No, they shouldn’t make $15 an hour. They should make whatever is needed to sustain themselves and a family, including a pension and any healthcar costs. That’s probably well over $15 an hour.
i think the last time i saw someone do the math, that by the time 15 is fully rollled out everwhere the minimum would need to be like 26-30 dollars an hour to keep up with ridiculous costs of everything.
Meanwhile the same job 70 years ago paid the equivalent of $34 plus benefits
you could go to college on a part time job and have no debt.
Also no health insurance, no IRA, eat only rice and beans/ramen, live in a small studio with a roommate, can’t afford anything new and salvaging from flea markets and thrift stores… And the college is community college with lots of grants from the government.
So you’re saying live extremely frugal and struggling?
That had nothing to do with the minimum wage (which has been lower than $15 of today’s dollars since inception), but because of how much cheaper college was back then.
“Its not about pay, its just about how more affordable things were for the pay you earned back then!”
College tuition has massively outpaced inflation, much less wage growth.
The policies (chiefly the change that made student loans no longer dischargeable in bankruptcy) that rocketed college tuition up are a MUCH more significant factor in college affordability, that’s just a fact.
When everything outpaces inflation, maybe we compute inflation wrong.
The minimum wage in the US has never been higher than about $12 in today’s dollars.
Holy shit, what dirt does Putin have on Elon?
$15/hr is 10 years ago, now it should be 25
$25 minimum. Those two jobs are much more valuable than tech project managers.
i say $30, easy, maybe more.
I live in a VHCOL area and $30 actually gets you the ability to save… If you rent a garage “apartment” and keep a partially empty fridge… Yet those salaries are still non-existent for anyone outside of a profession.
It’s needs to be raised and indexed to inflation.
Raising it alone is not enough. We’ll just spend another thirty years fighting for the next increase.
It should be, but the conservative corporatists that actually run the United States of America will never allow that to occur.
Some democratic states have actually done that like California and New York. There’s been bills from some dems representatives to do that federally in the past
If dems get a tricecta, I suspect some dems would push for that again
And then other Dems would block it! Sorry, I have no faith in good things happening. Still voting Dem though.
I was pleasantly surprised with some of the bills Biden tried to pass while he had the absolute slimmest of majorities 3 years ago. My disdain for conservative Democrats was also very much strengthened through that experience…
Agreed, and that’s why I vote as progressive as I can in primaries.
Primaries? Democrats apparently don’t need primaries. I’m all for living wages though btw. I’d say $30/hr as of today.
Ideally, it would.
But there is also a perverse incentive in politics against permanent solutions - as once Dems pass a law increasing/indexing the minimum wage, it’ll eventually become normalised after a couple cycles and people will fall back into their old ways and switch back to voting against their interests (GOP) due to social issues.
If they solve the problem they cant campaign on it. Xeno paradox ish.
Let’s make it a nice round $30/hr and call it a day.
We should shoot for $60/hr so by the time that passes in 25 years it might be only slightly below a living wage.
Perhaps part of the problem is a fixation on the specific number and lack of consideration for the material needs of the people. How much does it cost to live in your city? That’s the minimum wage. Is that $120/day? Is that $200/day? Is that $5000/day? That needs to be the wage floor.
Feel like you’re spending too much money on labor? See about reducing the cost of living, then we can talk.
Minimum wage means minimum livable wage, and “livable” isn’t the same as “survivable”.
Anyone working should be able to afford the amenities we call living, not just scraping by. Children, transportation, food, healthcare, reasonable recreation, savings, retirement, self development and actualization. All of it.
People not working should be able to survive, and we should do everything we can to get them to that “living” point as well. Disability or a bad labor market shouldn’t close someone off from eating, having children or going to the doctor.Minimum wage means minimum livable wage
Whether you think that ought to be the case is a separate matter, but as it is, it does not mean that, nor has it ever meant that (in the US at least), for as long as minimum wage existed.
Sure, you can find a quote or two from politicians back then saying otherwise, but as far as what actually passed as law, it’s never been. Obviously after adjusting for inflation, the highest the minimum wage has ever been is $12.34, in 1968, and that was fleeting.
Just mentioning since most people don’t seem to realize this is the case, and I’ve even seen a lot of people think the minimum wage was (relatively) much higher back in the post WWII years when things were very prosperous for the US. Fact is, in all those anecdotes about ‘He raised a family of four on a single income from this random job’, said job was paying WAY more than the minimum wage of the time.
Making the minimum wage $15 or more now is talked about like it brings things more in line with how they used to be, but in truth it would be an unprecedented new highest minimum wage ever (after adjusting for inflation, and yes, I do have to keep mentioning that, in my experience) even if we went ‘only’ to $15. Not saying that’s bad or good, but it’s important to be accurate about what is actually being proposed–if you’re advocating for this and someone asks you ‘why should it be raised to $15’, the answer should not involve talk about how we’re just trying to bring it back in alignment with where it used to be, relatively, because that’s simply not true.
I agree. I don’t see much point in raising the federal minimum wage beyond $15/hr until we make landlords extinct. As long as there are leeches who have free reign to charge whatever they want for a basic human necessity, any raises will just flow right into their already overstuffed pockets.
Genuine question, what is one supposed to do if they need a place to live but can’t afford to buy an entire house, if not rent?
Seems like that ‘middle option’ needs to exist.
My previous comment did advocate for going all scorched earth on landlords, but I do see a space for them to exist in a heavily reduced capacity. And they’d actually have to work for a living. Apartment buildings would still exist, so individuals (NOT corporations) would be allowed to own a building of units and rent them out, with the stipulations that they personally live on site, they personally do the leasing and/or maintenance work themselves, and they pay themselves no greater income than 3x the median cost of the rent for their units. Any profit that isn’t refunded to their tenants or used to improve the property is taxed at 100% with zero deductions.
That way rental properties are still available, people can still make a living doing the actual work that goes into renting (leasing and maintenance), and there is no incentive or even ability for someone or a group of someones to use residential property to steal passive income.
Yeah, fixating a number is not the best, that was my point. We should have minimum dividand attached to an index.
This is hiw businesses win this game. Whine about it to the point the amount you’re asking isn’t even enough, demand subsidies to increase wages and then give pretty much the same they paid a few years ago, pocketing the rest.
“Business innovation”
Why aren’t conservative parties illegal worldwide yet?
DAE free speech is bad???
Lemmy is such a fucking cesspit.
Because banning people you don’t agree with from running for Congress is fascist, even if it’s for what you believe is the right reasons. Everyone has a right to vote for who represents them, even if they’re garbage.
Awful take. Rejecting Fascism and refusing them a platform isn’t Fascism itself.
The right wing worldwide is adopting Fascism as an ethos. Fascism must be crushed as a existential threat.
Most Conservative politicians on this planet deserve to be locked up in a prison cell for the rest of their lives. A whole lot more deserving of that fate than those who fascists imprison.
Nah, fuck that shit. This shit (https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-top-1-own-more-wealth-95-humanity-shadow-global-oligarchy-hangs-over-un) is enough justification to treat right-wingers and their financers as Pinochet treated socialists.
Sure, let’s kill or jail everyone we disagree with. Surely that won’t lead to anything bad, right? It’s not like this hasn’t happened before and lead to millions of deaths or anything.
A sacrifice to be had for a better world.
Unless it’s you. Then it’s fascist horror.
As long as it’s your beliefs that are being forced, genocide is a-ok!
Because you are super smart and know what’s best!!
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others!!”
You know, maybe casually advocating for the torture and/or deaths of millions of people might be the sign that you need to go touch some grass.
Like, seriously… do you even register what you sound like?
The point is that GOP and similar POS right-wing parties all over the world, all in the pockets of oil companies and rich lobbyists, have ruined the world long enough. Time to give 'em a taste of their own medicine.
Big “perpetually online” oof energy right here.
Go out. Meet people. Maybe consider a “dumb” flip phone if the Internet is too much for you. I promise you: the world isn’t as bleak as the Internet has made you believe it is.
Oooh! A Purge!
Its been decades since humanity has had a good purge.
Isn’t there one happening in Gaza right now?
IMO No, that’s genocide.
Purges are based on political idealism, not ethnicity.
Authoritarianism is cool when you’re the one being an authoritarian.
Really sucks when someone you don’t agree with decides what is allowed or not.
If you give a government power to decide who is allowed in the government, even if you think it’s for the right reasons, you’ve now created a system where all it takes is one or a few people to turn a utopia into a grueling dictatorship.
That’s not really a good gamble
If we want to get out from the late capitalist dystopia, repression against reactionary forces is the only way.
And then what? Yes, identifying and resisting an oppressive power structure is all well and good, but any revolution has to grapple with the fact that you will still have a massive population with cultural and ideological structures that can only conceive of the world in terms of the old system. Congratulations, you’ve toppled the government and now you have the power to implement a new system. What will you do with that power? Will you implement yet another system in which there is a powerful in-group that the law protects but does not bind and a disempowered out-group that the law binds but does not protect?
you will still have a massive population with cultural and ideological structures that can only conceive of the world in terms of the old system
We force them in the new system
Will you implement yet another system in which there is a powerful in-group that the law protects but does not bind and a disempowered out-group that the law binds but does not protect?
No, the new system would be “right-wingers and rich lobbyists fuck off while normal people thrive and late stage capitalist dystopia is finally unwinded, and whoever opposes it gets rekt”
Okay, but you haven’t really answered the question of “what’s the new system”. You don’t have to solve all the problems of creating a new society, but you should have a general idea. “Not the old system and not the past people” is not an actual system. “Normal people thrive” is not an actual system.
For example, monarchy would be a system where “capitalist dystopia is finally unwinded and whoever opposes it gets rekt,” but somehow I don’t think that’s what you want.
You have to make an actual positive claim about what you envision, about your ideology, values, ethics, etc.
People they and everyone else depend on that they don’t respect.
Being disabled after a decade of working is fun.
Went from making $36 an hour to… about $11.50 from SSDI.
Was too injured to even apply for unemployment in time, not that it would have mattered as I was utterly incapable of ‘seeking work’.
More fun examples of how the poor live
Pro: Managed to Qualify for Section 8 in only 6 months.
Con: It almost certainly won’t matter, as I got evicted from the inability to work, and now my credit score is also abysmal, and all Section 8 is is privately owned apartments (cough slumlords cough) who choose to accept a portion of rent and utility payments from Sec 8, that can absolutely refuse you for an eviction or bad credit, and have their own waitlists.
Once awarded a Section 8 voucher, well they expire in a couple months if you don’t find a place. So you have to wait months or years again for Section 8 applications to even open up again, then apply for Section 8 and wait months or years to be awarded a voucher again, and then apply to Section 8 accepting slums with gigantic waitlists again.
Roach motels for my foreseeable future!
“Did you have this list of people you don’t respect ready to go, person I made up for this fake conversation?”
lol, come on now
I’ve had dozens of conversations that went just like this. As long as a decade ago from fuckin cable pullers and surveyors (the ones that hike through shit and snow with flags not the engineers) making 14$ an hour in Alberta when everyone else that flew out there was making 30+. You could make the same shoveling shit back home and they were upset about BC paying Tim’s workers 18$ at the time.
People are fuckin stupid and unaware. So they guess, wrong at their situation 99% of the time because some yokel in a suit pointed fingers at a convenient distraction that plays on their already present xenophobia. None of their “issues” were geographically or economically pertainent to themselves but they liked to bitch about them all the same.
I’ve had these talks with people.
Like they get upset because they see a ice cream shop advertising $18/hour for a cashier and getting pissed at that?
Bitch, that’s your free market at work!
(I assume, because I can’t fathom a criticism of paying someone more than the value their labor creates, therefore I’ll just assume it’s actually a value judgment of the person themself)
If the value a person’s labor creates doesn’t support their basic necessities even though they work full time, either things cost too much or that labor is undervalued. Anyone who does a job full time deserves to be able to cover their basic necessities.
Anyone who does a job full time deserves to be able to cover their basic necessities.
Okay, but I’d add also that no one should be forced to hire someone at a literal loss. After all, it’s a business, not a charity.
And the fact is that there exist jobs that don’t create enough value that it’s possible to satisfy both of the above conditions. So what’s the solution? This isn’t such a simple problem to solve.
If you say ‘fuck the employers, they have to pay a living wage, no matter how valuable the labor is’, then new small business creation will be smothered to a standstill–no one is going to want to start a new small business if they’re unable to attain the same ‘living wage’ they’re forced to pay every employee, regardless of what they bring to the business.
And if you say ‘fuck the workers, low/no minimum wage’, it becomes much easier to exploit/intimidate individual workers into accepting unfairly low wages.
That’s why I think the most effective system is something I heard of in a few countries, I forget which, where there is no minimum wage, BUT there is a lot of strong codified protection for things like unionization and collective bargaining, which enables the best possible compromises possible, in every industry (and for certain, compromise will be necessary to a degree, for the reason stated above). The result in those countries, as I recall, is that the median wage tends to be higher than what the ‘baseline’ minimum wage set by law would end up being. Another advantage is that it’s much better finely-tuned to each individual industry/job, and also much better at reacting to changing circumstances, than the beauraucracy of legislation could ever hope to realistically match.
Yeah it’s not an easy problem to solve. Encouraging unionizing would certainly help, or if you wanna get even more radical, a supplemental UBI. Ultimately though, until those things are more attainable, if an employer hires someone to do a job, and the value created by the person doing that job doesn’t justify paying them* a living wage, I think it’s on the employer to reevaluate the job they’re asking someone to do for them. Maybe that means exploring automation options to help that worker generate more value, or maybe explicitly stating that the job is a part-time job that won’t provide a living wage, or maybe reorganizing/adding job responsibilities such that the hired worker can generate more value.
Fine points, though I think automation is much more likely (as we’ve already seen it begin to happen) to phase out the human being entirely, rather than make their labor more productive, by simple virtue of the fact that it costs less.
Plus, it only becomes easier for it to cost less, the higher wage the human beings are demanding (and/or forcing via legislation).
Okay, but I’d add also that no one should be forced to hire someone at a literal loss. After all, it’s a business, not a charity.
Then don’t hire them. Done.
Problem solved?
Fix your business model? Nobody is forcing anybody to do anything.
And business owners complaining that nobody wants to work for scraps, that sounds like a business problem.
The fact that your response to the dilemma of a particular job position creating less value than the minimum wage you intend to force upon it with “fix your business model” reveals a massive ignorance of what goes into starting a business, and of how thin profit margins are in the majority of small businesses.
You’re unwittingly advocating for there to be insurmountable hurdles for starting new small businesses, which will inevitably result in megacorporations with deep enough pockets to eat those inflated costs (and having a lack of competition to the degree that they can easily mark up their product far beyond where they normally could without being punished for it, to more easily eat said costs) being the only ones employing anyone.
And then, invariably, the same ‘advocates’ will come along and complain about monopoly and lack of competition, oblivious to their own facilitation of that end result.
In short, your ‘solution’ is objectively foolish, and merits no serious consideration.
I suspect a number of middle-class workers are against the idea of a minimum wage increase because their wages have been mostly stagnant and they feel it’s not fair that the lowest paid workers might approach their income, while billionaires and CEOs are buying up everything.
They’re right, it isn’t fair, but they’re looking in the wrong direction. Instead of trying to prevent the lowest paid worker from approaching their income, they should be trying to reign in the top 1%. But I guess it’s easier and feels better to say huge swaths of people are don’t deserve to make anywhere near as much money as they do rather than enduring the inconvenience of finding alternatives to Amazon, Facebook, Insta, Xitter, etc.
Not to dismiss the real problem of monopolies and market dominance- but the docility and lack of resistance of such people would be startling if it weren’t over shadowed by their misplace contempt for the poor.
It’s like that cartoon of the guy with a whole pile of cookies telling the guy with one cookie “Look out! That immigrant wants to steal your cookie!” You can substitute any other demographic for the immigrant - socialist, burger-flipper, victim of medical extortion - and it still works.
Sure, I want a cookie too. I look out the window of my ground floor (first floor for the US) apartment at my neighbour watching a beautiful sunset through the wide glass front or his fancy first floor living room (second floor for the US) that seems to be about the size of my whole apartment, and I want that too. I see another guy move his Mercedes from the driveway so he can drive his BMW today instead, and I want a nice car too. I hear a colleague cursing the bureaucratic bullshit of having to do the property taxes for both his own parents and his in-laws on top of his own, and I can’t help but feel a sting of envy at his luxury problems. I want property too. I want a nice cookie too.
But the critical word in all these examples here is too. My neighbour can have his apartment with the beautiful view, the other guy can have his cars (climate consciousness notwithstanding, we have bigger sinners to worry about), my colleague’s parents and in-laws can have their houses too, and it’s a wonderful thing that they have the support of someone helping them as they age and struggle with these things who also has experience from his own property. I don’t want to take these things away. Hell, even when I see my landlady’s constant vacation pictures that I know my rent is sponsoring, I don’t begrudge her that vacation (though I do resent having to pay rent). They can all keep their cookies.
But if a corporate CEO gets a multi-million annual salary and another multi-million bonus while I got a “generous” thousand for an internship, he can well spare a cookie or a thousand. And even he pales next to private investors earning - whether through dividends or through their stock value increasing - just as much without even carrying any degree of responsibility. At least the CEO still does some work, even if it doesn’t justify his salary.
To be clear, I still don’t give a shit about the small-time middle-class pension fund investor. They participate in a fucked up system and I wish their pension would be funded differently, but if their investment pays my wages, I’ll be content. Let them have their cookie. Hell, I’d even be content to let them have a second cookie, if that was the price for me and everyone else getting at least one.
I can cope with some level of inequality as a concession to the unfair and imperfect nature of humanity. It would still be better than having to pick up the crumbs off the table while watching as the big guy shovels another tray of cookies I baked onto his pile.
For anyone worried about their cookie: Let’s work together. Let’s topple the cookie-hoarders and distribute their cookies. Let’s get you another cookie. And if I have a cookie of my own, you don’t need to worry so much about me wanting to take yours. We all win.
Except the hoarders, but fuck them.
Studies have shown that when minimum wage increases you see increases all up the pay scale, and the closer to minimum wage the greater the increase is. The reason being why would I be an EMT for $17 an hour when I can go be a burger flipper for $15 and not have to get PTSD? So these lower middle class people making 20ish dollars an hour would see a pay bump for sure. Which brings me to my next point other people have pointed out, it should be a fight for 20-25 and hour.
The answer to all of these is actually no… Because it should be $23.
This is how long the fight for 15 has been going on. We will finally get 15 when minimum wage should be 46 dollars
raising min wage doesn’t raise prices… that’s conservative bullshit
“we find prices grow by 0.36 percent for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage.”
Prices are rising on their own, before any wage hikes prices had risen already.
Have you accounted for the “wages” of the shareholders?
“The economy” is just money in motion. Like how electric charges moving create light, moving money carries and creates value in the exchange. When rich people soak up money from millions of people, they destroy all that value and the economy stagnates. When millions of people are given money and then spend it in millions of ways, the global economy improves.
We optimize our economy around stagnate money sitting in septic pools, when we should be trying to build an ocean of money that never stops flowing.
They never took econ 101 and don’t understand that elasticity is a thing. They think that literally all costs are passed to consumers.
Assuming that math is linear, a $15 an hour minimum wage would be 100% increase and responsible for an additional 3.6% inflation. We can argue about whether or not this increase I’d wroth it, but it is hardly 0.
That being said, I suspect this math has changed since Covid. Wages have generally gone up I would not be shocked if many companies are already paying their formerly min wage employees more. The fewer people between 7.25 and $15 the lower the impact on “the economy”.
$15 is old news, $25 is what I say these days.
Are you aware that that would be more than double what the (inflation-adjusted, of course) minimum wage has ever been in US history?
Yes, American workers have been underpaid for the country’s entire history. $25 sets the wage increase in line with productivity increases since the 1970s, when wages and productivity decoupled.
TL;DR: The EPI graph isn’t measuring productivity vs. pay, even for “typical workers”; it’s measuring wage inequality, and images like these are the visual equivalent of out-of-context half-truth soundbites:
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/6rtoh4/productivity_pay_gap_in_epi_we_trust/
a bunch of bullshit
Economists aren’t serious people, they’re priests who worship their idealized version of the market.
They’ll get you there by 2035 when the cost of living is close to $50 wages
Bold of you to think it will be any higher in 2035 than it is now.
7.25 federal, jobs offering 7.25-50 on indeed and paying $15
Ah, early 2021… back when $15/hr was at least somewhat decent. Heck, $15/hr was being fight for about a decade before even then. Maybe in ten more years $15/hr will become minimum wage and politicians will pat themselves on the back and claim they’re the most pro-worker politician in US history for instituting a minimum wage that was argued for two decades in the past.
15$ is too little now. They would need to make more.
Thats by design.
They took 10+ years to finally implement the 15 dollar minimum wage, explicitly so it would still be too low to live on by the time it was in, so they can turn around and go and lambast people for being “greedy” after getting what they wanted…while willfully obviating and distracting from the shit like rent and home prices that are getting furthe and further out of the average americans reach.
Who is the artist behind this design?
the cool thing about capitalism is that evil can be effectively distributed
Greed and money. Collusion can be ideological, not planned
Still better than fucking $7.25
That shit is insulting.
Yeah
Moving from nose deep in the septic tank, to chin deep, is technically an improvement, I guess.
There are tons of jobs around me that pay $11 or so. It’s above minimum wage, but you sure as hell can’t live on it.
The same thing was done with healthcare.
I say make it a gradient based on zip codes.
High enough that the local average rent is no more than 30% of it.
Doesn’t just make sure workers get paid adequately wherever they are, also provides a slight incentive towards making jobs in less developed regions of the country to bring more jobs out to the exurbs and such.
Pinning it to the local cost of living and having it automatically adjust with inflation/rising rents/food prices/etc would be the rational way to do it, which is precisely why it’s a non starter.
Zip code is way too small of an area though. I can picture better off areas getting all the workers - no one wants to work in that shitty grocery in the low income part of town
At this point, it should be 28
