Minimum wage
Minimum wage
111 comments
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It’s wild how conservatives have been led to believe that people shouldn’t make a livable wage doing whatever job needs to be done.
Then, when people don’t want to work for shit pay, they cry that “nobody wants to work anymore”.
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For me to win, others must lose
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That's the crux of it. Republicans almost invariably see life as a zero-sum game. It honestly does not occur to them that everyone could be happy and prosperous.
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Well, of course. They agree that someone has to do those jobs, they just don't think they should be able to afford a one bedroom apartment while doing so.
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It’s wild how conservatives have been led to believe that people shouldn’t make a livable wage doing whatever job needs to be done.
Not just conservatives. My stepdad is far from being one, but he lives in a fantasy reality where "no one in the 80s made a living or supported a family working fast food or running a register." (I paraphrased a tiny bit, but this is a near-direct quote from him.)
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In the 80s we were already on this path to severe underpayment. He was being fucked by the system already, it just wasn't as obviously destructive so he took it with the lube they provided and said thank you. Now they can't admit that's what happened because they would have to admit were/are idiots getting willingly fucked by the business.
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"makinh a living" and "surviving" are two different things
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This. My parents and my husband and I went to the Smithsonian archival museum in Washington DC. They had an exhibit about the coal and steel strike from the 1800s-literally present day. My parents were raised in the era of "work hard put your head down". They really needed this to show class inequality of capitalism. I mean you can find that anywhere on the internet but it was cool to be there and talk about it. Fuck Capitalism and the cancer that it has always been. My parents are still voting for Trash but I feel its a step forward.
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Aha, Snopes rates it as "True", therefore nobody wants to work anymore!
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It's the mentality that billionaires use to impose on us. Yes, our life sucks, but it is not bad, because there are people for whom or sucks much more.
I am currently reading book called On Freedom by Prof. Timothy Snyder and is really eye opening, how we are being manipulated to hurt our and our children's future. I think everyone should read it.
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Just a reminder that we’ve been trying to get the minimum wage to $15/hr for so long that if we kept up with inflation the minimum wage would be over $25/hr now. By the time $15/hr actually passes it’ll be less than half of what it should be.
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I'm so fucking tired of hearing about a living wage.
I want a thriving wage! If that means that janitors and whoever the fuck conservatives want to shit on make $40-50 dollars and hour, so be it.
Wages have been so stagnant that I want a labor market and not a job market.
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And, federally, it's still half that ($7.25). Cheers!
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Maybe the movement should stop pushing for a number and just say you want a regulator who just increases minimum wage by inflation every year, as well as setting absolute minimum federal minimum wage up to a level where you can actually live.
But without asking for legislation that gives a regulator the authority to set minimum wages, even if you get $25/hr, you'll just have to get the movement going again ever few years.
This is not a novel idea by me, it's done all over the world.
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So... one approach you could take would be to say anyone working a full time job should be able to afford a one bedroom apartment. You know, New Deal kind of ethos for the modern era.
https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/united-states/?bedrooms=1
Ok, avg one bed rent ~= $1600 a month.
$1600 * 3 = $4800 (1/3 rent to income ratio)
$4800 / (40 hrs x 4 weeks) = $30 dollars an hour.
So yeah its actually worse than 'We've been arguing about $15 for so long its more like $25'.
Nope. Its $30 an hour. $62,400 a year.
Sure would be cool if we did literally anything to _actually_make housing more affordable.
(BTW 60% of working individual Americans make less than this)
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Not just afford a one bedroom apartment. They should be able to do so and also afford to go to work. You can get housing for next to nothing in bumfuck nowhere, but if you can't get to work while living there, then there's no point.
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And you just know this is going to be the conservative argument regarding the subject. Joe Random makes $18 an hour in New York City and they'll argue that this is sufficient because you can rent a 1br studio in Kentucky with it.
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I agree anyone working a full time job should be able to afford a one bedroom apartment but minimum wage in 1940 was $624a year and an average apartment seemed to be $324 a year so to meet that same level of pay we would “only” need a minimum wage of 17.25. That’s still way more than the current minimum wage of 7.25 but not as high as $25/hr
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Minimum wage in major cities is usually in the mid-twenties these days. The idea of a federal minimum wage is kind of silly, considering how different the cost of living is across the country. Living wages should be calculated and enforced at the city or county level.
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1/3 of your income for rent is higher than financial experts advise. You should try to keep it under 25%
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True, but afaik, basically every place in the US has a functionally, if not outright legally mandated 3 to 1 income to rent ratio.
Occasionally some smaller or more charitable landlords may waive this, or there may be different rules for some specific affordable/elderly/disabled communities, but for the overwhelming number of places, 1 to 3 is either legally required or enforced via industry standard.
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If you've ever been to a restaurant with a conservative, the way they treat servers like shit is a dead give-away of their political orientation. Conservatives hate working class people.
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Do you go out much? Most people treat their servers well regardless of political affiliation. My home town is majority conservative and are all very respectful when eating out.
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I worked a career in an almost exclusively conservative line of work after being raised in the red south. I base my assertion on many, many years of close observation, but I admit this is only anecdotal evidence. I'm glad to hear your experience is different.
Would you say your local conservatives also tip well, or do they tip like the vile, sub-human pieces of shit I have observed?
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Ssshhhh! Stop contradicting their overwhelming bias!
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Church people are notorious for being the worst patrons.
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$15 is a start. How about $20 and adjusted to inflation yearly?
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It's actually more like $25-30 now since we've been having this bullshit "conversation" for so long.
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You're right, $23 is what I usually use and rounded, and that's an old number probably based on my own experience of when the minimum was okay. Looking back, even your range may be too low, as production began to outpace wages in the early 70s, making a comparable matching minimum close to $40.
In the end it's about a wage being livable, whatever that needs to be. And it probably shouldn't be a per hour number, as a company forced to pay per hour an amount can easily just reduce hours, defeating the point. Some sort of universal basic income, so wages become a supplement and not slavery? We have to change somehow.
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The "fight for 15" movement officially started in Nov 2012. CPI calculator says that's $20.54 in today's money. But we all know housing and groceries have gone up significantly faster than CPI, and mostly just because the people controlling the supply decided they wanted more money.
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If you think a job should exist, the people working that job should be paid enough to live comfortably.
You don't get to look down on people flipping burgers and sneer that they should get a real job if you want McDonald's to exist - you're essentially saying people should be punished for delivering a service that you want - it's sickening.
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At least 15$/h. And even that's not enough to live on these days.
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Low wages would honestly be fine if everyone was guaranteed housing and food and medical care. I just want a society where a person who is lazy or unambitious or disadvanted who just wanted to take a year off could survive with some reasonable level of comfort without working at all if they didn't want to.
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It was hard to live on that 20 years ago.
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“But you clearly deserve more than $15 an hour. What do you do, what do you deserve to earn, and why?”
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Minimum wage should have been $15 an hour 10 years ago.
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The common argument for why 16 year olds flipping burgers shouldn't make $15 / hr is that they don't have the same expenses as an adult, so they don't need that much, and it's so fucking wild to me that they'd use that. Clearly what you need doesn't factor into what people are paid in any other circumstance, otherwise the top 0.1% would be middle class, too. So why does it suddenly matter for that one specific demographic?
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This is why fast food locations are closed during school hours obviously.
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The focus on wages is misleading (intentionally). America has more than enough resources for everyone here to live comfortable lives regardless of what jobs anyone does, they’re just poorly distributed
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If we peel about 50 billionaires and their families we could make every single American a multi-millionaire. I bet it would put a dent in wage theft, too. Scare the piss out of middle managers so hard they prolapse their ureters.
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The 50 richest people in the US have a collective net worth of about $3 trillion. If you could wave a magic wand and turn that net worth (which is not an amount of cash money) directly into cash, something that obviously can't actually be done, but I digress, and you distributed that $3 trillion evenly among the ~340 million people in the US, everyone would get about $8800, lmao. Not quite multimillionaire level.
It amuses me how confidently people will state complete bullshit, even when it's so easily debunked.
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They're optimally distributed if you're near the top.
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Are they though? The mentally ill who think all there is to life is a digital high score in their bank accounts definitely don't act like they're living fulfilling lives.
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I support abolishing minimum wage... once every person has sufficient healthy food, safe shelter, and needs based access to healthcare and educational resources.
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Yeah, make the employers compete against UBI. Can you pay me more to work than the government pays me to sit on my ass?
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Makes me wonder if absolutely shitty jobs like janitorial work or garbage collection or working in sewers would go from being minimumally paid to being super high paying jobs if there was UBI, because it would become the only way to actually attract (a majority) people to the work. Or if it would just force robotics to get better specifically for these kinds of jobs humans don't want to do.
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I wonder if UBI is ever going to happen as a side-effect of corporate greed. Like, you want employees? Well, too bad, I've hired all of them. With non-compete clauses, no less. And I've spammed all job hunting sites so that 99% of resumes phone numbers go to my sales reps who will swarm your number if you ever dare to post a job listing yourself. So, no way around me. Now, I could subcontract you a few, but it is going to cost you big bucks since I have to make a profit somehow with most them sitting on their asses with minimum wage.
This is basically what happened with the housing market(at least 'round here), and has occurred on smaller scale in the IT sector. Not sure if that'd ever be possible in the general market with the sheer amount of money required to pull this off. Especially as humans, unlike houses, are unlikely to become an appreciating resource without general population decline.
Feel free to throw a wrench in this theory, though. I don't really want to live in a world where my livelihood depends on some real estate fucks.
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People act like if people were paid enough to cover their rent and bills, they would be living some ultra life of luxury. The arguments against minimum wage being raised never make any sense when wealthy people use every loop in the book to extract as much as possible.
- Gross income, roughly for a 35-40h workweek
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$7.25? Woof. I made that back at a grocery store 20 years ago.
I'll take €1,969 and look out on the Mediterranean.
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Some of those 7.25s will technically be even lower, that's the federal minimum that will apply to pretty much all jobs, but they still have it on the books that if they could, they'd fuck you over even harder. Georgia's for instance is 5.15 which can come up in some niche circumstances, and some don't even have a listed minimum
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List of European countries by minimum wage
Don't forget cost of living. Monaco might not be the easiest city to find affordable housing.
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I think New Hampshire is taking "Live Free or Die" too literally
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Show me how you convince someone making $40k that someone making $400k: 1. isn't rich. And 2 shares their class struggle.
The fact is they don't and they'll never see it that way.
You can say you're fighting billionaires all you want but what ppl see is you're trying to fight 350k makers which they could be some day.-
Tax brackets exist. Which means both the person making 40k and 400k were taxed the same on that first 40k they made. If you raised taxes on people making over 350k they would be taxed at the same rate as everyone else on all the money they make up to 350k, and only the money over 350k (50k) is taxed at the higher rates. 95% of the population does not fall in that 350+ a year grouping.
So your argument is that there are a few outlying cities where making 400k isn't enough, but there is no city in the u.s. that you can't find a place to stay for $5,000 a month....15% of their income. While many Americans are paying over 30% of their income to housing.
400k, you can cut costs in your budget and buy a $50,000 car within a year. 40k, you can cut costs and buy that car... Never.
There is a huge difference between someone making 400k/year and making $25 million/day, yeah. But if you think 95% of the population doesn't deserve a chance to enjoy life because you someday might be taxed the same on your first 350k, and you may have to be taxed higher on the 12.5 percent of your income that you would be paying 100% of towards living quarters if you were in the 40k group.. I think it's greedy.
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I came into this thinking $15 was too low so it makes the poster seem like the bad guy
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A republican should make $15/h
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hey now why'd you have to crop it so we don't get to see how fucking old this tweet screencap is?
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I found it this way
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It's been three or four days since we've seen this posted, so it was overdue.
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Conservative: yes
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... (yes)
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Society needs Mandatory Service Worker Service. Like Mandatory Military Service, except you are required to spend a year working a full time minimum wage job with no outside financial support before you turn 25
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doubt it would help, these people have no empathy
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Don't forget the I was treated like shit, thus today they don't deserve better mentality.
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did you just have this list of people you don't respect ready to go, imaginary person I made up for this fake conversation meme?
Also, 'the job you do creates less value than the wage you're demanding for it' and 'I don't respect you' are not the same sentence. They're not even the same category of statement. The former is an assertion of fact (which can be true/false, depending on the job/wage), the latter a subjective value judgment.
111 comments