$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.
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.
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.
Yeah, fixating a number is not the best, that was my point. We should have minimum dividand attached to an index.
Let’s make it a nice round $30/hr and call it a day.
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.
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.
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
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
deleted by creator
“Did you have this list of people you don’t respect (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) ready to go, person I made up for this fake conversation?”
lol, come on now
E: Stereotypers mad
(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).
Fine by me, at least in the long run. I look forward to advancing to the utopia where robots do all the work, every human receives a UBI (or money is just done away with entirely), and we’re all free to pursue whatever hobbies we want, instead of toiling away to increase stock value for the shareholders. We’re probably a long (long) way off from that, but I welcome any progress towards it.
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.
