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Lumifer comments on On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor - Less Wrong
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The relative value of a job matters more than the absolute here. When a worker can walk across the street and get the same $15 an hour at McDonalds they do today at Burger King, then Burger King and McDonalds need to compete for employees based on work conditions. Managers get away with abuse only when the salary exceeds the prevailing wage for the skill set, or jobs are hard to find.
Nope. When you force a price floor above the market clearing price (the price for labor, aka the minimum wage) you create a persistent glut of supply and a shortage of demand. Managers don't have to compete for workforce when there is a long line of people raring to get their $15/hour in front of both McDonalds and Burger King. Instead, managers spend a lot of time coming up with clever ways to to automate their business.
If some prospective employees are better than others, then that long line of people will still contain better and worse candidates, and employers may compete to get the better ones.
Yes, and in this context better means "willing to put up with abuse by bosses".
It presumably means some combination of that, speed, diligence, etc. I wouldn't expect abuse-tolerance to be a large fraction of what most bosses want, though no doubt some bosses are awful enough to prefer less profitable but more abusable employees.
Depends on the "abuse". Here it means practices that increase productivity at the expense of employee quality of life. For example, insisting that employees be willing to work odd hours on short notice.
Employers always compete for better employees, but they are, generally speaking, satisficers. The marginal benefit from having a high-IQ, very conscientious, giving-his-100%-to-the-job employee flipping burgers is not very high.