• Clent@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        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

        • rigatti@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          And then other Dems would block it! Sorry, I have no faith in good things happening. Still voting Dem though.

          • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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            5 months ago

            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…

              • doingthestuff@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                Primaries? Democrats apparently don’t need primaries. I’m all for living wages though btw. I’d say $30/hr as of today.

        • thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          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.

    • RedditWanderer@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      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.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        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.

      • BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world
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        5 months ago

        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.

    • Mac@mander.xyz
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      5 months ago

      $25 minimum. Those two jobs are much more valuable than tech project managers.

      i say $30, easy, maybe more.

      • Asafum@feddit.nl
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        5 months ago

        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.

  • 100_kg_90_de_belin@feddit.it
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    5 months ago

    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.

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      5 months ago

      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

    • LANIK2000@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      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.

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    5 months ago

    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.

    • Wilzax@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      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

  • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      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.

          • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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            5 months ago

            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?

    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      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.

  • PolishAndrew@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    They also conveniently forget how recently these jobs were hailed as being essential to the function of society…covid taught us nothing lol

    • Codex@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      “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.

    • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      They never took econ 101 and don’t understand that elasticity is a thing. They think that literally all costs are passed to consumers.

    • Buffalobuffalo@reddthat.com
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      5 months ago

      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”.

      • bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net
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        5 months ago

        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.

  • rothaine@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    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.”

    • Bosht@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      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.

  • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      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

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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    5 months ago

    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!

    • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      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.

        • Zron@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Authoritarianism is cool when you’re the one being an authoritarian.

          Really sucks when someone you don’t agree with decides what is allowed or not.

          If you give a government power to decide who is allowed in the government, even if you think it’s for the right reasons, you’ve now created a system where all it takes is one or a few people to turn a utopia into a grueling dictatorship.

          That’s not really a good gamble

          • CazzoneArrapante@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            If we want to get out from the late capitalist dystopia, repression against reactionary forces is the only way.

            • Soleos@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              And then what? Yes, identifying and resisting an oppressive power structure is all well and good, but any revolution has to grapple with the fact that you will still have a massive population with cultural and ideological structures that can only conceive of the world in terms of the old system. Congratulations, you’ve toppled the government and now you have the power to implement a new system. What will you do with that power? Will you implement yet another system in which there is a powerful in-group that the law protects but does not bind and a disempowered out-group that the law binds but does not protect?

              • CazzoneArrapante@lemm.ee
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                5 months ago

                you will still have a massive population with cultural and ideological structures that can only conceive of the world in terms of the old system

                We force them in the new system

                Will you implement yet another system in which there is a powerful in-group that the law protects but does not bind and a disempowered out-group that the law binds but does not protect?

                No, the new system would be “right-wingers and rich lobbyists fuck off while normal people thrive and late stage capitalist dystopia is finally unwinded, and whoever opposes it gets rekt”

                • Soleos@lemmy.world
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                  Okay, but you haven’t really answered the question of “what’s the new system”. You don’t have to solve all the problems of creating a new society, but you should have a general idea. “Not the old system and not the past people” is not an actual system. “Normal people thrive” is not an actual system.

                  For example, monarchy would be a system where “capitalist dystopia is finally unwinded and whoever opposes it gets rekt,” but somehow I don’t think that’s what you want.

                  You have to make an actual positive claim about what you envision, about your ideology, values, ethics, etc.

        • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
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          Sure, let’s kill or jail everyone we disagree with. Surely that won’t lead to anything bad, right? It’s not like this hasn’t happened before and lead to millions of deaths or anything.

  • hark@lemmy.world
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    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.