More than 24 hours rent if you want a weekend tho.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
553 points (98.1% liked)
textsfromsolarpunk
246 readers
1 users here now
Inspiring, infuriating, meaningful or amusing, solar and punky text posts. From Tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, greentext boards, or wherever.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Yeah. We should have maybe 3 workdays per week. Maybe less
Walmart's gross profit for 2023 was 147 billion. They could easily pay a living wage, instead they exploit their employees labor.
They exploit mentally handicapped people. Like how fucking evil do you have to be to steal from a mentally handicapped person? Whatever level that is, Walmart blew past it decades ago and kept on running.
No, no, no, they help the mentally handicapped by providing them with employment. /s
$147,000,000,000 ÷ 2,100,000 employees = $70,000 profit per employee.
Imagine if they decided to give even half of that back to their employees. That would more than triple the income of their minimum wage workers.
And yes, I know there's no way in hell that happens because they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders blah blah blah. Just imagine a more fair world with me for a second.
Yes we are drooling socialist cucks
And keep in mind, as Jon Stewart reminds us, we subsidize the employees low wage in social programs including food stamps. It’s the worst of all worlds.
#transcription
teaboot
Not to be a drooling socialist cuck, but if a full day's labour can't purchase three square meals, 24 hour's worth of rent and utilities, a fraction of a month's clothing budget, and a reasonable portion to be saved for when you can no longer comfortably work, what the fuck are we doing shit for?
I say minimum wage should be set at the first level subdivision, but as an annually readjusted calculation, where one month's wages is no less than is necessary for the state/province/territory/etc.'s average rent to be at most 40% of that minimum wage.
The reason I say 1st level subdivision instead of nationally is because setting it nationally squeezes rural wage givers unnecessarily while making wage earners in urban centers starve.
By operating at a more localized level, you're less likely to run into this issue, and also it creates a gradient of wage markets which will naturally incentivize the creation of single income rent supporting jobs in economically underdeveloped regions, meaning that you can actually use the difference between the highest and lowest minimum wage in a country as a metric on income equality and equality of development opportunities.
Federal government workers in the US generally have a "base salary," which stays the same across all regions, so you can easily compare. And then they get a regional adjustment, based on where they actually live, called "locality pay." I think this is recalculated annually based on the specific areas. It's almost certainly more complicated than that, but I think that's the gist.
I agree with you, and my point is that the US government already does this! So if it's fine for government workers, just apply that same algorithm to a federal minimum wage, peg it with some inflation index, and we've ~~solved~~ made the minimum wage issue a whole lot better, so we can focus on other issues that don't have huge supermajorities of support.
That's kinda why I suggested the average rent as an index, since unless we do some Nordic style price adjustment control that limits how much prices can go up in a year or such, that will probably be the best indicator of the actual inflation that the average consumer is experiencing in any given year.
(use median rent rather than average rent)
How about whichever is higher? I feel like circumstances could lead to either causing wages to be lower than they would be if pegged to the other instead.
If some clown wants to charge $3B for rent in a hovel in the backstreets of Idaho, mean rent might not make a lot of sense.
I just want to put this into perspective for you: on average, if you were to buy a home, you would need a wage of 60,000 yearly just to pay the mortgage. No utilities, no food, no property tax, nothing else. Just the mortgage.
To avoid state violence.
Monthly clothing budget? Like in new cloths every month?