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.
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
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 misplace contempt for the poor. edit: typo
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
I love asking them to explain what negative consequences raising minimum wage would have for inflation and the economy, then asking them to explain how lowering income taxes wouldn’t be even worse.
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.
Why aren’t conservative parties illegal worldwide yet?
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.
Awful take. Rejecting Fascism and refusing them a platform isn’t Fascism itself.
The right wing worldwide is adopting Fascism as an ethos. Fascism must be crushed as a existential threat.
Most Conservative politicians on this planet deserve to be locked up in a prison cell for the rest of their lives. A whole lot more deserving of that fate than those who fascists imprison.
Nah, fuck that shit. This shit (https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-top-1-own-more-wealth-95-humanity-shadow-global-oligarchy-hangs-over-un) is enough justification to treat right-wingers and their financers as Pinochet treated socialists.
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
If we want to get out from the late capitalist dystopia, repression against reactionary forces is the only way.
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?
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”
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.
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.
Oooh! A Purge!
Its been decades since humanity has had a good purge.
Isn’t there one happening in Gaza right now?
IMO No, that’s genocide.
Purges are based on political idealism, not ethnicity.
A sacrifice to be had for a better world.
Unless it’s you. Then it’s fascist horror.
As long as it’s your beliefs that are being forced, genocide is a-ok!
Because you are super smart and know what’s best!!
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others!!”
You know, maybe casually advocating for the torture and/or deaths of millions of people might be the sign that you need to go touch some grass.
Like, seriously… do you even register what you sound like?
The point is that GOP and similar POS right-wing parties all over the world, all in the pockets of oil companies and rich lobbyists, have ruined the world long enough. Time to give 'em a taste of their own medicine.
Big “perpetually online” oof energy right here.
Go out. Meet people. Maybe consider a “dumb” flip phone if the Internet is too much for you. I promise you: the world isn’t as bleak as the Internet has made you believe it is.
DAE free speech is bad???
Lemmy is such a fucking cesspit.
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.
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
The same thing was done with healthcare.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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
$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
$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.
It should be, but the conservative corporatists that actually run the United States of America will never allow that to occur.
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.
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.Yeah, fixating a number is not the best, that was my point. We should have minimum dividand attached to an index.
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.
$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.
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.
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
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.
It’s easy to shit on everything, so I’ll try to avoid doing that.
I do genuinely not understand the blind “minimum wage should be this” angle. All raising the minimum wage does is raise expenses for everything. It’s pretty much like fuel costs: price of fuel goes up - your bakery, pharmacy, grocer, etc all raise prices and in the end it is those on the lowest income that get impacted the most.
A bit of a mind dump:
- Most of us live in a capitalist system. You can dislike it all you want, but as someone who’s seen what happens when
ownership is shared, everyone is equal, a cook should be able to run a country- fuck that. I’ll take bad capitalism over that nonsense any day. - Everyone should strive to improve themselves. Every day. Doesn’t have to be monetarily driven improvement - it’s the mindset of constant improvement that I want. And when that happens - aiming for minimum wage becomes a thing of the past.
- Everyone is not equal. Everyone must be given equal opportunity. We’re good at different things, we absolutely suck at different things. Doesn’t mean we’re bad/wrong/mistreated if we try those things. What is wrong, however, is someone claiming they deserve something (great salary) when they suck at doing whatever they’re doing. Just go do something else; preferably something you’re good at.
- Deep inside - we’re apes. We need to keep ourselves busy as otherwise brain starts overcompensating for lack of activity and we end up being idiots on the internet. Given enough time that leads to us being idiots outside the internet as well.
- Mental health issues are real. They’re abused waaaay too much as an excuse to rot in the basement. Been there, done that. Start small, increment daily. Small, iterative steps. Everything takes time. Your choice on what gets your spend.
Time and again, it’s been demonstrated that minimum wage hikes do not have a 1:1 relation with price hikes.
Spoiler: it’s corporate greed.
All raising the minimum wage does is raise expenses for everything.
Demonstrably false. Prices will always go up regardless. Nobody should have to work for less than a liveable wage. If you disagree with me you are a piece of shit.
Of all the things you could’ve said you chose one of the dumbest.
Why does the job exist if it’s so worthless, working it doesn’t allow you to participate in society?
If you work 40 hours a week you need to earn enough to live in the city where you do said work. Period.
Also, wages are only a small part of costs for pretty much everything. +10% wages does NOT mean +10% total costs for whatever that worker provides, and so does NOT mean +10% price, if the company is honest.
Now that my teens are working, I’m a bit uncomfortable with this. Does my teenager, whose living expenses are still fully paid by me, really need a living wage? We’re a $15 minimum wage so He’s excited about the money he’s making, but part of me feels like he’s taking some of that from someone who needs it
I guess it comes down to that it’s a job, that anyone can fill. Also that some teenagers may need a living wage
Does my teenager, whose living expenses are still fully paid by me, really need a living wage?
Thank god it’s none of my employer’s business what my living conditions are. If I can make do with a lot less because of personal circumstances then that’s good for me, but that can’t be the metric to measure other people against.
part of me feels like he’s taking some of that from someone who needs it
He’s taking it from his employer who certainly doesn’t “need it more”, otherwise they wouldn’t employ your son.
Think about the natural conclusion to the problem that you’re trying to address. What if we pay teenagers who don’t need the money less than everyone else. That would incentivize employers to … check notes … only hire teenagers who don’t need the money. Everyone else, who actually does need the money, they would have trouble finding a job. Facepalm.
Also. Because your teenagers are getting lucky, in that they have a family that’s paying all of their bills, you somehow wish that they weren’t getting lucky, and that some rich person was getting richer? Do I understand that correctly?
Furthermore. There might be value to your teens in working less so that they can do other things when they’re still teenagers. That might be something you would want to explore, since your family’s finances are in a solid state.
And hey, if you think your teenager is being overpaid, why don’t you encourage them to donate some of their money to charity?
In many other families, finances aren’t so strong. Maybe the parents can pay the bills, but if the kids want to go to college, they’ll have to take out student loans. Or they could start saving in high school, and use that money for college, or to get an apartment if they have to move out, or to buy a car, or whatever else they need after they graduate high school. All of a sudden the extra money sounds really important, doesn’t it.
No, I’m saying that while I agree that essentially every job should have a livable wage, I can’t. Reconcile that with a teenager’s part time job while living at home.
I’d entertain the idea of an exception to livable wages, even if it hurts my family. However I don’t see a reasonable way to apply that without affecting everyone
Guess who works alongside your teenager? Grown ass adults. Should they suffer so your teenager (whom you deem to not be worth a living wage) can learn whatever libertarian lesson you’re foisting on them?
I don’t know whether to upvote you on the difficulty of defining a kids job or downvote on thinking there’s some sort of a lesson different than: he’s a kid with a temporary part time job, not an adult or independent.
Obviously I’m all for him earning more and wish him every success. However speaking from a much more general perspective: should there be any exceptions to livable wages annd is this one? Is there a reasonable way to even do that?
It’s certainly not my intent to judge you or make assumptions, but that seems like kind of a weird perspective, to believe your kid should make less than their peers for providing the same labor. There are plenty of households who humbly ask their working teens to contribute a portion to bills.
My kid lives at home! Therefore they should never make enough money to actually leave home and build a life for themselves!
but as someone who’s seen what happens when ownership is shared, everyone is equal, a cook should be able to run a country - fuck that. I’ll take bad capitalism over that nonsense any day.
Nice strawman… You sure showed that completely made up political/economic philosophy who’s boss!
- Most of us live in a capitalist system. You can dislike it all you want, but as someone who’s seen what happens when
