6d ago

‘Not a Fantasy’: Mamdani Applauded for Defense of $30 Minimum Wage Plan

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'Not a Fantasy': Mamdani Applauded for Defense of $30 Minimum Wage Plan | Common Dreams

New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani forcefully defended his call for a $30 minimum wage during the final debate of the race Wednesday night, warning that under the status quo, the expensive metropolis is at growing risk of becoming “a museum of where working-class people used to be able to live.”

The inability of many New Yorkers to make a livable wage in the city, Mamdani said, “is pushing them to live in Jersey City, to live in Pennsylvania, to live in Connecticut, because they can’t afford to live in New York City.”

Under Mamdani’s proposal, which would have to be approved by lawmakers, New York City’s wage floor would rise incrementally before reaching $30 an hour by 2030. The minimum wage would then be tied to either cost-of-living increases or worker productivity jumps.

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Everyone crying that it won't work, I NEVER see them suggest an alternative to the cost of living crisis. Their plan is just to get slowly boiled alive like wtf.
- LA put a mansion tax on homes selling over a certain value and I was told it would crash the market…spoiler it didn’t.
  
  Kinda wish it would've crashed the market. Maybe then it'd slow folks getting pushed into the Inland Empire and crash the construction of housing tracts
- I have this debate all the time in the Uk pushing my leftist ideals and I’m always met with it won’t work rah rah rah. And I’m like well maybe we could try because for the last 42 years of my life of unfettered capitalism things have gotten worse and worse for most people so clearly this isn’t working so let’s just try something radical for 5 fucking years aye.
  I’m not even capping but if the greens don’t get elected next election there’s a none zero chance i am going to throw my life away by murdering people of the elite class because the alternative is to just plod along and nothing changes.
  I’m doing alright too. But I care about all people and we should judge our society on how we treat the poorest in it. I will fucking die on this hill, just depends how many I take with me.
  
  That's what crazy to me. Ppl afraid of "radical new ideas" when the same old shit clearly isn't working.
  I'm not gonna try and talk you down, everyones frustrated and fed up with the state of things. I would say be careful what you post online these days. We all just feel powerless to make any meaningful changes in the world around us :/
- Their plan is "I got mine, fuck everyone else."
- Everyone: What if we just throw people in jail for being poor or other behaviors associated with poverty? Surely nobody would choose to be poor then!
Do people in power not realize that if workers make more money they'll also spend more money, thereby helping businesses profit?
- Seems they began the process of willfully ignoring this fact in the 1970s, and it’s now gotten to the point where no, they don’t realize, because they’re so divorced from reality they can’t.
- That would result in a redistribution of wealth. I think most billionaires would rather live in an Ivory Tower in the middle of the desert than live in a 10-bedroom mansion alongside lesser millionaires in a diverse and prosperous city. They really couldn't give a shit about normal people which is why people like Bezos want to bring in robots to do the work.
- But then the poors will have more power.
  A strong middle class is much harder to rule.
Even if you don't get it - start at $30 bucks. The current is $16.50. If you get negotiated down to $20/hour you just gave every body on the bottom a more than 20% raise. I don't think it's reasonable to expect New Yorkers to live on $40k/year but it's a hell of a lot more reasonable than $33K/year.
I understand why minimum wages need to be monitored closely, and doled out with forethought and compromise. I get that raising up the bottom very suddenly tends to just be accompanied by price increases that ultimately still benefit the wealthy.
But it's also just true that feeding money into the bottom of the system always pays greater and more impactful dividends than trying to somehow feed even more to the top. It's been proven time and time again, and yet we're always told it's pointless to try it this time, because Rich people will just find a way to get it back. Duh, that's what Rich people do. They use their advantages to gain more advantage. But the more people's hands that money flows through on the way back to the wealthy, the better off we all are.
- If it gives the poors a choice, the rich can’t have it.
  You let those bottom 20% climb out of poverty and suddenly gain a choice in where they work/shop/spend their sudden disposable income? Well that might lead to demands of quality products, equitable availability and pricing, and less money for my cash stack throne!
  They’ll ignore the mountain of starved child carcasses if there’s another 100 on the stack.
- If you get negotiated down to $20/hour you just gave every body on the bottom a more than 20% raise.
  This is such a toxic pov
The people who complain about higher minimum wage are the same people that also complain about crime and the unhoused. What if you simply paid more in taxes and then some of these problems were alleviated? What if public transportation in the US was just way better. Shit this became a fuckcars ad lmao.
- Arts disingenuous.
  Many small businesses struggle with labour costs. What needs to go hand in hand with an increase in wages, is a reduced cost of business focusing on real estate.
  There's ways around this but what is needed is reversing the syphon of money to billionaires and trillion dollar organization
which would have to be approved by lawmakers
I foresee checks and balances working as designed, protecting capitalists' profits and shielding them from paying a livable wage, again.
- And the more people who try this, the more it makes said lawmakers look bad. I'll tell you one thing. We certainly aren't going to accomplish it by not trying. So I say let the man cook.
  
  Fully agreed. Even exposing people to these ideas and trying to partially implement them is a good thing in every imaginable aspect.
Current NYC minimum wage is apparently 16.50. So a 1.8x increase over 5 years (how long are mayors for in NY?).
I... my inner labor 100% supports minimum wage increases. My inner realist understands that has a very substantial impact on businesses and tends to result in fewer employees doing more work (and rapidly getting them salaried so that overtime doesn't exist). Which has a net negative impact because now one person is getting paid a living wage rather than two people getting paid enough to live in a closet in a flat.
Which is why, like most things, the solution is to decouple life from work. Universal Basic Income is what we desperately need. It resolves the minimum wage issue AND automation. The former because Fred's Khlav Kalash KCorner isn't destroying their margins to have more than one person working the counter and the latter because... we are RAPIDLY reaching the point where jobs permanently go away (see: Tech). And it actually fulfills the capitalist dream where the people working (because they want additional spending money or "to have a better life") actually want to be there.
And... I kinda think that is less of a pipe dream than a first term mayor managing to increase minimum wage by 1.8x in 5 years.
I'll also just add that NY, like much of the modern world (not just the US), is largely driven by commuters. People who wake up in Jersey or on the outskirts of town, drive in at 3 am, and then are part of the team that open up the shop at 4 so that you can buy your bagel when you walk out the door at 5:30. And... in a lot of ways that 16.50 goes a LONG way once you get to a place with a semi-reasonable cost of living... that said workers have difficulty enjoying because they are getting back home with just enough time to eat a meal and then go to bed.
Which is a very different problem and also why this kind of rubs me the wrong way the more I think about it. Don't get me wrong, there are LOTS of people barely existing in NYC. But a lot of them are people with REALLY good jobs who just still live in one of the higher cost of living places on the planet. Not so much the people getting minimum wage to make their coffee.
- has a very substantial impact on businesses
  It has an impact; not a substantial one. Of course businesses will complain. They don't want to pay workers at all, let alone fairly, but the only real impact is a slight reduction in profits once.
  
  We can argue on what you consider "substantial" to me. We can also both just walk away and whack it to Sailor Moon hentai. The latter might actually be a more productive use of time. Err, also let it be known I am referring to Queen Serenity or whatever since I just remembered most of the sailor scouts are teenagers and that makes this joke real fucked up.
  The fact of the matter is that, yes, it does have an impact on businesses. Moreso small businesses than the megacorps.
  Like... it is generally common knowledge that most restaurants fail in the first year and a large part of that comes down to wages and profit margins. Ignoring the hell that is tip based economies for the moment (they still factor in to a minimum wage increase but at a much lower rate), wages come out of revenue. Revenue is based on price per meal. If wages increase, you either pay out fewer hours or raise prices.
  Which... does get to the tipping side of things. EVERYONE fucking hates tipping (except for the workers who work it). But the people arguing that we should just bake that into the price are quite often the same ones arguing that everything is getting so expensive. Like... no shit?
  Because, at some point (essentially microeconomics at a scale where it sort of works), you can't raise prices AND you aren't selling more hot dogs. Same with trying to run a hardware store that has to compete with Amazon and Lowes. And you very much CAN see that over time where minimum wage goes up (good!) and you have more and more restaraunts and local hardware stores with fewer and fewer staff. We all hate the idea of waiting 5 minutes for someone to come make a key but... that someone was busy mixing paint and searching the stock room for that color of doorknob someone needed.
  Which, again, is why I am a firm believer that the goal needs to be UBI and we need to decouple work with life. It obviously needs fine tuning so that there will actually still be people willing to do those deeply shit jobs but we also need a way that isn't just a constant cost of living loop.
- 1.8x increase over 5 years
  12.5% annualized
  
  Yeah. To me that sounds insane (especially if you are getting the increased passed annually rather than all at once but scheduling the bumps) but, like I said, NYC is weird in that the inflation loops tend to be much more delayed. Or, I guess, have already gotten so fucked that it doesn't matter as much that the staff at the smaller shops that are increasing prices to increase wages already can't afford the stuff they sell.
  I'm used to discussions and campaigning for even single digit percentages being A Thing.
I'll believe it when it comes into effect. That's a lofty promise.
- It isn't a promise to raise the minimum wage. The mayor doesn't have the power to do that. It is a promise to push and lobby towards that goal.
  For a supposed democracy, Americans really tend to gravitate to a single source of power (king, dictator) mentality.
  
  As usual ml has a bad take on how America works.
- I don't think you understand if he doesn't lie he won't get in so it's justified for the greater good!
  
  Ron Pearlman voice: Politics. Politics never changes.
Mamdani ONCE looked at A Nazi Tattoo through a WINDOW! We HAVE to Vote for Donald Trump's Sexual Deviant friend INSTEAD!
I’m all for increasing minimum wage, but I get annoyed when people put specific dollar amounts into legislation. They should base it on like cost of living or some index of generated profit.
- % of profits is the best way to deal with it.
  
  Nah, profits can be manipulated. It’s percent of revenue. Like, the CEO could pay themselves the entire profit and say “whoops no profit.” I also think the highest paid person should not be able to make more than ~10x the lowest paid person. So if there’s a $30 Per hour wage, the highest paid person could not make more than $300 an hour, or ~$624,000/y
Only problem is that cost of living problems are world wide and not just NYC.
- He's running for NYC, not mayor of earth. Someones gotta start it.
  
  Yeah hopefully it'll be him but I have my doubts looking at his list of promises.
- It's still a start, and it has to start somewhere. It absolutely will not be passed at the national level before it's passed anywhere else.
- "This attempt to help some people doesn't solve everyone's problems everywhere all at once, therefore it's not good enough!"
  
  This is an excellent example of twisting someone's comment around enough to get angry at it instead of trying to understand it.

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