoid starving. But, if they don't work they don't have enough money or resources to leave the country, and will surely starve. And this isn't even happening in the 18th Century, this is happening now with companies that are based in places like the USA, and ranked highly in Fortune 500. Its not like they can't afford to pay them more. This is the sort of situation we are trying to avoid, one where employers can, and will if they can, drive people virtually to starvation just to earn more profit.

Date17:24:34, August 23, 2005 CET
From Capitalist Party
ToDebating the Establishing Minimum Income
MessagePeople wont starve. Stop with that complete and utter bullshit.

Companies will not pay their workers shit, they will pay them a wage they can live on. Why? Because if they dont then that worker is not very productive, if they are not very productive then the company does not make much, if any, money.

So please stop with these ridiculous suggestions that people will die or starve due to not being paid enough.

Date17:28:07, August 23, 2005 CET
From Liberty Party
ToDebating the Establishing Minimum Income
MessagePEPOT, Your justification for your plan is the French revolution? Seriously, that's the closest thing you can find to linking market economics and starvation? Shouldn't that, by itself, tell you something? Anyway, as I explained, people ARE NOT starving in the absence of a minimum wage.

Your Soviet-era 'worker and parasite'-style caricaturing of society in this fictional class warfare is totally bogus. Who are you trying to convince? The fact is that in a free, open, capitalist society, any person who is willing to provide something that people want will make money. That's how markets work. And they DO work. Look around you.

Some of the harms of minimum wage are, a) they are illiberal, b) they are inflationery, c) they are inefficient, d) they increase unemployment. Just because you can't see a harm with a minimum wage (and since you are unwilling to ever look further than your own myopic obsession with class struggle I'm not surprised that you have trouble seeing).

DSP, Can you identify which people are forced to take 2 jobs where one of which exceeds 48 hours per week, together with where they are and what their circumstances are? I'm not necessarily disputing that these people exist, but without having all the facts in front of me, I can't tell you what the root cause of the problem is, nor the solution.

Date19:40:53, August 23, 2005 CET
From Democratic Socialist Party
ToDebating the Establishing Minimum Income
MessageHere are some outakes from various articles by CNN and the BBC websites:

Nike in Indonesia, from CNN.com - 'JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Workers at nine Indonesian factories under contract by U.S. sportswear giant Nike say they have either suffered or have witnessed sexual and verbal abuse.

Laborers also say they were asked to work what they called "illegal forms of overtime." They also said they were denied both sick leave and annual leave.

The allegations are in a report prepared by the Global Alliance, an international coalition dedicated to improving the lives of factory workers, particularly in Asia. Nike is a member of the organization.

The study is based on interviews with more than 4,000 workers at the different Nike plants, and was funded by the sportswear company in a move to try to improve working conditions at the contract factories. '


GAP in various countries, BBC.co.uk - 'Gap workers from Indonesia, Lesotho and El Salvador were presented at a press conference in Manhattan to describe how they were paid very little to work long hours making Gap clothes in factories full of health hazards and brutal working conditions.

The Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, the Africa Forum and a college group also said they had documented "abusive working conditions" in 40 factories making Gap clothes in Cambodia, Indonesia and Bangladesh, as well as in Lesotho and in El Salvador and Mexico.

"We want Gap to stop exploiting sweatshop labour around the world," said union official Steve Weingarten.

"We want them to pay a wage that allows a decent standard of living and allow workers to organise unions to improve conditions in their factories."'


Disney in China, CNN.com - 'HONG KONG, China (AP) -- The Walt Disney Co. said Friday it has hired an auditor to investigate claims that its Chinese contractors pay workers below minimum wage, demand excessive overtime and cheat labor monitors by faking pay slips.

Disney said it has asked the nonprofit firm Verite to probe allegations by the Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, a new group aimed at protecting Chinese workers' rights, in its report titled "Recovering Mickey's Conscience."

The report, released Thursday, said the Nord Race factory in the southern city of Dongguan, which makes Disney stationery, paid workers 2.69 Chinese yuan ($0.33) an hour until June, when it promised to raise the rate to Dongguan's minimum of 3.43 yuan ($0.42).

But the factory put off paying workers their June salaries until the end of August, said the report, which claims to be based on worker interviews.

It said a Nord Race worker allegedly put in 383 hours in March, exceeding the 204-hour legal limit.

The factory also failed to triple hourly pay on holidays as required, the report said.

At the Hung Hing printing factory in Shenzhen, run by a Hong Kong company of the same name, workers put in 12-hour days but were only paid for 10, the report said.

It also said that industrial accidents are common at the Hung Hing factory. A machine reportedly compressed a worker to death in 2002, and a falling piece of equipment crushed the waist of another worker in a nonfatal mishap in 2005.

The report also claimed that factories coached workers on how to answer auditors' questions.

The Nord Race factory allegedly issued fake time slips while concealing the real ones showing illegal hours, the report said.'

These are just a few examples, but its happening all over the world, and with a multitude of companies. We invite others to look at the sites, and read the full stories:

Nike - http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/southeast/02/22/indonesia.slaveshop/
GAP - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2497957.stm
Disney - http://www.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/08/19/china.disney.ap/index.html

Date23:57:05, August 23, 2005 CET
From Liberty Party
ToDebating the Establishing Minimum Income
MessageWe don't pretend that every company is a joy to work for. This is one of the reasons why capitalists believe in a free market. Every one of those allegedly abused workers should be free to leave and go to work for another company (I'm not sure how true this is in China). Perhaps you should wonder why these people do not leave. Looking at Nike specifically, the average wage is R240,000 almost double the minimum wage of R126,500 per month plus free holidays, free meals, free health care, subsidised transport, lodging and bonuses. An entry-level, unskilled factory worker earns 5 times the average income of a farmer. Since 1990 real wages in Indonesia have increased by 55%, almost entirely due to the presence of relatively high paying multinational corporations.

Bluntly, conditions may not be great for Nike`s Indonesian workers, but workers accept it because they are still so much better than the alternative. More importantly, the mere presence of these multinationals in the country is rapidly driving up wages across the board.

Also, most of the issues you refer to have nothing to do with capitalism,

-sexual and verbal abuse. This is, rightly, criminal in almost every jurisdiction on earth. There is no capitalism or minimum wage issue here;
-not allowed to organise unions. As discussed in other debates, TLP has no objection to workers organising themselves into unions. There is no capitalist argument against the existence of unions;
-put off paying June salaries until August. Capitalists agree in free markets and enforceable contracts. We are utterly opposed to companies breaching their contractual obligations;
-the factory also failed to triple hourly pay on holidays as required. Again, capitalists believe that whether the requirement is contractual or statutory, obeying the rules is necessary and should be enforced.

I'm not sure how many of the above could be avoided with a minimum wage. I guess the people who would be unemployed as a result would no longer have to worry about when they get their salaries.


Date10:10:14, August 24, 2005 CET
From Democratic Socialist Party
ToDebating the Establishing Minimum Income
MessageWe just took sections of the articles in an attempt to point out the problems with a lack of workers rights, though we admit we went a little off topic.

And we'd like to point out we are talking about a minimum INCOME not a minimum wage. They may have been paid above a minimum wage, but its clearly barely enough to live, and an establishment of a decent minimum income would have meant the companies would have to have paid them a reasonable amount or they would have simply left. All the minimum income insures is that, because people generally want a better standard of living than the government dole provides, which isn't very good, and so want to work, as long as employers actually want to pay them a decent wage. We are looking out for the workers, and want to avoid them suffering the economic abuse that companies have shown them in other countries. Its not like Nike can't afford to pay these people enough for even a semi-decent standard of living. And while it may be better than other companies, Nike should be trying to lead the way, not delve to their depths.

Date16:31:19, August 24, 2005 CET
From Liberty Party
ToDebating the Establishing Minimum Income
MessageDSP, your last paragraph reveals my concerns about this policy. You start the debate by claiming that you want to set a minimum income at a level that is above starving but low enough that it is not a comfortable income and strongly motivates people to find work. Now you are saying that you think amounts 'above a minimum wage' are 'barely enough to live' (as opposed to not enough to live) and instead you want a 'decent minimum income'.

If we ever tolerated a minimum wage/income, it would only be insofar as the amount was barely enough to live in order, as you originally argued, to motivate people to find work. Not enough to have a decent income.

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Voting

Vote Seats
yes
   

Total Seats: 116

no
   

Total Seats: 438

abstain
  

Total Seats: 0


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