You can't see the forest for the trees, mate. All you can see is that he is getting paid and that he can buy simple things and knows what a day off is. The reality is that 1 galleon a week and 1 day off a month is a lot to someone who previously had nothing, but in the grand scheme of things (and to humans) that is next to nothing.

 

Again you're working under an assumption that a galleon per week is below minimum wage. And again you're disregarding the fact that he was offered more money which he refused.
Compared to the level of abuse he was used to while working for Malfoys that is paradise.

 

Thanks to the Daily Prophet, we know the following wages:-
Hit-Witch or Hit-Wizard - 700 galleons a month (175 galleons a week)
Assistant Manager at Flourish & Blotts - 42 galleons a month (10.5 galleons a week)
Dragon Feeder at Gringotts - 7 galleons a week (28 galleons a month)

Compare that to Dobby, who gets 1 galleon a week (4 galleons a month).

 

The amount Dobby gets is rather irrelevant, as long as he knowingly made the decision to agree to that amount. Which he did. And he does get room and board as well.

 

The Hogwarts house elves - who are not paid - get room as well, your point?

 

So he is not making as much money as the others. Still doesn't prove what he is being paid is below minimum wage. You also need to consider that he doesn't have to pay for his food or lodgings either.

Btw can you provide the link to the site from where you got these figures?

 

The figures provided come from J.K. Rowling: A Bibliography 1997-2013.

In regards to the minimum wage in HP we are not told this in canon, just as we are not told in canon the history of house elves.

 

And that's why I keep telling you to stick to facts but you keep deviating to assumptions.

 

The whole debate is us, the reader, assuming we know enough about a fictional world to comment on it, but we don't really know enough about house elves as we are not told by the author. How do we know it is in the house elves' best interests that we interfere in their way of life, we don't - we assume.

 

@ Taure:

So, if I am reading this correctly, this is a Risk vs Reward thing now. I hope you understand the risks fully here : even the mention of the word 'Freedom' makes House Elves miserable. Any attempt at 're-education' would be very difficult on the Elves. Merely freeing House Elves is off the table for obvious reasons. So you try to trick them into understanding freedom without telling them explicitly its about freedom. Fail here and the House Elves are horrified with the realization that they tried to participate in a freedom struggle and remain miserable for their the rest of their lives.

This now turns into a 'Greater Good' argument. Risk torturing them now for the mere possibility that humans have brainwashed them (and I don't believe humans could brainwash an entire race with no apparent exceptions) and they may be happier with freedom in the future? Except that's not true either. They are happy now (with or without duress) and they may just be happy in the future. If the brainwashing were a certainty, I might just agree with you. As it is, I don't think the Risk is worth the Reward.

Even now there are lots of problems. Your attempt at re-education is very likely to fail unless you can produce examples of Elves happier with freedom than work. The Elves would most probably blow you off as someone who can't understand their species at all. There are also a lot of people who would rather live in apparent bliss than face the difficult reality, so your attempts are unlikely to earn happiness even if you succeed in un-brainwash them. So really, there are a whole bunch of problems and risks with this education plan.

The situation is now like this 1)You are unsure if there even is a problem (i.e. the brainwashing) in the first place, 2)Even if there is a problem, there is very little chance of solving said problem, and 3)Price for trying to solve the possible problem and then failing is very high. The house elves are fucking happy : happy and eager to serve. At some point, it is just best to see that everyone is happy with the ways things are and to let any sleeping dogs lie.

 

I don't claim to know much and even less about house elves. What I do know is that abuse is a bad thing and house elves are victims of abuse. Something you acknowledged a few posts back as a matter of fact. I want to avoid going into debates about paychecks and voting rights for elves. I want to stick to how they're abused and how that situation can be remedied

 

So in other words you don't like slavery, but slave labour is ok?

Also, the house elves of Hogwarts aren't abused. We have only seen 3 specific cases (Dobby, Winky and Kreacher) of abuse. As far as we know, every other house elf bar those are treated the same as the Hogwarts house elves.

 

Again that's an assumption that every elf in the world except Dobby, Kreacher and Winky aren't abused. But that was never the argument.
The argument was that the Wizarding world has no laws to protect house elves from abuse.
For a guy who refuses to even believe that house elves are slaves you have turned into an ardent champion for their labour laws.
Jokes apart the only reason I've avoided discussing wages and other technicalities is because I don't know enough about wizard economics to give a productive argument and neither can you for that matter.
So let's just stick to what we know shall we?

 

Talk about missing the point.

House elves are slaves by our - human - definition, they are not slaves by house elf definition. That was my point.

In regards to pay and voting rights, that is the next logical step after freeing them. Just freeing them is a half-assed campaign at best, if you are campaigning for house elf rights you are campaigning for all house elf rights, not just the ones you can be bothered to campaign for.

 

Lets take it one step at a time shall we? Lets make abuse against house elves a punishable offence first. Slowly but surely within a decade or two we will have the first house elf eligible to run for Minister of Magic I swear on Merlin.

 

I have no problem with that, but we have to be careful in the way we letter the law. Remember, house elves punish themselves. We can make it illegal for Masters' to give their house elf the command to punish themselves however from what we see in canon if any house elf even thinks they are going against their Master they will punish themselves.

 

We can always tell the masters that they shouldn't allow house elves to punish themselves. I'm sure that will work.

 

As far as I can tell, the House Elf Slavery debate boils down to the nature of House Elves.

Are House Elves parallel to people and therefore deserve human rights?

If yes, then they are living in a condition of slavery.
If no, then the entire human framework of slavery and self-determination is misapplied.

The problem is, this question cannot be decided on a forum. J.K. Rowling could give us a definitive answer but beyond that, you're all arguing over what you think House Elves are.

Here's an absurd (yet tenable) interpretation of House Elf nature:

A1. House Elves are magically more powerful than humans (we see evidence for this when Dobby protects Harry from Lucius, and the Elves' ability to bypass wards)

A2. House Elves are kind and nurturing and, like the Benevolent version of the Christian God, feel a paternalistic need to help lesser beings like humans

Conclusion: House Elves are like mothers taking care of these wayward human beings who are so helpless that their lives would be in disarray otherwise. They help humans out of a desire to protect and provide care, in the same way a mother feeds and cleans up after a toddler, is patient when the toddler pulls her hair or snatches her glasses, and is angry at herself when she get mad at the toddler for misbehaving, even though she knows that the toddler doesn't know better. One could posit that the House Elf would disobey its 'master' in cases where it's trying to protect its family and truly thinks its toddler is on the wrong path, as Kreacher did with Sirius and Harry.

Explanation of Dobby: perhaps he's one of those women who were born without a maternal instinct, and never really wanted kids anyways?

 

I can only imagine the look on Lucius' face.