$15/hr is 10 years ago, now it should be 25
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.
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"
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.Yeah, fixating a number is not the best, that was my point. We should have minimum dividand attached to an index.
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.
$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.
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.
My rule of thumb is "the less I'd like to do a job, the more the person doing it should be paid." It works well for all the so-called unskilled jobs that get routinely exploited.
Not bad, has a few problems though, I would never want to be a banker, even worse an investment banker, yet those fuckers earn way more than I want them to
Go cleaning staff! Also other slave like jobs. It's a little bit sad that to make money you'd need to actively make your life worse, but it's a great starting point. It would also make the story billionaires make up about working hard have a real point.
Hourly Rate Yearly Salary
$10 $20,800
$15 $31,200
$20 $41,600
$30 $62,400
$40 $83,200
$50 $104,000
$75 $156,000
$100 $208,000
To make an average wage (roughly 62k according to the national average) it'll need to be $30 an hour minimum.
We have a locality pay scale BAKED IN to federal salaries. Federal salaries are established and updated yearly. Using this, we could get rid of a dedicated minimum wage number. All we need to do is set the minimum wage to the lowest amount a federal employee could be paid in that location, and you're all set. Federal minimum wage debate solved.
If the government can't find employees, then they need to raise the locality pay there, or bump up the payscale across the board. Same could be done for the minimum wage
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 $15 an hour.
15$ 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.
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."
"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”.
Can't wait for somebody to figure out how to spin wages being mismatched from productivity, and the resulting corporate profits as a net reduction in tax revenue and reduced market participation per capita, then start teaching the MBAs this.
They also conveniently forget how recently these jobs were hailed as being essential to the function of society....covid taught us nothing lol
Sounds like even a minor general strike would get concessions pretty quick
Haha hard to argue that one
Y'all know that trick for toddlers where you give them a choice between two things so they don't throw a tantrum? Maybe we could try that.
"We can either raise the minimum wage to $22--"
Conservative: "NOOOOO don't WANT THAT, don't want! Poor people will TAKE ALL THE CHEESEBURGERS"
"--Or implement UBI. How does that sound?"
"...Ok."
So voting? Too bad we never get to actually vote on these things. All handled by geriatrics that don't give a fuck about the current generations.
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
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.
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
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!
At this point, it should be 28
Why aren't conservative parties illegal worldwide yet?
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.
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.
DAE free speech is bad???
Lemmy is such a fucking cesspit.
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.
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 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 misplaced contempt for the poor. edit: typo
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.
People they and everyone else depend on that they don't respect.
It's easy to shit on everything, so I'll try to avoid doing that.
I do genuinely not understand the blind "minimum wage should be this" angle. All raising the minimum wage does is raise expenses for everything. It's pretty much like fuel costs: price of fuel goes up - your bakery, pharmacy, grocer, etc all raise prices and in the end it is those on the lowest income that get impacted the most.
A bit of a mind dump:
- Most of us live in a capitalist system. You can dislike it all you want, but as someone who's seen what happens when
ownership is shared, everyone is equal, a cook should be able to run a country- fuck that. I'll take bad capitalism over that nonsense any day. - Everyone should strive to improve themselves. Every day. Doesn't have to be monetarily driven improvement - it's the mindset of constant improvement that I want. And when that happens - aiming for minimum wage becomes a thing of the past.
- Everyone is not equal. Everyone must be given equal opportunity. We're good at different things, we absolutely suck at different things. Doesn't mean we're bad/wrong/mistreated if we try those things. What is wrong, however, is someone claiming they deserve something (great salary) when they suck at doing whatever they're doing. Just go do something else; preferably something you're good at.
- Deep inside - we're apes. We need to keep ourselves busy as otherwise brain starts overcompensating for lack of activity and we end up being idiots on the internet. Given enough time that leads to us being idiots outside the internet as well.
- Mental health issues are real. They're abused waaaay too much as an excuse to rot in the basement. Been there, done that. Start small, increment daily. Small, iterative steps. Everything takes time. Your choice on what gets your spend.
If you work 40 hours a week you need to earn enough to live in the city where you do said work. Period.
Also, wages are only a small part of costs for pretty much everything. +10% wages does NOT mean +10% total costs for whatever that worker provides, and so does NOT mean +10% price, if the company is honest.
Now that my teens are working, I’m a bit uncomfortable with this. Does my teenager, whose living expenses are still fully paid by me, really need a living wage? We’re a $15 minimum wage so He’s excited about the money he’s making, but part of me feels like he’s taking some of that from someone who needs it
I guess it comes down to that it’s a job, that anyone can fill. Also that some teenagers may need a living wage
but as someone who’s seen what happens when ownership is shared, everyone is equal, a cook should be able to run a country - fuck that. I’ll take bad capitalism over that nonsense any day.
Nice strawman... You sure showed that completely made up political/economic philosophy who's boss!
- Most of us live in a capitalist system. You can dislike it all you want, but as someone who's seen what happens when
Holy shit, what dirt does Putin have on Elon?
