$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.
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.
And Arizona
It should be, but the conservative corporatists that actually run the United States of America will never allow that to occur.
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.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.
$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.
My rule of thumb is “the less I’d like to do a job, the more the person doing it should be paid.”
That does already put upward pressure on the wage. Same reason that graveyard shifts tend to pay more than first or second shift positions of the same job, and that more dangerous jobs tend to pay more than safer ones of equal overall difficulty.
so-called unskilled jobs
“Unskilled” is not an insult when talking about jobs, it’s just terminology/jargon. In this context, it describes a certain category of job: one that requires no prior special certification or schooling to be qualified for, and that the typical person can be trained to do to a satisfactory level within a month or so.
jobs that get routinely exploited.
The fact that many people are qualified to do those jobs (due to their low requirements) is the primary thing driving the wage down for them. As long as there is someone willing to do the job for X amount less than you’re willing to, they’ll get hired over you, because the job is such that individual excellence doesn’t make nearly as much difference. You can’t really blame the company for hiring the cheapest adequate labor they have access to, they’re doing no different than the workers trying to find the highest paying job they can. To criticize one without criticizing the other is a double standard.
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
You can’t make the minimum the average lol
You can if you want to increase the average…
You thought inflation was bad before lol
Inflation is directly related to the amount of money being printed by the federal reserve.
Anyone really worried about inflation should be concerned about how wallstreet and the fed are in bed together. But wallstreet and the fed both do anything they can to distract everyone from that simple truth. The day it is made illegal to hire someone out of government to any banking or wallstreet firm that SHOULD be a conflict of interest is the day you will see a monetary policy that makes sense for the average worker instead of wallstreet. So of course because of this it will never happen in the USA.
Inflation is directly related to the amount of money being printed by the federal reserve.
But not solely related. Everything you just said was beside the point.
You can if you want people to be able to live in some degree of comfort, security, and dignity
That’s not how economics works. Like at all. It’s what a 10 year old would do if given control of the economy.
It can be, and theres no good reason it shouldn’t be that way. Economics is man made concept that can be changed at will, it isn’t some infallible law of nature
Economics is man made concept that can be changed at will
Possibly the most naive statement in history. Holy shit, read a history book.
Ive read plenty and our modern concepts around economics don’t go back that far. There have been innumerable societies that were able to create generally equitable systems of resource distribution throughout human history that weren’t contingent on modern concepts around economics. If those before us were able to do it with significantly more limitations, there’s no reason we can’t do it (and even improve upon it) now. Try reading some books that don’t lick boot
Would you care to give an example of a successful society of the past that achieved what you are describing without slaves or other means of super cheap labor. I can’t think of a single one but I am very interested.
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
The minimum wage in the US has never been higher than about $12 in today’s dollars.
And the workers weren’t all paid minimum wages at the time.
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 $15 of today’s dollars since inception), but because of how much cheaper college was back then.
“Its not about pay, its just about how more affordable things were for the pay you earned back then!”
College tuition has massively outpaced inflation, much less wage growth.
The policies (chiefly the change that made student loans no longer dischargeable in bankruptcy) that rocketed college tuition up are a MUCH more significant factor in college affordability, that’s just a fact.
When everything outpaces inflation, maybe we compute inflation wrong.
15$ 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.
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.
Sure, but for many people, that’s the difference between drowning in shit, or living in it like the rest of us
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.
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
$15 is old news, $25 is what I say these days.
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
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.
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.
Prices are rising on their own, before any wage hikes prices had risen already.
Have you accounted for the “wages” of the shareholders?
Dividends are not wages.
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
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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!
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
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.
