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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
They really just want slaves, but they know that’s a line they can’t say anymore. In public.
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.
Baby Boomers really struggle to accept their enormous share of how we got to this place.
Invariably it’s some Millennial’s fault. And by Millennial, I mean anyone who looks under 40.
Ask him how those Reaganomics are working for him.
The problem is that those Reaganomics affect younger much worse than older. He probably still did fine and that’s why he didn’t understand what others are complaining.
“makinh a living” and “surviving” are two different things
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.
Aha, Snopes rates it as “True”, therefore nobody wants to work anymore!
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.
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.
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
This is a pretty privileged statement. We’re not at a point in society where robots and machines can produce everything we need, which means people need to do it. Why would other people need to labor for your existence while you do nothing? Every creature on the planet labors in its own way to continue living, and humans are no exception.
Did you consider they mean you have to pay others to keep living on top of the living part which includes feeding/caring for yourself. You are born into a system where you have to do many things outside of it. Just the concept that all of the land was divided up by groups and claimed so the people born in those areas have to pay them, work for them, and be forced to go through their education systems is crazy. You can’t exactly choose to leave either, the land is all claimed by other systems that will have strict immigration policies and their own rules for life forced on you.
Freedom is long gone.
and be forced to go through their education systems is crazy
Education is a huge gift, and your education benefits not only you, but the society you live in. Why would you complain about receiving a free education, which allows you to live a richer, and fuller life?
Depends on the education. I don’t think those born in russia or North Korea are getting that “richer and fuller life”
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My point was more that people have a fundamental right to live, but sure
What does that even mean? Of course you have a fundamental right to keep your life. That doesn’t mean you have the right to receive food and shelter without effort, when those things require effort to produce. Yet we do sometimes provide those things to people who don’t labor. They’re not very nice, and they don’t provide a life of abundance, but they are available to many people who wouldn’t have had those options at earlier points in history. It is a great advancement in our society that we can provide for the basic needs of people who aren’t capable of providing for themselves, either in whole, or in part. But if you’re capable of working, and providing for yourself, then you should meet that challenge with urgency, especially since the taxes from your labors contribute to the assistance for the incapable that I mentioned above. We may eventually reach a point where nobody needs to labor, but not in our lifetime.
We could already have been at that point if 99% of the actual value of our labor wasn’t stolen by the rich. But sure, I guess we can’t reach it with this attitude
And, federally, it’s still half that ($7.25). Cheers!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Where in the U.S. is 7.25 even a remotely livable wage? The U.S. government already has locality calculations for different municipalities that wouldn’t be hard to do with a minimum wage where high cost areas would have a higher minimum wage and low cost areas would have a lower one
1/3 of your income for rent is higher than financial experts advise. You should try to keep it under 25%
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.
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 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.
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.
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Ssshhhh! Stop contradicting their overwhelming bias!
Church people are notorious for being the worst patrons.
$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.
We should use a money supply where they can’t do that!
If you’re suggesting something like cryptocurrency or a return to the gold standard, I challenge you to explain how that would help in this situation.
In this situation our pay is getting cut every year, at a greater rate than minimum wage is going up.
$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.
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 $40.
In the end it’s about a wage being livable, whatever that needs to be. And it probably shouldn’t be a per hour number, as a company forced to pay per hour an amount can easily just reduce hours, defeating the point. Some sort of universal basic income, so wages become a supplement and not slavery? We have to change somehow.
If you think a job should exist, the people working that job should be paid enough to live comfortably.
You don’t get to look down on people flipping burgers and sneer that they should get a real job if you want McDonald’s to exist - you’re essentially saying people should be punished for delivering a service that you want - it’s sickening.
At least 15$/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.
It was hard to live on that 20 years ago.
“But you clearly deserve more than $15 an hour. What do you do, what do you deserve to earn, and why?”
Minimum wage should have been $15 an hour 10 years ago.
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
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.
That’s not correct.
The average wealth in this country is ~250k a person
Yeah their number sounded really high, but fuck it hurt to see 250k as well. Do I count as 0 or a negative number if I have more debt than my possessions are worth?
I think
0EDIT: I meant to say the total asset value.? I’m not sure. I think the number came from total wealth as an object, not total net worth.
Could still be correct, average is heavily skewed by the millionaires/billionaires.
No. No way. A million a person would mean $325 ish TRILLION for just the US. I think that’s around half the global wealth?
So you’re saying we just need more economic imperialism?
No
The median income is supposedly around 64k, which already paints a different picture.
The average wealth could be $1,990,000 and they’d still be incorrect, lol (assuming the minimum value for “multimilion”, $2 million).
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.
They’re optimally distributed if you’re near the top.
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.
But if you ask them if someone deserves a million dollars per hour for shitposting on Twitter they look at you like you just burned an effigy in their front lawn. Not the brightest bunch
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?
Dare I say it’s totally fucking Marxist and anti-American to suggest that people be paid for their labor based on financial need? This also makes boomers have a meltdown
This is why fast food locations are closed during school hours obviously.
I shitpost on Lemmy; what do I get?
A hard time?
Correct!
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.
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.
Gross income, roughly for a 35-40h workweek$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.
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
List of European countries by minimum wage
Don’t forget cost of living. Monaco might not be the easiest city to find affordable housing.
It’s notable that the countries with no legal minimum wage are also those with the highest wages. That’s because these countries have replaced laws with collective agreements. This goes to show that united workers can create better results than politicians.
It’s a really unfortunate effect of minimum wage. It turns into maximum wage, because employers can point at a minimum wage and say “hey I already pay you 0.01€ more than minimum, go back to work and be thankful”, whereas union wages are based on constant negotiation and actual statistics of what is paid in the market.
I really don’t want my wage to be determined on country-wide politics. In my opinion, it’s much more logical to let each sector determine it for themselves. Especially in times like this where right wing parties are gaining influence due to immigration issues. Why would I have to take a pay cut, because a lot of old people are afraid of immigrants? It makes no sense. Issues like that make people vote against their own interest.
The best way to put a value on work is by letting the people in the sectors decide. Both sides of the table of course. But just not political.
(I do realize that union agreements are also political in that both employers and enployee unions are democratic, but at least it’s confined to that topic and to that sector.)
I agree that legislative parliaments shouldn’t determine minimum wages.
Minimum wages are a safeguard against certain forms of wage theft, IMO, because the biggest stick around acts as your compulsory union.
Voluntary unions should then collectively determine minimum wages in a separate body.
I do not agree that there should be sector-specific minimum wage alone as every human being has worth and thus their time as well. This does not exclude sector-specific negotiations.
Yes, one builds on top of the other. That’s how it works ideally.
It is however easier to get workers to unite when there’s no legal minimum to fall back on. Also, when the majority of workers are unionized, the legal minimum is irrelevant and only serves as a talking point against the actual negotiations.
Minimum wage makes sense in countries where unions can’t get a foothold, but it’s a double edged sword: It’s keeping unions from establishing, because a lot of people will gladly leave their negotiations up to the politicians and not risking sticking their nose out.
Quite a lot of the things that people take for granted now started as union contracts. Paid holidays, working hours being less han 80h/week, maternity/paternity/family leave, sick leave/pay, paid breaks, paid pension etc.etc.
NONE of that happened due to political parties feeling a need to require employers to pay out more or secure the working class… Never happened.
It might be elevated to law in some countries by now, but it always always started with unions demanding it and going to conflict over it.
Even when the conflicts failed, it made the premises for putting it into law. That is how working hours have decreased. Unions wanted it, didn’t get it at first, but still got it second time around, when the notion hit the government workers, making it necessary to lift the idea into law to keep functioning.
Without unions, we’d still be shoveling coal into a furnace 80 hours a week, because that’s what made financial sense for the business owners.
I think New Hampshire is taking “Live Free or Die” too literally
