Each industry should have its own minimum wage.

Think about it this way;
option 1) at age 20 take a job in front of a computer. Sell your life-hours 40 hours a week for 40 years, live another 20. You sell 83,200 hours of your life to finance the other 440,000.
option 2) at age 20 take a job in a coal mine. Sell your life-hours 60 hours a week for 30 years, live another 10. You sell 93,000 hours of your life to finance the other 255,000.

The math is kind of easy. An office worker typically can anticipate 440,000 (525,000 minus 83,200) discretionary life hours. A coal miner can expect 255,000 (350,000 minus 93,000).

In effect, during his or her career, the coal miner has sold 270,000 adult life-hours to the company compared to the office worker's 83,200. If the coal miner is selling 3 1/4 times as many life hours to the boss, they deserve at least 3 1/4 times the pay. Say $30/hour minimum wage.

Selling most of your life doing a shitty job deserves more compensation than spending a little of your life doing something pleasant.

Further, the government has had zero results by fining employers who knowingly create dangerous workplaces. If they're forced to compensate the employees fairly, commensurate with the life hours they take, they might have some motivation to make a safer workplace.

I would have expected this to get some reaction.

Everywhere I have worked admin folks work longer hours than front line (being exempt from overtime encourages this expectation companies have that they will)

That's the highest of any major occupation. Anecdotally, coal miners work more, simply because they don't go up top until the elevator does.

Finance, retail, information, education? 36-39 hours.

Just this superficial look at the number indicates that they work 30% more hours than those of us who are sitting in our comfortable office chairs.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat21.pdf

Even using that look we see maybe a 10% difference not a 50% difference.

Bearing in mind too the data you linked to is segregated only by industry not by job within it.

This one tells a different story - from same source

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.cpseea28.txt

How many percent increase is 47 (miners hours) over 36 (average office workers hours)?

Answer: (47-36)/36 or 30.55%

This subthread is tangential to the main point, the link you posted is not relevant to it, and doesn't contradict the earlier link.

CEO's make millions and the biggest risk for them is breaking a nail. Hell they don't even have to worry about doing a good job, if they lose it all the government will bail them out. Guys who risk their lives to keep us in electricity... get fucked over.

Nothing is going to bring back these peoples loved ones but I'd like to see the families sue and take over the company. If you ask me mining should be controlled not by some big corporation but by the city in which the mine resides.

But at this time of day, with this demographic, it's unlikely we'll be in the majority.

6wks vacation standard.

By the way your assumption of 60hr in the mine vs 40hr in the office is wrong. And these days hardly anyone can retire at 60.

Hazardous occupations shorten the workers lives. I think it is reasonable to officially compensate on that basis.

Making the lives of the already comfortable more so, doesn't change the basic problem for those who labor in dangerous professions.

And trying to solve it with pay scales instead of OSHA enforcement.

You get the same results without the complexity of "deciding who is more valuable". Who decides, what is the criteria?

Jobs which shorten the workers lifespans must pay better to equally value their lives.

It's simple amortization.

(or a thousand other jobs) without some very compelling motivation. If coal mining Company can't find people that are willing to work for them, they are out of business, so they have to increase pay, benefits, improve working conditions and safety to avoid going under.

I think you would find that coal mining etc. would become very lucrative, short-term careers that people did to set up the rest of their lives.

I think we can all agree that higher education/higher risk should correspond with higher pay.

I don't think higher education should correspond with higher pay, necessarily. Experience, perhaps, or proven reliability.

Higher education does not impress me. It allows people to work easier and less grueling jobs, which is its own reward. Extra money for playing student shouldn't enter into the equation.

Higher risk labor, however, should receive additional recompense.

You want to use the tried and true "garbage collector vs. the doctor" example?

That we can't all agree on that is the foundation of injustice that the OP is writing about.

Just about able bodied person in this country can be trained to be a coal miner...

How many people do you know who can teach a class on semiconductor circuit analysis?

... then there's a strong motivation to buy the ticket for that particular ride at your nearest institution of higher learning.

If your area of expertise allows you to earn more than the minimum wage for your profession, power to you.

The minimum wage is the floor at which society considers labor should be valued. My contention is that this calculus is incomplete, it presumes that an hour on the job is all that is being sold.

and assume infinitely greater health risks to do his job.

Paying somebody more because they have the good fortune to be born in the upper quintile of intellectual ability is a little like paying somebody more because they were born with green eyes -- it's just a trait. The extra recompense that person receives is a cushy classroom job, free of risk and pain.

It's not some great mystery that only the most brilliant minds can grasp. It's math and science and jargon mixed with a bit of experience, just like everything else, (some specialized knowledge + jargon = a "profession").

...as in you'd seriously want to see your idea passed into law and enforced?

In the real world, I seriously doubt this idea of yours would work. I'm all for progressive taxation, more support for unions, breaking up corporate power so corporations don't have so strong a hand in negotiations with workers, better enforced work safety laws, etc. I sincerely doubt, however, having some committee decide what people should get paid based totally on social, non-commercial criteria for the "value" of various jobs, applying "life hours" criteria like yours, completely divorced from the laws of supply and demand, is at all feasible.


If the political will to enforce and improve the safety laws doesn't exist, the political will certainly doesn't exist for a scheme like yours. I think it's much closer (albeit, sadly, probably not close enough) to political reality to improve the enforcement of safety laws, and raise the fines for non-compliance high enough that the fines hurt more than the costs of fixing the problems mine operations get fined for -- combined with lack of enforcement, the big problem now is the a stupidly and obviously ineffective system of having fines that are cheaper to pay than paying to fix safety problems.

The fact that the solution to problem isn't politically practical doesn't make it less right.

What "committee" set the current minimum wage? The criteria I suggest aren't arbitrary. If a job is correlated with a shorter life expectancy, then those hours of lost life should be factored into their minimum wage.

While the cave-in at the coal mine grabbed headlines, the fact is that every single day miners die of workplace injuries - usually shortly after retiring.

...off the top of my head, I'd go with these:

(1) Stop using so much coal -- it's not good for the environment anyway.
(2) For whatever coal use remains, automate the mining process so few if any humans are exposed to danger and an unhealthy environment. That would mean a loss of jobs, however, and no guarantee other sectors of economy will offer replacement jobs.
(3) Improve safety and health conditions for miners.

If practicality has little or nothing to do with the solutions we're putting on the table, I'd go with the above list well before instituting a strange system of trying to financially compensate people for how much of their life and health they give away.

If we are going for practicality and feasibility, the above list should work pretty well too, in reverse order for the short term. Long term, we don't really have a choice about solution 1. I'd consider it fairly likely that in the next 25 years we'll see advancements in automation which make robotic coal mining (solution 2) cheaper than using human labor. With (1) and (2) taken care of, (3) hopefully becomes a moot point.

And given the choice between a highly taxed dangerous profession and a highly compensated one, I'd prefer the latter.