I support people doing whatever serves both parties involved and not letting others dictate in what manner they have to come to agreement. Many times I prefer to be paid a flat rate, and other times by the hour.
There are no laws that can be passed that will assure fairness, and to the contrary are oftentimes misused to take advantage from one side or the other.
I see both sides of the coin. UAW is asking for wages which may well put an end to US auto manufacturing. Revenues set a hard limit on how much you can spend on labor. On the flip side, I also see many business owners feeling they're entitled to workers willing to work at starvation wages. Their revenues often don't even factor into it. They can afford to pay more, often a lot more, but just won't. Yet these same business people will complain they either can't get workers, or the ones they get are useless.
Cost of living factors into many of these calls for higher minimum wages. We're seeing nationally what we saw only on the coasts 30 or 40 years ago. That job I had which paid $7 an hour in 1989? I couldn't even support myself on that. My take-home after taxes and carfare was around $800 a month. That's with having Ramen soup for lunch. Rents were at least $600 back then. I would have been underwater once you added in my student loans payments, never mind food or clothing. And forget saving for retirement. It used to be if you worked even a menial job full-time in the 1950s at least you wouldn't be poor. You could afford food, clothing, a place to live in an OK area, maybe enough for a little entertainment or hobbies. Then by 1990 on the coasts even a somewhat better than menial job wouldn't even cover housing. Now the same thing is happening pretty much nationally.
Only two ways to fix it. Either get wages up, or the costs of a lot of these things down. The same crowd that hates regulation is often against ditching the zoning laws that would allow the free market to begin to fix the housing issue. This is true whether you're talking about big cities or suburbs. We have people that want the neighborhood to stay the same as it was when they moved there in 1947.
Government can't legislate completely "fair" because that definition differs depending upon who you ask. But they can keep things from being grossly biased in favor of certain groups over others. Remember the employer almost always has the superior position at the bargaining table. It's nice to think workers can negotiate equitable terms. In practice most lack the intelligence, bargaining skills, or balls to do that. Only way I got a raise from $7 to $11 an hour at the last job I worked at before becoming self-employed was by threatening to walk, along with another guy, and my immediate supervisor doing the same. In the end the company still won when it decided to lay everyone off. Ironically, my former boss bought the place to run as his own business. He's still in business 33 years later. The parent company which used to own the place has been gone for something like 20 years. Most times though the little guy loses.
