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the question of wage levels is political.
if you ever find yourself having to look at industrial production historically, wages become sraight away one of the main indices of the main political players, and the balance of power that obtains between them. but this balance only makes sense if you take account of the various frames that situate it. so wage levels are not really matters that can be thought about coherently in isolation.
one way of managing the question is to shape and control the metaphors that folk have recourse to when it gets to the most complicated issue. so above, on this question, recourse was had to the mythical "small business" which operates in a marginal scenario economically and so is vulnerable to shifts in boundary conditions. this association is ideological. it is interesting that counterarguments were statged by way of concerns like walmart, which track the path of concentration--huge businesses that use the dominant ideology to justify increased exploitation through depressed wages. what is curious (to me anyway) is that this shift could be made across the question of defining the "service sector" without it leading to any real attack on more general frames.
the americans operate within neoliberal ideology--an ideology that is so dominant that it does not have a name. the question of wage levels is formulated within the general ideology of markets that are somehow self-regulating (or would be if hayek-world had any contact with the empirical world) that in turn situates the recourse to the mythical small business. this same ideology rationalizes the social consequences of economic decisions by essentially blaming working people for their exploitation.
neoliberal ideology is remarkably weak internally, very much open to critique once you arrive a point of being able to name it and formalize its rules. neoliberal ideology results in amazing brutality in economic relations that are rationalized by imputing moral failings to the victims.
is the minimum wage too low? yes.
what maintains this situation? the conditions outlined above.
should the minimum wage be raised? obviously, yes.
but the matter moves immediately from that to the larger question of how, politically, economic activity is to be understood, neoliberal assumptions remove social consequences from consideration of economic activity. it is only on the basis of such a seperation that raising wages can possibly be opposed.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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