If y’all can’t compete with an extra $300 a week your pay is shit. If you can’t pay your workers a living wage, the problem is your business plan. https://twitter.com/jemillerwbal/status/1388462956334260225

It drives me absolutely wild when a business says “If I have to pay my workers fairly, I will go out of business.” THEN YOU ARE A BAD BUSINESSPERSON AND A BAD PERSON AND MAYBE YOU SHOULD CLOSE.

Dozens of times over the years as I sometimes struggled to keep @FiresideFiction afloat, people would suggest I lower our relatively high pay rate for short stories. And it’s like, no, part of my business plan is to pay a fair wage, and if I can’t do that, we’ll close.

Fuck out of here with exploitation of labor for profit. Go get a day job if you can’t hack it as an entrepreneur.

Addendum: “But Brian, an *extra* $300 a week is unfair to compete with because it’s *extra*.” Yeah it’s “extra” on top of an unemployment payment that is only a percentage of your wages pre-pandemic, and those wages were shit. So it’s $300 on top of a percentage of shit.

Turns out, people are finding they like making closer to a living wage and don’t want to come fight maskless yahoos about local regulations for the shitty $2.13/hour tipped minimum wage plus shitty tips at your shitty restaurant or $7.25/hour at your shitty mall store.

The government has accidentally run a huge experiment of living wages and universal basic income and the results are in: people prefer staying at home during a pandemic and feeding their families over working in demeaning jobs and NOT being able to feed their families. Oops.