Minimum wage should have been $15 an hour 10 years ago.
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
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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.
$15/ an hour ain't shit anymore. $20+ should be minimum.
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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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”.
For me to win, others must lose
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.
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.
A one-bed apartment! The lap of luxury! Get three roommates and stop being lazy!
- Sent from my house
first house
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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.
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.)
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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At least 15$/h. And even that's not enough to live on these days.
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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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.
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.
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.
The whole concept of having to earn your right to keep on living is pretty wild
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And, federally, it's still half that ($7.25). Cheers!
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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I support abolishing minimum wage... once every person has sufficient healthy food, safe shelter, and needs based access to healthcare and educational resources.
Yeah, make the employers compete against UBI. Can you pay me more to work than the government pays me to sit on my ass?
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.
Both, ideally. Though UBI is still just a bandaid on the gushing wound that is capitalism; without radically correcting the housing market landleeches will just raise rents by the exact amount of UBI and we'll be in the exact same situation.
An actually good UBI system would also include shit in the verbiage of the law to prevent that.
Yeah when mass unemployment hit with the pandemic, we were shown exactly how insufficient most if not all states' unemployment benefits were for actually living on. I think having some kind of voucher system where this is one week's groceries, one month's rent, etc., would work, but of course they're going to find a way to game whatever we come up with. Saying "but they'll find loopholes" isn't a reason not to do the first step. That's letting perfection get in the way of progress, and it's pretty much the entire corpo pol playbook.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I think the key difference is that I grew up in the North. I can't speak on what everyone did but my conservative friends and any conservative relatives of my friend group were acceptable if not very generous with their tip. In any case, I know this is how politics goes but generalizing your ideological opposition as the scum of the earth isn't terribly productive or insightful. However, the people you grew up around sound pretty bad and your criticisms of them are much more justified.
I was a server for years and I don’t know what political views my customers had directly, but my absolute favorite people to serve were tradesmen with their families (at least locally, tradesmen are often assumed to be conservative). They tended to be pretty relaxed and tip well. Those are historically union jobs, and I don’t know if the people working them still vote in favor of worker solidarity, but they still culturally support it, ime.
My least favorite people were also people who are often assumed to be conservative, for what it’s worth: families on their way home from church. They were nitpicky, required a lot of attention, and tipped like shit, plus they often tried to get things comped off their bills by complaining about something on their way out.
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Ssshhhh! Stop contradicting their overwhelming bias!
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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)
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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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.
$15 is a start. How about $20 and adjusted to inflation yearly?
It's actually more like $25-30 now since we've been having this bullshit "conversation" for so long.
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I came into this thinking $15 was too low so it makes the poster seem like the bad guy
A republican should make $15/h
“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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