Moral Confusion About a Living Wage
Many claim that the state should compel employers to pay their employees a living wage to ensure that they can meet their basic needs. While there is a duty to ensure that everyone can meet their basic needs, it’s not the duty of employers in particular. Rather, it’s the duty of everyone who is able to enrich those in poverty—a consideration that speaks in favor of progressive redistribution rather than a mandated living wage.
Consider that employers are buyers of labor. So to determine whether employers in particular ought to be required to meet their employees’ basic needs, we have to ask the following question: does buying from someone obligate you to pay a price that’s high enough to ensure the seller can meet their basic needs?
I’m skeptical. To see why, suppose you plan to buy a car from a dealer who is losing so much business that they’ve fallen below a decent standard of living. Do you have an enforceable duty to pay that dealer an extra, say, $2,000 for the car rather than give that $2,000 to someone who needs it as much or more? I don’t think so. The mere fact that you’re buying a car from them doesn’t generate an enforceable duty to help.
What does generate such a duty is the general duty to help those in need when you can do so at a reasonable cost to yourself. But this duty would permit you to help someone other than the car dealer, provided their need was the same or greater.
Now suppose an employer buys someone’s labor, but the employee remains below an acceptable standard of living. If you denied that you have an enforceable duty to pay the car dealer more simply in virtue of buying a car from them, you should deny that the employer has an enforceable duty to pay the employee more simply in virtue of buying her labor. The mere fact that you’re buying something from someone doesn’t generate an enforceable duty to help that person. As noted, what does generate such a duty is the general duty to help those in need. And the general duty to help those in need speaks in favor of progressive redistribution rather than a mandated living wage that applies only to employers.
A question about utilitarian libertarianism and about left libertarianism too, I guess: if progressive redistribution is okay at the national level, why not international? Isn’t the argument for redistribution much stronger internationally? And then there are so many people internationally who are so much worse off that if we did compel redistribution to help them first, we’d likely destitute ourselves before getting to our nearby locally-poor, who are of course globally-wealthy.