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It should also be said that just because I already paid my student loans off doesn’t mean I don’t want other people to be in debt. Student loan forgiveness needs to be up there with the livable wage.
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There’s some double negation confusion at work here, but I think you wrote that you do want other people to be in debt ;)
Yes. You’re right. Thankfully it seems everyone understands what I meant though. 😊
Student loan forgiveness is regressive by definition (those lucky enough to go to college are a minority that earns on average $0.5 to $1 million more over their lifetimes, than those who don’t), aren’t you against wealth transfers from poorer to richer?
If the goal is free education then yes, there has to be a cutoff somewhere
This fight is about us taking from the rich, not from each other.
Beautiful stated, cutting right to the heart of the matter.
Tech here!
/hug!!
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Ever considered OR? I’m a surgical tech now but in nursing school, plan is to just switch over to the dark but stay at the same hospital.
One patient at a time. No crazy family members. It’s chill as fuck behind that red line!
I remember growing up in the 90’s and being acutely aware of the growing minimum wage. I knew no matter what that when I was able to get a job I would be guaranteed “this” amount and always thought about prices and how long I had to work to get something I wanted when I was an adult. Every small bump made it a little mini-celebration like I was getting a future raise that would allow me to have a better life.
Now? Shake and bake costs over 5$, I have to literally work over an hour to buy half a cup of “convenient” seasoned bread crumbs. I could buy the flour, make the bread, and process it to make my own… but now I’m out of time in the day to work enough to actually afford the meat or any other side item. Oh yeah, and at some point I should pay my bills and save for retirement -_-
Buy bread chop it up season and put in the oven at a low temp till it’s as dry as you want
Way to miss the fucking point… 🙄
Cheaper than buying pre made and you don’t have to make bread, 10 min of work
Way to miss the fucking point… 🙄
You’re obviously lazy and willing to wast money on premade shit that is now expensive and terrible for your health
Shake N bake is flour and seasoning, make it yourself ffs
Dude, you keep missing the point. Instead of stubbornly arguing the same thing, maybe reread and spend some time thinking and trying to understand the conversation you’re participating in so you don’t look so foolish.
Oh I getbthe point, KD usednto be 25c a box now is $3
But that’s what you get for “convenience”
You know, it’s comments like this that make me laugh and realize how much of a privileged life someone has. Anyone saying, “Oh, it only takes 10 mins to make bread crumbs!”, has never actually been required to make all of their food homemade. Let’s take a journey and use a generic recipe.
- bake at 275 degrees until dry, about 10-to-15 minutes
ok so maybe 15 mins, preheat oven, getting it all ready, maybe like 30 mins but very relaxed. Lowest priced loaf of bread is $1.39 at a local grocer (it’s a horrible brand that’s more airpockets and made from the cheapest ingredients possible but it’s still counts as bread).
- Add them to the food processor, and process them until coarsely crumbed.
Oh shit, now I need a food processor (cheapest is 40 on amazon and walmart), or I could stand at a blender for 2 hours doing one handfull at a time (if I have a blender). Wait, wasn’t this only suppose to take 10 mins?
Ok let’s just chop the bread by hand, now we’re about an hour into the process after it cools and is chopped. But I wanted shake n’ bake, so let’s head over to this recipe.
- Mix all ingredients in a large bowl until evenly mixed and the bread crumbs are no longer ‘clumpy’ from the oil.
Let’s see here, Vegetable oil ($2.99), Salt ($0.79), Dried onion flakes ($2.19), Paprika ($1.29), Sugar ($3.19), Garlic powder ($1.29), Ground black Pepper ($2.29), Cayenne ($2.49), Parsley ($2.19), Basil ($2.59), Oregano ($2.49). (all cheapest prices listed from local grocer, nothing premium)
So now we’re at over 25$ for the homemade shake and bake ingredients. 65$ if I want a food processor to keep this under an hour. Oh yeah, I hope I have foil, baking sheets, sanitary plastic bags to “shake” it, a long term storage container for the amount I’m making. I’m over $100 as a fresh person starting life to make bread crumbs. 2 hours between prep and time spent getting ingredients… and I have bread crumbs, guess I’ll start actually cooking the meal!
You can make excuses for people that already have some of the required items, but generically you can’t make that statement unless they’re privileged and have hand me downs or time to bargain shop for cheaper appliances. It all costs in the long run and with homemade you’re paying with your time that no one has. The whole point of the shake and bake was a convenience for overworked families trying to continue to participate in society in a “healthy” way. If you can’t afford “convenience” as a worker, then you’re not getting paid enough.
edit: formatting
And yet a local Domino’s Pizza around here is still offering the same $12 an hour rate and advertising a manager salary of $25k a year! Corporations never learn and people wonder why customer service is so crappy.
Huh, according to Indeed, the range for Domino’s delivery drivers around me is $18-$25 an hour. How far over minimum wage is your $12?
It’s NC, so it’s bottom of the barrel what is legally required minimum wage. 7.25
They are likely including tips in that range.
I realize that, and mainly considered the bottom of the range as a result; $18 is still a far cry from $12, after all.
But on slow days, they are still only getting minimum wage ($7.25)… tips are part of the culture, but not guaranteed and can’t be counted on for budgeting living expenses.
Drivers heavily rely on tips. That is the estimated price range with tips. The base pay for Domino’s drivers in my area is $10/hr.
There should be no profits, no bonuses, and no dividends until every worker (not employee, it doesn’t matter what your relationship with the company is if they benefit from your labour) is making at least a living wage with full benefits. Executive pay should be capped at a multiple of the pay of the lowest paid worker or of the average pay paid to all workers. whichever is lower.
There should be no profits, no bonuses, and no dividends until every worker (not employee, it doesn’t matter what your relationship with the company is if they benefit from your labour) is making at least a living wage with full benefits.
To get anywhere, you must define “living wage” concretely. You can use variables of course, but without at least a ‘formula’, “living wage” is just a meaningless, unachievable talking point. You at least have to know what you’re aiming at, to have any hope of achieving it–you’ll never get anywhere just saying “living wage”, because ‘enough to live on’ does not nearly have the same definition for everyone. So, what’s the baseline, in your view?
Example: ‘the living wage should be enough money to afford [list of things] with $X leftover for discretionary spending/saving.’
the definition of living wage is already defined by MIT
They actually have a pretty decent website that calculates it for you here
Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.
Assuming 1 childless worker, got a list of things here (would like to know more about how these numbers were arrived at, but I’ll take them at their word).
Food, medical, housing, transportation, civic (apparently this is recreation etc.) Internet/mobile, and “other” (saving?)
I looked up an area near me. They give annual values, but I, like most Americans I imagine, can relate more easily to monthly costs, so I divided everything by 12. So here’s what MIT says a “living wage” should pay for, per month:
Food: $406. That seems like a LOT for a single adult. My roommate and I spend less than this for the both of us and we buy groceries together, so I know how much our combined cost is.
Medical: $276. Can’t really comment in either direction about this, fact is that medical costs vary SO much from person to person, and even for the same person at different stages of life, that I’ll just give the benefit of the doubt that that’s the correct cost on average.
Housing: $1615. My rent is less than this, and I’m talking about the actual rent, not just the 50% of it I pay (as I said, roommate). I could see this being more or less accurate for my area for someone just moving in someplace, though.
Transportation: $897. What the fuck? If you have shitty credit AND you financed an expensive car for a shitty rate, then maybe you could get here, not that requires a series of bad decision making. NOBODY should be paying anything close to this a month for a car, even if you get gas weekly.
Civic: $251. That’s significant, $60+ every week? Doing/buying what?
Internet/mobile: $117. That sounds fine, assuming middle of the road Internet and standard mobile plan.
Other: $368. Well, what can you really say about “other”?
So, other than a few of those categories being WAY out of proportion imo, the biggest issue I see here is that MIT is giving different, separate “living wages” for 3 categories of people (1 alone, 2 with 1 working, and 2 with both working (why isn’t this just the first category doubled?)), and for 0 to 3 children. So, some issues I’m seeing:
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It’s one thing to force a company to pay a worker more if they have a kid(s), and/or live with someone who doesn’t work, but you can’t force a company to hire these people. Considering that the value of the labor itself obviously does not increase based on those things, this seems like it’d obviously create massive direct (there’s likely some that’s indirect, but the fact is that your boss is not entitled to know anything about your living situation) incentive against hiring anyone other than single childless individuals.
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Typically an employer is not even entitled to know such personal details about a worker/applicant in the first place. But if we put these into effect, they would have to, in order to know which category you fall into, which leads back into 1 above.
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There is a LOT of work that does not generate nearly that amount of value (in the case above, around $27/hour assuming 40hr work week) for the business, but are things the business can’t function without. It’s easy to say “if you can’t afford to pay every single one of these positions at least this living wage, then you can’t afford to be in business”, but the fact is that this would place huge obstacles in the way of a small business getting up and running to any real degree. Megacorporations have pockets deep enough to eat the cost though, and so they’ll become even better at driving small business to extinction than they already are, and hasten us toward a society where they’re the only real game in town. And I shouldn’t have to list the reasons that an ‘employer monopoly’ is a REALLY bad state of affairs for the working population.
“Just increase the minimum wage to a living wage” is not the ‘duh, just do it’ obvious solution it’s made out to be.
I’m mobile so I can’t check those numbers, but they leave the sources they got for the calculations they provided, by category here
I know the numbers are pretty on point for for poverty vs living wage for my area, but like any actual research studies YMMV, but they do have sources of why they have the numbers they do, and they are by verified/reliable sources
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The classic definition is the wage needed to cover the basic needs of the family including things like rent, childcare, transportation, etc. I would go one further and say that the family needs to not be living paycheque to paycheque. They should be able to save for the future, go out once in a while, educate their children, save and pay for university, and advance themselves. They should be able to live.
The classic definition is the wage needed to cover the basic needs of the family including things like rent
Rent where? Rent costs vary wildly.
childcare
What sort of childcare, and how many children is it meant to support? Or do you get $X per child? And if so, is there a maximum number of children, where having more won’t get you more money?
transportation
Over what distance? And how, owned vehicle or public transportation? If owned vehicle, what kind of vehicle? Used/new? Price ranges for vehicles also vary wildly.
I would go one further and say that the family needs to not be living paycheque to paycheque.
That entails what amount of extra money? And what do you do about people who willfully choose to spend it instead of saving it? Are you aware that in the US, 1 in 4 of people earning $150k or more live paycheck to paycheck? Just because one has money to save doesn’t mean they’re going to do it.
go out once in a while
Again, far too vague. How often? And how much money does ‘going out’ cost? You’d have to figure both of those out, and multiply them by each other, to ensure this goal is met.
educate their children
Taxpayer-funded public school already covers this. Unless you feel everyone should be entitled to the cost of private schooling?
save and pay for university
University tuition is another massive variable, so you’d need to decide how much is given for tuition. Also, if someone does not go to college, do they not get that part of the money?
and advance themselves.
The vaguest criterion yet. It’s pretty much impossible to say if a given minimum wage satisfies ‘everyone can advance themselves’.
As anyone can see, this “classic” definition is still full of major holes, and not nearly complete enough to even conceptualize a goal such that progress toward it can even be measured. Just saying “living wage” over and over will never get anyone anywhere.
K
Profit is theft, labor that is not compensated in accordance with its value.
The owners/investors deserve to origin but so do the workers. All of the profit going to the owner/investors is theft. That’s why I say that there should be no profit, bunnies or dividends until everyone is fairly compensated and the profit should be shared with the workers in proportion to their contribution which is huge. No workers, no company, no profit.
The cost of living will just keep going up because inflation is necessary in our current, debt based monetary system. The Fed tries to keep this under control by not allowing the rate of inflation to go much beyond about 2% a year. The recent inflation issue we’ve been having wasn’t about inflation suddenly happening where it hadn’t been happening before, it was about the rate of inflation increasing beyond the Fed’s 2% target. When they talk about inflation getting back under control, they’re talking about the rate of inflation getting back to near 2%. But make no mistake: prices are still going up - they have to, that’s how the system works - and they will keep going up every year, seemingly indefinitely. For this reason, a cost of living raise equal to at least the rate of inflation is absolutely essential, otherwise workers are getting a pay cut.
But this is further complicated by the fact that the core inflation numbers are very broad. Housing costs are exploding. Core inflation would be much lower if not for rising housing costs. But the way housing costs increases are measured is by averaging housing costs across all markets, meaning the cost of housing in low demand areas is averaged with the cost of housing in high demand areas. This means that if you live in a high demand area, the core inflation rate doesn’t necessarily capture the true cost of living in your area, and that the cost of living in your area is going up much faster than the national average. Therefore, many workers need an annual cost of living increase that is much greater than the national inflation rate.
As far as I know, there is no national law requiring companies to give cost of living raises every year. Many companies do, but many don’t. A mandatory, annual cost of living raise is something that unions can negotiate, once again showing the value of unions.
The cost of living will just keep going up because inflation is necessary in our current, debt based monetary system.
You’re making this sound like it’s something that was arbitrarily decided by powers that be, but the fact is that if there was deflation instead, the economy would come to a screeching halt, because it becomes more ‘optimal’ to hold onto cash under a mattress (since in deflation, it grows in value over time) instead of spending it on goods and services.
A tiny amount of inflation is best long-term, for the whole.
Yeah the gold standard is disastrous for wage laborers, we had a huge fight over this for basically the entire time between reconstruction and the world wars
I don’t think the decisions that led to our current monetary system were made arbitrarily, not at all.
Minimum wage should have been $15/hr at least 10 years ago.
I still have people telling me that 15/hr is too generous.
People gotta start getting angry enough to organize with other angry people.
All by design
Meanwhile CEO pay rose 1460% since 1978 https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/
The execs use those untaxed resources to lobby and keep things in their favor, and so the cycle continues
So it has been with all political carrots in the United States my entire adult life, regardless of who is in charge, which is why I don’t believe in nations or electoralism anymore
This is the primary reason that inflation exists—so that business/corporations (the owner class) can steal more of your hard-earned money.
Uh, no, the primary reason inflation exists is so that there is an economy, lol.
If there was deflation, the ‘optimal’ thing to do with your extra cash would literally be to stuff it under a mattress.
Too much inflation is obviously bad, but deflation is also really bad. A tiny amount of inflation is optimal long-term.
