Minimum wage
Minimum wage
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, we people don’t want to work for shit pay, they cry that “nobody wants to work anymore”.
A one-bed apartment! The lap of luxury! Get three roommates and stop being lazy!
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
Education can and should be a gift, but they have successfully taught you that you are living a fuller life… By giving up all your freedoms and working for them, and being allowed resources when and how they want you to have them. What fun you are allowed, when and where.
Shit the courts are even saying homelessness is illegal, so it’s go to work the way they want you to work, or we will lock you up in a cell until you agree to go back to work for them. The continental u.s. is about 2 billion acres. So logic would say the median land a person should be able to live on is around 5 acres. Live with a family of 4, Thats 20 acres. I know very few people who can buy 20 acres of land today, let alone get into how much you’ll have to pay in taxes to hold onto it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
www.zillow.com/rental-manager/…/united-states/?be…
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 make housing actually affordable.
(BTW 60% of working individual Americans make less than this)
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.
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.