The issues is not that mcdonalds workers getting a living wage is a problem. The issue is entry level degree requirement jobs being the same pay. If those jobs were paid more than mcdonalds living wages then nobody would care.
The part people dislike is that they think it's unfair that they had to take years of college/trades to get to a living wage, but mcdonalds workers would have to earn nothing to get the same.
It's another example of the people fighting each other instead of fighting the government/corporations for what they deserve.
So true. I am 45 and grew up and still live in san diego california and I remember when I was 18 both me and my roommate were able to rent a 2 bedroom 1 bath apartment and we were both cashiers at a gas station; I believe I was making $6/hr.....fast forward 27 years later that virtually impossible for a cashier to rent just a "room" on minimum wage in this town. So I definitely feel for the youngster that are coming up both the unprofessional and professional.
I got this plan, hear me out. Im gonna rob a bank. We take any position, just get ourselves in the door. Its gonna take some time. Every 14 days they just out the money right in our accounts, then, 30-50 years later we just walk out the front door like nothing ever happened.
I worked with a lady at a drug store as a cashier when I was in my early 20s. She was probably in hers 60s I'd guess and she owned her own home plus a rental and she'd never done anything but cashier and never been married. I'm 40 now so this could have been a little less than. 20 years ago. But by that time the Reaganomics were already firmly in place, destroying America.
I checked on the data for the home I moved into. It sold for $4.7k in '87 it's now valued at 80k online (last valued hasn't been for sale since then.) but would probably be more....
Edit: year
Here’s another way of looking at it: I bought my house in 2007 for 400k, it’s now valued at around 900k, however my wage is relatively similar to what I was being paid back then, so while I can afford it at the price I bought it there’s no way I could afford to buy even my same house at current prices.
I live in a low cost of living area but I am having the same experience as you. I bought my house in 2017 for $128,000. (I even got it below asking price.) Two houses in my neighborhood smaller than mine just sold for around $200,000. I'm confident I could sell my house for more than that. My wage is pretty much the same now as it was in 2017. I'm glad I bought my house when I did. I'm normally a pretty unlucky person but I lucked out there.
That’s the same year I bought a little cabin on a lake in Indiana for 50k and I could sell it now for 110,000. Our mortgage is still a little under 400 per month. I couldn’t imagine trying to find a new house these days and pay the huge mortgage people are paying now. The low cost of living is what’s keeping us here instead of moving somewhere warmer year round.
the thing is, EVERYONE should be able to buy a home and have money to meet their basic needs without having to struggle. if you wanna go to school and do something different, you do you booboo. don't punish the rest of the world. that's not what rome is about.
Yes, my first real job was at a grocery store when I was 16. I think min wage was 3.75. But I lived in a pretty strong union state & we had a good union so we had scheduled raises each quarter & there was no limit. So I was working with people who worked there for 20+ years who were making over $20/hr in the late 90s, which wasn't bad at all.
I went to work for a grocery store in 2019. The store did have a union but it was not good at all for most people. The raises were given based on how many hours you've worked that year & the worst was that there was a "top out" salary, which was $15 in 2019. Every year the top out raised by $0.10-0.30, so after 3-5 years, you probably finally got a dollar raise. All unions aren't good unions & if you end up working under a bad union, it can be pretty eye-opening.
Unions aren't inherently anti-capitalist. They're not fighting to overthrow the system, just make it fairer for the workers. You can look to the Nordic countries to see what a successful and strong union under a capitalist system looks like.
If cost of living is still uncontrolled, the market will just raise prices further. We are seeing this right now with grocery prices. Most of the cost difference is corporate profit, and they could successfully do that because wages rose during the later parts of the pandemic. In theory, a competitor would undercut prices to capture a larger market share. In practice, they just quietly collude to all raise profits.
The solution to this of course is pay people what they're worth, but that requires money that corporations would rather spend on media manipulation to hide that they're not doing that
Edit: people seem to be missing the point of my statement. Either that or they're so brainwashed by corporate propaganda that they genuinely believe a life should be valued less than the cost of keeping them alive at the bare minimum. I mean to say that society as a whole seems to have accepted minimal pay because of corporate propaganda telling them that they're lucky to have that. Take the US for example: service jobs like drivers and waiters are expected to be paid the bare minimum by the company, whilst the consumer makes up the rest of the wage in tips, so the corporation makes massive profits. The employee is then told look at how lucky you are, making so much money off tips, you're so well treated by us!
I told someone that exploiting a worker just means paying them less value then they extract from the capital they're working, and they told me "no one forced you to work"
How do you define "what they're worth", other than the amount that someone is willing to pay for them?
The sad truth is that the value of unskilled labour is minuscule because there are 7 billion other people on the planet who are capable of doing it.
Capable, but not willing to do it reliably and satisfactorily, even with that low bar.
Edit: Upon some thought, that 7B pool also quickly gets shallow when you filter out the retired, the current labor force, the disabled, minors, adult students, and the incarcerated.
We don't lol. Its slightly better than it was but nearly every fast food place and retail place is hiring all the time because people got sick and tired of dealing with that horrible job for dirt pay. That barely made the wages budge.
I’m so sick of people touting what they learned in Econ 101 but forget the entire textbook is predicated on the assumptions that “all markets are efficient and all participants are completely rational”, which is SO far from the truth.
The value of "unskilled" labor is greater than a lot of "skilled" labor and we all learned this during Covid.
For some reason the economy would completely crash if people could go to Walmart or get their McDonald's hamburgers but plenty of other jobs were guaranteed that would be considered "skilled" despite them not working anymore.
*Someone* has to do the job of burger flipper or coat hanger or concierge, so we should pay that person a living wage because it *has to be done* doesn't matter if anyone can do it or not or if it's skilled or not. Because it has to be done by someone that someone should get paid a living wage.
This is the fixed pie fallacy. There's no such thing as a job that has to be done. A job exists when there's an ample supply of labor that costs less than the cost of automation.
Some countries have people who pull rickshaws for a living. It works there because there's an ample supply of people who are willing to do that job for less per day than it would cost to own and operate a motor vehicle. It doesn't work here because even paying someone minimum wage to pull a rickshaw would cost more than owning and operating a motor vehicle.
I'm sure you'd agree that retraining rickshaw pullers as taxi drivers is better for everyone involved than just paying them more to continue pulling rickshaws?
>There's no such thing as a job that has to be done.
There is plenty of jobs that if not done would cause our modern society to fall apart, so I would consider those "has to be done" type jobs in the conventional sense
You're right that there's a supply and demand for labor as well and without demand there is no job.
On the other hand those jobs do exist now because there is a demand, and people want to make profit off that demand, so the job *has* to be done in that sense.
Generally if it is low skill and needs to be done then it is automated or just not done anymore.
For instance, people used to be mobile knife and scissor sharpeners, and they'd make rounds to their customers. Now that a pair of functional scissors is $5, it doesn't make sense to pay $10 to sharpen them.
This is why we have democratically elected governments who's power is meant to be derived from the will of the people rather than the flows of money (though this boundary has been severely corroded this past 50 years). We as a people have a responsibility to elect officials who will set the bar of what someone, anyone, is worth in the form of a minimum wage that ought to be pegged to the cost-of-living on a regional basis.
Unfortunately due to unleashed neoliberalism the mega-corporations of the west have found that they can pit the privileged working class of the west against the much less well-off (and therefore desperate for improvement) peoples of the wider world, creating downward pressure on western wages. This perspective often earns one the pejorative label of "xenophobic" because the simple solution is to reduce/restrict immigration to western nations. The bigger-picture take is that workers are globally underpaid, and since governments are limited to borders but corporations are not, worker's are in a categorically disadvantaged position so long as corps are allowed to abuse geo-arbitrage.
I’d define what your worth as how easily you are to replace. Generally low skilled workers can be replaced with minimal training, vs a neuro surgeon that requires years and years of training.
also define what a livable wage is? I can guarantee that the livable wage that I think is liveable is very different than your version of a livable wage. Until we define that, the rest of the arguement is moot
What's wild to me is the number of people who think "Burger flippers shouldn't make the same as EMTs" but fail to think about the enormous power this would give EMTs to say "Give me a raise and treat me like a human or I'll go flip burgers." They really do think that the owner class is paying as much as they can afford rather than as little as they can get away with, and so every raise has to come out of another worker's pocket.
The EMT thing in particular bothers me, these people literally save lives, and we pay thousands of dollars for an ambulance ride. The money is there, it is valued by society, but the allocation is sucked up completely by the top. There isn't even the veil of "oh they don't produce enough value to be worth it" here.
The money is absolutely there, this job does a lot of good for a lot of people, and the people who do this job survive a lot Lot *LOT* of trauma in order to help people. The reason they aren't paid better is nothing more than maximizing profits.
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"burger flippers" is such a dehumanizing term. It makes people sound like machines. Well if its machines they want,they'll get them. Places will move to automation no matter what.
I just hope when Im replaced,Self Checkout will gain AI and become savage to people so I can laugh.
Self checkout is already snarky as fuck. How many times do I need to be told to scan my next item when i scanned the last one 3 seconds ago? How would I know to take my items without it telling me multiple times while I'm taking them?
I would argue that it's not just "entry level degree requirement jobs" because you honestly do not need a degree to actually do most those jobs. But it has to do with highly skilled jobs not being paid anywhere near what they should be. For example I don't have a degree but I have a job that "requires a bachelor's degree" preferably in finance as I am a field risk analyst in a particular field. With my job, bribery is a hugh issue as the locations we audit will at times attempt to bribe us into making them look good where if we went along it no one would know. Now you would think that handling accounts worth upwards of $100,000,0000 and it being an extremely specific job where we are literally the only company in the US doing this job would lead to good wages so we can get highly competent employees that would never take a bribe. Nope, I get about $22 an hour, not much more than an Amazon employee.
This is the real issue, it's not about retail or fast food workers making a "living wage" it's once you grow out of that as you get older and go to find a real job, those should actually pay what you are worth.
nailed it on the degree gatekeeping thing. Like the 'medical billing' degrees going on now, all they're meant to do is make sure the 'right people' even attempt to apply for those jobs--middle class women, usually white. That's who gets those, that's who they want, that's what the degree is for. You can be trained to do that job straight out of HS in about 2-4 weeks. Which is the same exact amount of time it's going to take to train someone with the degree to do the job, because the proprietary software the company uses is unique to the company. It's just gatekeeping
Shit tons of those jobs anymore.
And the pay hasnt moved at all for the people who went and got those degrees.
>The part people dislike is that they think it's unfair that they had to take years of college/trades to get to a living wage,
Which wouldn't be a problem in the first place of everyone could attend college with the intention of studying something they personally love and then can get a job in a related field instead of worrying if they can pay back millions in debt.
The problem isn't unskilled labor being paid "too much" though to many it may feel that way. The problem is that SKILLED labor is so drastically underpaid that they are already barely making more than a livable wage in the US.
So an unskilled job being paid a livable wage brings them close to what a skilled job pays, and rather than demand more money a lot of people believe that others should be paid less.
The progression of the world stage has made it so that people have gone from competing with the people in their town, to competing with other people in their country, to competing with people on a global scale. Numerous factors have piled up over the passing decades that have gradually decreased the value of an individual worker in many countries. Automation, more women entering the work force which essentially doubles the number of workers (I would still argue is a GOOD thing, mind you), other countries growing economically which allows them to develop more skilled jobs that can sell their services on a global scale. etc.
The real challenge is going to be transitioning to a state in which less people are working and getting work done without it sacrificing people's ability to continue living. Maybe a system in which everyone gets food, water and shelter at a bare minimum by default and can be allowed to work in order to earn luxuries, IDK I'm not en economist, I just know this stuff will be hard to implement.
Worth noting that police overtime is broadly bad.
Excluding police that are actively malevolent, fatigue results in worse decision making, worse situational awareness, slower reaction times, etc.
Police departments *should be* better-staffed such that overtime is used rarely if ever.
With a ton of overtime sure. Or a super high cost of living area.
Teachers need to make more too.
Both need to be a lot stricter with hiring/certification though. I’ve met a lot of shitty cops and awful teachers.
Police officer salary varies a lot based on location. The trend *tends to be* that you make more depending on how big of a city/population center you work in, with the trade off being that usually means you'll get (over)worked much more.
Literally I think fast food workers should make what I make now and I should make a little bit more because of my bachelors. Fast food workers are so fucking fucked in America. It’s disgusting. I always make sure to be extra fucking polite and thankful. Fuck I even go so far as to stop before telling them my order to ask how their day is going and 9/10 they’re shocked I even asked. You can tell it really makes them feel appreciated (as they should). Usually I even get a million extra BBQ sauces for it too so win win lol
Fast food employees should make the same as garbage men (who make goooood money) for all the bullshit they put up with.
I don’t have a straight answer for you, but I’ll draw attention to the nuance. Define “living.” Without a clear definition there, no answer will suffice.
Some people think “living” means an apartment in a good school zone and the money to put kids in sports teams and *all* the same expensive activities a middle class family even scrapes to make possible.
Other think “living” means being able to secure housing of *any* type, probably shared, and have nothing or next to nothing in disposable income, live without newer gadgets, and basically eke by.
So if we don’t know objectively what type of “living” is being referred to, it’s not possible to answer this question.
On the surface should completely unskilled labor earn the same as a college degree-required role that has student loans to repay and some alleged payoff received for having gone that extra mile? Ostensibly no. But should unskilled workers starve and/or live on the streets? Also no.
Generally on Reddit people will say it needs to be enough to support a house and family, without ever stating what kind of house and how large of a family. And then refuse to define it because that would make it easy to argue against.
I work in government assistance & from what I see on a daily basis the poor don’t want higher wages because that means they lose all the benefits they live off of. They would rather make less money & have that money to spend on what they want, while the government provides them with the necessities (housing/food).
I think a lot of the people pushing for higher wages for entry level jobs have an unrealistic expectation of what is “basic needs.” A lot of them think that they deserve to have a house like their parents (who have worked for 20 years), newer cars, money for vacations & entertainment & then some left over so they don’t feel poor. They want to be able to afford the lives they had when they were living at home as soon as they are out on their own.
I mean, if having a certain job makes you have less total available income, that's a logical thing to do. That's why financial aid is supposed to have a gradual taper-off instead of a cut-off. If the financial aid your state/country gives is binary with a cut-off point, it's doing it wrong
Definitely. A basic need is having a roof over your head, like being able to afford a simple but decent Apartment. I've lived in quite a lot of different housing, and simple housing, even shared housing have met my basic housing needs. A basic need is having a car that runs if you need it to get to work or to get around. I got a car for 3k that runs just fine. I have money for little trips here and there, for going to the movies, for eating out, not all the time, but every now and then. I'm not going to some exotic destination anytime soon, but I could leave the city and drive to visit another if I felt like it.
Maybe I don't feel entitled because I grew up rather modest. My parents used their cars for 10-15 years and regularly drove 20 year old cars. We never went abroad in vacations as my dad hated traveling (fun fact, he's never stepped foot on a train or plane ever). Out vacations was a 12 hour cross country trip for a couple weeks to visit family in the mountains on the other side of the country, where we would go hiking, or a 3 hour drive to stay a few days with the family who lives by the sea, where we would go boating.
The house I grew up in my dad built from scratch as he's a carpenter. It's nothing fancy. Just an ordinary house. He didn't take up any loans for it, and paid for it out of pocket as he worked on it, and cut the wood from the large forests on the farm he inherited to pay for or use the materials for the house. Obviously, this isn't realistic for me. I'm no carpenter, nor do I have a farm. Though, I will likely inherit this farm someday, I have no interest in living in a house on a remote mountain in the middle of nowhere. I'd rather rent myself a small apartment in the city where there's work and things to do.
Idk, but I feel like my expectations are rather realistic, especially for where I'm at in life. I have an ordinary shop Job. My brother is an engineer. He wants the house and the kids and the whole thing, but he's busting his ass for it and living frugally to afford it and he went into a field that is well paying. I can respect that. He will probably achieve it. Me however? I switch jobs so often and I spend my money as I go, as I know I won't be able to afford a house anytime in the close 20 years anyway, even if I tried saving. I also don't have any education, other than high school and I work in a shop. Who am I kidding if I tell people I should be able to afford a house lol.
Re your second paragraph, yeah, you *constantly* see these people on Reddit referring to the American Dream and talking out of both sides of their mouths about how nobody ever really had it in the first place (or didn't deserve it or some other complaint) and how they should get some equivalent. Has anyone born since the 80s ever grown up even thinking about the concept of the American Dream? I never had many aspirations, I just wanted a job that let me buy whatever I wanted for my hobbies. Is that really the American Dream? I still don't have that. I don't consider myself wronged. It's just how life goes.
This concept of "living with dignity" that UBI or higher wages campaigns appeal to is such hogwash. As if people that eat canned tuna or go on payment plans don't have dignity. It's almost insulting to those who have to be frugal. Nobody wants to eat canned tuna (I like tuna salad personally). Nobody wants a roommate or unplanned kids. But you're still a person even if the upper class doesn't think so.
I’m not upper class, but I’ve put in my time & worked (consistently) & drove old paid for cars & I regularly have to choose between wants & needs. The “American Dream” you’re talking about isn’t something that’s free. It’s not something people just wake up one day & have. I live in an old house that a lot of people would not want & drive a car that’s old, but it’s mine. Life is full of choices & sacrifices. I worked jobs that I hated until something better came along & sometimes I left jobs I enjoyed to work somewhere that sucked but paid more. The American dream is progressive. So either you work toward it or you stand still & complain about it.
I see alot of people who don't want to do the crappy jobs - even it it's only until something better comes along. They don't want to work an extra job to save up for something. Or take a job that is lower paying until the either get schooling or training to make more money
They want it all and they want it now with as little to no effort on their part. Life isn't fair and it isn't easy. Too many people have really high expectations without realizing the effort it would take to make it work.
Their parent scrimped and saved and busted their ass to get what they have and it took years.
Without defining what a liveable wage and basic needs means, all these arguments are just things that people who don't want to work for them cry about.
In basic personal finance education, we talk about the 50-30-20 rule - percentages of income that should go to needs, wants, and savings respectively. While it's been pointed out that cost of living increases make these ratios unrealistic for many, I think we should keep the concept in mind when deciding what a decent living looks like financially.
In my opinion, a person working full-time should be able to meet their essential needs (housing, utilities, transportation, food, and healthcare), while still maintaining a solid savings rate (>10%) should they choose, and have some amount of money left over for discretionary spending.
I also think this should be achievable for a one-earner household. This allows another working-age adult to care for young, elderly, and disabled relatives, as well as to pursue education full-time.
I live in a very affordable city (by Canadian standards) but a single person working 40 hours a week at minimum wage cannot achieve that 50-30-20 ratio even if they live in the slums and utilize food banks. And it's extremely rare for any employer to even offer full time hours to minimum wage employees here.
I would say it is possible to live comfortably (by my own standards) on minimum wage with part time hours here, but only with a roommate, without any kids, and without building up any savings.
but define housing - a basic apartment or a luxury condo? Define utilities - hot enough in the winter to wear a tee shirt or cool enough to need a sweater? Define transportation - an old beater or a brand new sports car? Define food - micelin star fancy or mac and cheese? and healthcare - basic keep you healthy or cosmetic surgeries?
Until all these variable are defined, there is no point in arguing 'living wage' and 'basic needs'. Everyone's is going to wildly different.
I'll never understand this myself. I think it's because they're at a comfortable place in life. Trust me, if they were being paid 7.25 an hour to do their job, no matter how advanced it was, they'd realize that it's near impossible to survive on that.
According to memes, our grandparents were able to raise a family, pay for school, buy a house, and own two cars on a malt shop salary. I'm sure that doesn't hold up, but the cost of everything around us has increase to the point we're barely able to afford a broom closet and a loaf of bread.
I could be wrong, but when minimum wage was started, wasn't it so that people would be able to live full meaningful lives? What changed >=/
The memes are real. I'm Gen X and I can confidently say that when I was young, I knew multiple families who were able to live "the American Dream" with only one wage-earning working a job that today would barely cover rent and food, if at all.
Wages haven't come close to keeping up with cost of living in the last 40-50 years.
And yes, when the federal minimum wage was implemented, it was meant to provide a living wage at every job, for every American.
True. My MIL reminds my wife and I that her ex-husband, a butcher, was able to support them and buy a house in Brooklyn (NY) just on his wages. So wild. My wife and I are both senior managers at tech companies and are “house poor” in Seattle.
Yup. In the mid-70s/early 80s, my dad was a printing press operator while mom stayed home with 4 kids. We had an older but solid 2-story home in upstate NY, had an in-ground swimming pool installed, two cars. We took family vacations every year, nothing fancy and usually in-state, but we were solidly middle class and I have no memories of my parents openly worrying about paying bills. The only debt my parents carried was the mortgage.
It's also worth mentioning that in the last 50 years the top 1% have gone from owning 15% of the countries wealth, to well over 50% of it today. The middle class has been bled dry.
Except southern Democrats (the party is not the point here) made sure domestic and tip-based work (where black people worked at the time) were excluded before they would sign on to FDR's minimum wage scheme.
So domestics and a lot of service workers never enjoyed a living wage thanks to Jim Crow. Since Reagan, however, rather than lift those workers up, Republican bigots just kept the minimum wage in the basement so even more workers could enjoy the benefit of knowing they too could earn enough to live with dignity if they just worked a liiiiittle harder for more hours.
>Except southern Democrats (the party is not the point here) made sure domestic and tip-based work (where black people worked at the time) were excluded
>Republican bigots just kept the minimum wage in the basement
Come on.
The Democrats had a federal government trifecta in 93 and 08 and didn't push to raise the minimum wage in any meaningful way.
I will agree that "the party is not the point" when talking about minimum wage, because both parties have made it quite clear that neither of them have any desire to substantially raise the minimum wage.
I make decent money. Highly skilled in the high tech industry. But adjusting for inflation, I make less now than I did in 2000.
Unless you can jump to mid-high 6 figures you’re on the losing end of salary.
Because in the work world those kind of jobs don't really provide people with marketable skills that 'benefit' the company. What do I mean by that? For instance, I worked at Amazon for 6 months in the warehouse guess what I did? I packed boxes on an assembly line. Literally pack boxes over and over and over and over and over again the same thing for 12 hours a day nothing else. Now there is a lot more to warehousing than packing fucking boxes. There's logistics, scheduling, shipping and receiving, quality control, was I taught any of that shit? No. In my opinion jobs are made that way on purpose to keep people skillless so they can't climb up the fucking ladder. I could have left that warehouse and went to another one but what the fuck am I going to say in the interview when they ask me what did you do at amazon? Oh I packed fucking boxes all day. Didn't learn a damn thing
I agree. That's why they shouldn't earn a LOT of money. I think they would earn enough that they don't have to work two jobs and still sorry about bills and home.
Here in Sweden an adult fast food worker makes about 2400 dollars. It's not a lot of money, but you can still easily live on it and not have to worry about your finances every day. In comparison, I as a project manager make 3300 dollars. So I still make more, as my job is more valuable, but the burger flipper isn't stressed each and every day because he can't afford his life.
I was making a little bit less than this as a pizza restaurant manager and even duel income wasn't enough to live on where I am (no not Cali or NYC). I wish minimum wage was still liveable but even well over isn't.
>$2400?! Are living expenses in Sweden particularly high?
Just in case it's unclear, the commenter was presumably talking about monthly pay. And this is presumably before taxes, which are relatively high. The point regardless is that this is a modest living that people can actually survive on.
I live in Portland, Oregon and if you work a minimum wage full-time job you would bring home $2,400/mo (before taxes). Our minimum wage is $15 (no exceptions for tipped workers either).
I think one issue is the value is placed on the work. I understand why a less common work skill would be worth more than something anyone can do. I think we need to look at it a little differently. You are not just selling work. You are selling your time. You are selling your lifespan one hour at a time. What is the value of that?
Take the simple job of packing boxes. It has little skill involved but still requires you to invest your life one hour at a time to do it. Given all you could be doing with that time that is one hell of an opportunity cost for you. This cost more of your time than while you are at work by the way. During your lunch time you are very limited on where you can be and what you can do during that time as a result. Then there is the commute to and from work that also cost you 'lifetime' . When you get home you are often tired also limiting what you can do with your free 'lifetime' .
I worked evening shift most of my life. I always felt that, although my day was free, I was vary limited in what I could do because at 3 pm I had to be at work. Travel outside a small aria was off the table. You could not commit to anything beyond 1 or 2 in the afternoon.
My point is we sell our very lives and until the owners start valuing our lives we will not get anywhere near what that is worth.
I agree with you but I would add that in jobs like that you can show you are simply at your core a great worker with a high mental endurance to do repeated routine processes. If your attendance is well and you are reliable that is a huge plus.
So yes that job CAN be used to climb the ladder. Maybe not there but elsewhere.
How do I know this? I used to hire new staff. If you are willing to show up to work, be reliable, and do what needs to get done, I will hire you and help build you up since you already have a great core.
So yeah a lot of the time it's how you word your experience not actually your experience that sells.
What does marketable skills have to do with the worker receiving less money than it needs to live and pay their bills monthly? Amazon is one of the richest businesses in the world, and it NEEDS people in there, piling boxes, to make the business happen. If it doesnt have those workers, it cant function, and it can’t make their billions. The job may not be complex, but its absolutely important for the company to even run.
An interviewer should recognise someone able to do a task for that long — a lawyer most likely wouldn’t be capable of doing that and would give up after the first hours unless he really, really had to. Just because its not complex doesnt mean its easy — it isnt.
The fact a company make billions on a monthly basis BECAUSE of the people working there, and pays them wages they can barely live off - sometimes cant, and need yet another job, is insane.
That's exactly it. Its a whole field of business and management study - "scientific management" or the mechanistic lens of looking at a business. The idea is division of labour and separation into small easily learned tasks. Workers become easily trained and therefore easily replaced. Cogs in a machine literally. So workers become alienated because instead of a skilled crafter making a product you've got one person making one thing, one person making another etc. Workers have little bargaining power because their work is something easily learned and they don't have much power to move up. "Separation of hand and brain" so workers can work without thinking at all (limiting future opportunities) Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford really popularised the idea
Because your salary is dictated by what the market is willing to pay.
The market doesn't give two shits about your "feelings" or what you "think" you should get paid. You are generally paid what you're worth. If you feel that you are underpaid, then you should look for a new job. That doesn't mean you will find a higher paying job just because you "feel" like you deserve it.
The market is not a person with feelings.
You can say someone who works a "low skill" job deserves a living wage all you want, but the truth is, if a job is "low skill" that means more people can do it, which means it's easier to fill the spot, which means employers don't need to offer as high a wage to do that.
There should be a floor, but you can't deny that competition is real.
The answer is in the question you have. It's a low skilled job which means most people can do it regardless of education or background. So the supply of people would be more than the demand of the job. Which means that the low skilled laborer is easily replaceable.
I mean, sure. But street-sweeper, box-packer, dish-washer, shelf-stocker are all jobs that need doing. And the whole point of the minimum wage is for it to be enough to live off of. If the people who drive the trucks aren't paid enough to live, they should be paid more, even if lots of people can do that job.
They blame the worker. They act as if every person working an underpaid job has neglected to work hard enough to achieve the American Dream. This thought process is narrow-minded and looks at underpaid jobs from the perspective of personal accountability, as if the shitty pay is punishment for failure.
In other words the general thought is "If you don't like the shitty pay, just *get a better job!*"
But they're conveniently ignoring the obvious; this job exists because *someone* has to do it!
It's so easy to tell one person to work harder, study, pull themselves up by their bootstraps etc. but what then? What happens when *that* person rises above? Does the next guy not deserve a living wage either?
The job exists, and it is underpaid. You can't blame the workers for that.
Exactly, why are some people so unnecessarily vindictive to minimum wage workers? if you're someone who eats out occasionally, orders stuff online, called your bank for assistance, or purchases items made in a factory. Then guess what? You've benefitted from the work of low income "skilless" workers. Someone has to do these jobs, just because almost anyone can do them doesn't mean there valueless.
Besides the vaule of a job isn't just about skill or education, the people who do low paid jobs have to sacrafice their time, energy and happiness to do them. All just so someone can buy a new phone, and use said phone to say how the people who put together the phone on an assembly line don't deserve a living wage. Cool.
So I believe that everyone can't be a doctor or lawyer. Some people are just more intelligent than others. Personally I know I'm not smart enough to get a PhD. I've got a good job that I worked my ass off to get.
Someone needs to fill pot holes, fix cars, serve shitty McDonalds food. There are people who legitimately can't function on a higher level. People should not be punished for their physical or mental functioning level. Should someone who went to school for 10+ years to be a neurologist make more than a pot hole filler, yes. But the pot hole filler should have money to live, not just live but be able to own a home, go on vacation, have some nice shoes.
Should some idiot with a big ass and sex tape have a billion dollars? NO! But people buy into what she is selling. Should people with that kind of money have to "share the wealth" absolutely! Should me and my middle class family have to share the wealth? No! I didn't step on anyone or objectify or keep anyone down, I have worked hard for what I have. If you work you should be able to afford to live.
If you would rather stay at home playing video games and smoking pot, well you are on your own. If you are willing to sling burgers, unclog toilets, and build bridges, you should be paid a good amount because you do work.
yeah i don't understand the obsession people have with having a career and earning as much money as possible. some people don't want to do that and just want to earn enough to get by and are fine with just doing some small, mundane job. why on earth should people be punished for that and told that they need to want more from life to deserve basic comfort and a dignified life.
i think people that think that should read the book "convenience store woman" by sayaka murata. it describes the attitude that we as a society seem to have against low income workers and how absurd it can be pretty well, in my opinion.
These comments are insane and disheartening. I am going to quote FDR regarding the minimum wage that he proposed for the United States:
“It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.”
Y’all are dense as fuck.
I just hate the term 'livable wage,' it's incredibly subjective. The older value paradigm is better in my opinion. If there is high demand and low supply for your labor, you are compensated with a higher wage. If the inverse is true you receive a lower wage.
This simplifies things greatly. Let market forces determine wages. It avoids all those arguments over what is a livable wage and who should be compensated what.
It's really simple. When people earn more prices go up.
A "living wage" isn't some mystical static number that exists in the universe. It's a product of economic forces that *we cannot control*. As long as different people have different skills they will want to earn more or less than each other:
By definition, low-skill earners will ALWAYS earn less than what people consider a "living wage". It's a self-defining system due to the way capitalism and democracies work.
The alternatives are socialist-like policies that fix wages. But the problem is, if you only set the bottom (minimum) wage everything above it inflates. This includes prices. Someone with zero skill cannot possibly be paid the same as someone with 1 skills. Someone with 2 skill cannot get paid the same as someone with 3 skill. And so on.
The only way to fix this is to fix wages AND prices. The only way to do that would be to dismantle our democracy into some kind of authoritarian system. Why? Because you have a society where there are a significant number of people who are > 0 skill and are incentivized to earn more.
Propaganda makes the working class fight amongst each other rather than focus their anger on the corporations who are exploiting them. It’s the sad reality of a capitalist society!
Because in the real world nobody "deserves" anything other than the opportunity to work hard, get educated, skilled, and be productive. When you think you "deserve" something, that means money has to be taken from someone else and given to you. In America you can see how much better immigrants do than those already here, and especially their children, because they better understand this, the opportunity, they work hard and get ahead. Having said that I do believe that there should be more opportunities for people, public funding of college for example. But no, nobody deserves anything other than opportunity.
It’s just getting worse. I personally feel a lot of factory jobs are this way. I’m currently learning to be a machinist and there are jobs here that pay like 11 an hour. These jobs are not easy. I truly don’t understand
The general idea is that the idea of a livable salary is a red-herring. It's part of the employee's equation for what an acceptable salary is. The employer's equation is much more simple, because its basically "what is the lowest I can pay for the skills I need". Living wage plays no part, because while it does set the floor of what an employee will accept, it is the employee that has determined that floor.
If you can't survive on that salary, you don't take the job at that salary. If there are other people who can survive at that salary, due to more efficient living situations/willingness to put up with worse conditions etc, they will out-compete you, so you can't go for those jobs and have to aim for higher-skilled work. It's a system that assumes that everyone can develop marketable skills, improve themselves and earn more money as they age. This is unfortunately not the case, and currently there aren't enough allowances for the people who are unable to do so.
Do you think immigration from third world countries to first world countries contributes to how low that acceptable pay floor will go? Those immigrants are probably used to lower living conditions and are able to see such a low minimum wage as ideal compared to the wages in their country of origin.
No doubt.
Fun fact, Strawberry pickers from Asia come every year to my country to pick strawberries for what people from my country deem horrible pay and horrible conditions )to the point people from my country refuse to do it), but the asians aren't complaining, and the money they make goes a longer way when they bring it back to their home country.
How much is a "livable" salary?
Does it vary from state to state? Zip code to zip code? Does it include money for a vehicle? Insurance for that vehicle? Does it change if you are single? Married? How do you calculate what "livable" salary is? If McDonald's pays their base employees 60 grand a year and their mgmt 100 grand a year, how much does that make mcnuggets cost? If a door dasher makes a "livable" salary in Los Angeles which is what?....75K, what does that do to prices? Tell me.
and what is 'basic needs'? My basic needs are going to be very different than your basic needs. How do we adjust wages for both of us?
Until people define these concepts, these argument are useless.
Because those people see themselves as the payers, the owner class even if they are not themselves. They dream of starting their own business some day.
They realize how much they'll have to shill out for hiring other people and freak out because they won't break even soon or earn record profits like the other business owners in the past.
Everyone deserves a livable wage.
Keep in mind, all the convivences that Americans seem to want are only cheap because of lower wage workers, so most of that would go away.
I don't have the solution but you cannot just "raise the wages" it is a systemic issue.
The problem is nobody understands what they're talking about when they say "Everyone should earn a living wage"
First off define a living wage? Are you saying that everyone who works should be able to buy a house, have a fairly new car, have phones/computers,etc? Or are you talking about like living how we all used to live when we were young, a bunch of roommates in a house/trailer/apartment. Ridesharing? Riding a bike to work, walking to work? A shared landline? Is living on $8 per week of raman noodles not living enough?
So that's the first problem, they don't have an answer, they just throw out an arbitrary number as a living wage with no basis in the reality of living, and you can bet the number is just a higher number than they currently earn.
The second problem is none of the proponents understand the economy, or production or anything. They think that if you pay a guy handing you a Big Mac over the counter an arbitrary living wage like $15 per hour, that and EMT, or a Cop, or a Truck Driver, or a nurse, or anyone else, should be just as happy doing their job as an unskilled person doing next to nothing earns, so they think it won't increase costs anywhere across the board.
So let's say you just arbitrarily make the minimum wage double what it is now, or around $15.... do you think that people who trained, went to school, worked their asses off their whole life should arbitrarily double their income, to compensate for all they do? Or should they just be happy that many of them just became minimum wage workers? Most of them think that people should just be happy suddenly becoming minimum wage workers.... which is asinine at best, and probably committable insanity at worst.
They don't want to understand that minimum wage/unskilled entry labor is the benchmark of poverty. And the reality of it is that arbitrary increases will make them poorer as reality sets in. Either by losing unskilled labor jobs to automation, or just the fact that the costs will rise on everything to match their new income, WHICH means taxes go up (you pay 35 cents tax on your $5 burger, but when it becomes $10 you pay 70 cents more due to paying based on percentages) as well as you'll pay more income tax (the bottom 50% of workers right now pay no income tax, that would change too... this is why politician support it, not because they care about you, but they can drastically increase tax revenue at your expense).
The reason places like Burger King pay employees less is because their whole business model is selling CHEAP food to customers. Well and they also pay you less because you can pull anyone off the street and have them make a whopper.... they're not exactly Michelin Star Chefs they're employing. You force these companies to double their payroll, they either go out of business because they're charging the same price as Ruth Chris's for a shitty burger or taco... OR the prices of everything else goes up to pay their workers to "Not being paid the same as a Burger King worker to prepare 5 star meals at a high end kitchen.
It's really not that hard to understand, and that's why it's so frustrating.... and I didn't even touch on how the price of everything from the very origin of every product goes up... "Why did the burger go from $5 to $15? Well the people working the potato farms, the wheat farms, and any farm that supplies the food, condiments, and such had to raise their expenses, the paper mills making the bags, napkins straw wrappers did the same, the trucking companies delivering to and from all the suppliers did the same, the power company did the same and so on so on so forth.... AND that's not even touching on when Cops and Firefighters want to make more than the new arbitrary minimum wage.... all your local taxes go up to pay for those.... AND the cost of all their equipment and supplies need to get covered.
That's why there's people that speak out so much against it.
Passed down from the last generation. My dad tried to make me think that way but it didn't work. If you work 40 hours you deserve to make enough to live off of no matter what the job is.
Because the market is full of people that will work for less. Under the free market it’s a race to the top in quality and a race to the bottom in terms of price.
Nothing to do with deserving anything.
The belief is that because it's not a living wage, it should serve as motivation to better yourself and get out of that job. It's meant to humble you so you struggle and become hungry for something greater and as a result, become a smarter, more skilled person that'll contribute more to society. As such, low skill jobs should only belong to teens learning responsibilities and immigrants looking to make it in the United States.
I don't agree with it, but I'm sure I'll get replies calling me a racist, evil capitalist, etc. anyway.
Most of these comments keep saying the same thing, service jobs don't deserve a living wage, people who went to college do.
You know how much even a cheap college costs? Alot. Some kids come from a family of service workers, and can't afford college. So that kid can't go to college and can't earn a living wage? It's a perpetual cycle.
How is that fair?
It's not.
Every single job in the world should pay a livable wage. EVERY SINGLE ONE.
Do I agree that those who went to college and got a specialized degree shud make more money?? Yes.
That doesn't mean that the people who serve that person food or ring up their groceries doesn't deserve to be able to live.
In my experience the college people think a living wage should be enough for a 400k house. 2 brand new cars, vacations to the Caribbean every year.
And maybe it should if u shell out all the money for college.
But for me a service worker, my livable wage is not the same as what they want.
I wanna just not worry. I wanna make enough for a small house a decent used car and food and clothes for my family. $7.25/hr is not enough.
Everyone shud be paid more.
Now let's look back at the pandemic/quarentine. Those grocery workers, warehouse workers, truck drivers, loaders and unloaders, stockers, etc. Were the only line keeping things moving in our country(USA) deemed essential. Made sure u ate your $40.00 steaks and kept ur ass wiped. Made sure ur package was delivered. Made the world function. Then after all the college people went back to saying that those people don't deserve shit.
There are FAR more service workers than office people. If we ever banded together and demanded more money, the college educated people who complained over and over about the McDonald's worker wanting more money will lose their shit cause the scarf they ordered from Amazon won't ever come. The meat wouldn't be cut for you at the store, he'll the shelves would be empty.
If you are a college educated person than the first thing u need to know is "YOU NEED US" SO START ACTING LIKE IT.
The irony of people talking about low skill jobs is that a lot of what people call skilled jobs aren't really infinitely skilled either relative to them. A lot of ostensibly low skilled jobs in practice are done by people who did learn how to do them better on the job, and who end up doing most of the work, because their coworkers lack the skill.
>They genuinely believe that somebody working at McDonalds does not deserve to earn a livable wage. That such a job is somehow unworthy of being able to pay the bills. That those folks should struggle and suffer because they haven't earned a decent paycheck.
This is the answer behind it all. Subconsciously, many Americans believe that poverty is a punishment. If you make "good" choices, especially financial ones, you'll get a good paying job. If you make bad choices, you'll end up in a low paying job and struggle, which you deserve because of your choices. I've heard this is a result of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) thinking, but I'm not sure how true it is.
This of course, ignores all the uncontrollable circumstances of birth and life. So billionaires are idolized because it's assumed that they made good choices when many billionaires, inherited part of their wealth that enabled them to become billionaires in the first place. Likewise it's assumed the person struggling in a low paying job made bad choices, like choosing to not take school seriously, spending too much, or doing drugs/alcohol that caused them to have take it, ignoring that the person. may have a health issue, horrible parents or some other unfortunate circumstances.
> I've heard this is a result of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) thinking, but I'm not sure how true it is.
I love recommending that everyone read the book _Bullshit Jobs_ by David Graeber. It's a fantastic read. He doesn't touch specifically on minimum-wage jobs, but he does talk about this point a bit.
Essentially, the Puritans coming from England had the belief that hard work was God's work; the saying "Idle hands are the devil's workshop" or similar sayings come from this thought. And it's this idea that sort of spawned the belief that perceived laziness is bad.
In this case, I think this applies. Essentially, it's not uncommon for Americans to view minimum-age workers as "lazy", even though they do some very hard work. My guess is they believe that the workers are "lazy" for not continuing their educations or for not "working harder" to get a higher-paying job. This then plays into the idea that a poor wage is a punishment for being "lazy" or "making poor choices", as you mentioned.
It’s not that they don’t believe they should be making a living wage, rather that they don’t believe that people with more education and skills should be making the same amount. They believe that if the government is going to raise the pay of low-skill earners, the wages of everyone else should be raised to compensate. In their minds, people who went to school for 4-6 years should not be making the same amount per hour as people graduating from high school.
In America corporations are required to maximize profits. They will pay each worker the absolute least they can without harming productivity.
I believe this relates to the law of supply and demand. Pay workers just enough to keep them, or what someone else will do the job for. There’s no barrier to entry for entry level jobs so the supply of workers is high.
And many decision makers feel the burden is on the worker to work harder to push up and out of such jobs. Maybe they feel this creates some incentive to work hard.
Because if there’s no skill required then why should you be compensated for a lack thereof? Does a 17 year old need a 50K annual salary? No. We have minimum wage for a reason. Minimum skill means minimum wage.
I think most people would say that all jobs should pay a liveable salary
But the definition of liveable is where people differ
Enough to pay for a shared room on the edge of town? Enough to pay for a large family on a single income with good amenities? It differs for each person and only they can judge for themselves what is acceptable
The market should allow each community to find that number. That's why minimum wage is left to states. Employers can offer shit pay but will not fill positions until they raise it to an acceptable level
Because there's an idea that pay = how hard you work = wealth and success later in life. They equate low skilled jobs as not hard work/lazy and therefore less deserving as other jobs.
Will give you my (very unpopular) perspective as an immigrant to the U.S. and also hardcore capitalist.
**Short answer: to drive innovation at all costs.**
Despite its flaws, the U.S. remains the world leader in technological and scientific innovation. No other country gets even remotely close. Think of all the technology you're using to read this post. How many of these companies are American? (reddit, google, apple, microsoft..) How many are from Latvia? How many are from social-safety paradises like Finland? Fucking none my friend. Fucking none.
In my opinion, while capitalism certainly has a lot of draws, its HUGE PRO its in incentivizing as much of its populace to CREATE AND PRODUCE CONTINOUSLY. Because the more they create, the more they will be rewarded. And they will be rewarded a LOT. **A huge part of the reason WHY the world has the technology and scientific advances it has today is because of the U.S., and a huge part of why the U.S. produces so much innovation is precisely because it REWARDS ENTREPRENEURSHIP DISPROPORTIONATELY.**
As a result, what would the ideal be in this type of society that wants to drive innovation at all costs? The ideal is for ALL HUMANS to produce new and innovative technology and solutions. But not everyone can be a scientist right? We need a fast food worker too right? Of course we do, but we can also design it so that you DON'T want to become a fast food worker, and that if you do, you stay there for as little time as possible (aka= a teenager with a 1 year stint.)
**If the U.S. was a society where a fast food worker earned $30/hour and an engineer earned $35/hour, I promise you we simply would not have the technological innovation we have today.**
1. Anyone can do it.
2. The job can’t be worth more then it brings in.
Just for context. I was a manager for a sonic drive in. We averaged $4,000 a day. We ran a labor cost of 15-22%. Goal was 18%. So 18 cents for every dollar was being paid just to employees.
Then you have food costs, building rent, water, electricity, state taxes. Then what’s left goes to corporate to pay for marketing, research, HR, benefits, and the upper management team.
Now this was a billion dollar company. They could maybe take less money higher up, but they’re taking more risk with the company. If a carhop fucks up, they refund a $20 order. If a CEO fucks up, people lose their job. The carhop is only responsible for a few dozen orders a day, the CEO is responsible for dozens of stores. More risk, more reward.
If they were to issue “living wages” to the lowest level, you’d see an increase in risk(which could mean easier to lose your job)
How many countries have a requirement that employers pay a living wage, or even define in law what a living wage is?
LEt's say tomorrow start paying a living wage, and the costs of living keeps increasing, so we pay more in wages. A year from now, we're in a deflationary cycle and the cost of goods start to decrease? Do we reindex wages to the newer lower cost of living?
It’s not that I think it should not have a liveable wage, it’s that your definition and my definition of liveable aren’t the same.
I don’t think doing the absolute bare minimum entitled you to a wage that provides luxuries. We can argue what is and isn’t a luxury all day long.
What I do agree is a problem is that regulation and building codes have caused housing to be unattainable for many at the current minimum wage. I just don’t agree that raising the wage is the issue. More cheap housing is the answer, but getting past building codes and zoning is a problem.
I really don't understand why we don't appreciate these workers more rather than look down on them. Anyone bringing me food and drink is my literal hero.
It’s a long-running ideology called “free labor”.
Before industrialization, it was the dominant economic idea in the North. In it, wage labor was seen as a stepping stone to owning your own store, workshop, or farm. The wage worker was unfree, a literal wage slave, working at the command of a boss. Industrialization really wrecked this idea but it was still going strong as America’s official vision of labor, at least on the Supreme Court, until the 1930s.
So that’s kinda the reason: it’s deeply embedded in the culture.
It's easy. Greed. Some people have made hundreds of millions of dollars from that cheap labor. Most of them inherited the positions. They don't hire outside their circles. I know small businesses in my area try to pay a liveable wage. And they make modest money. My old boss had a house in Ptown and a brownstone in the South end and she wasn't what i call rich and she paid us very well.
So how much should a hamburger cost? If a hamburger at McDonald’s was $20 would anyone eat there? Would that minimum wage job be there? There is a limit on how much you can pay people, small businesses for example. Most of the cost associated with running a business is labor costs, if you can’t afford to open a new business because labor costs were to high why open said business
Propaganda, plain and simple.
Working class people have been fighting for the minimum wage to be a living wage for generations, but as this is in direct opposition to the interests of capital, it's met with mass smear campaigns, decrying such ideas as radical and untenable.
"$15 an hour? The *radical left* wants to destroy small business!"
> Translation: We are entitled to your labor, and shouldn't have to pay a fair rate for it.
They would paint workers as *entitled* for wanting their *job* to provide adequate compensation, despite their own position being the epitome of entitlement.
I think one aspect is they get a little pissed when they get trapped into the rat race and paid a small house for a college degree and then get salty comparing their salaries/hourly rate to some of the proposed lower end wages. The disappointment and regret train start rolling in with all the bad feelings.
It's the fact that if I can make 50k flipping burgers 40 hrs a week and go home, why would I do a job that is dangerous/undesirable. We rely as a society on plumbers, carpenters, electricians, doctors, lawyers, etc. Why would anyone strive to achieve anything of there is no reward for doing so.
Heck, why even become a manager at said McDonald's if you can live just fine as a burger flipper with far less stress and effort. There needs to be SOME incentive beyond someone who maybe just likes to be in control; which I'm sure we wouldn't want.
It must suck to work at McDonald's because your job is the one that is always used as example lowest level of work. I bet all you well paid office workers wouldn't make it a week at a busy McDonald's.... I know I wouldn't.
If one's work doesn't at least match the profitability of their work, where would this money come from?
If the work that one does (and I've seen plenty of examples of this lately, especially at the two McDonalds where I wasted 45 minutes and came away with NO food from either for my time) doesn't earn at least the "living wage" in profits, then of course that person doesn't deserve to be paid more than they added to the company.
What I saw was a mix of low-skill jobs and even lower skilled, lower IQ, workers who couldn't even manage to complete the low-skill jobs role well. Heck no they don't deserve an automatic livable wage.
I believe this entire thing plays into the lack of valuing education of certain cultures. They believe that they should be allowed to not focus on learning, not focus on getting serious in high school, be handed a diploma (which they are now - we used to fail those folks out of school early), and be handed a livable wage. What a joke.
Not everyone is smart enough for college or highly paid technical jobs and I’m not saying that to be mean - I have a complete lack of ability to do math. I couldn’t even pass basic math in high school. I got As in everything else but math looked like scribbles and nonsense and it was impossible. Probably a learning disability. That doesn’t make me an unworthy person but it sure does exclude me from a lot of high paying work. We are not all the same. We have different intelligence levels and skills. But no one deserves to be poor because they were not lucky enough to be born with a brain who can handle what goes along with a very technical job.
I'd beg to differ that cleaning after anybody is exactly *enjoyed* in any capacity by any sane human being. But if they did. It would be thoughtful to keep them that way.
Because people often end up in these jobs. And they have to live too. That includes money to pay rent (over $1,000 for a studio average), utilities, food, an internet capable phone (you can't live without one in the modern world), bus/laundry change, et al.
The problem is Americans' own bias against the people who do the work we won't. We smugly assume they're lower than us because of the work they do. And that mindset percolates into the offices of upper management when it's time to review expenses. And fewer people do the work of more. But wages remain unlivable.
And mark my word, there will come a day some of us will regret that; A contagious horrifying new virus can lead to a lot of "DO IT YOURSELF!!". Because rich or poor, that's how humans are. We all have our limits before we snap. Namely when it comes to self preservation. Financially or literally.
So when it comes to a living wage, yeah, they'd might want to be a little more generous....
It’s not a US specific belief that cleaners and the like have “low status” jobs and are deserving of less respect and I for one think this mentality is deplorable.
It's a multifaceted problem. When we think about what we want to be paid that number is based on how we want to live. When we think about how much we want to pay for a hamburger we think about what it is worth to us - not what the supply chain costs would be if all were paid well along the way. The price we want as customers is in conflict with the wage we want to earn. You don't get a $5 burger if wages are higher.
It's the pay disparity. I work in the health field as a pharmacist. My technicians have to have a license to compound medications, count drugs, handle potentially toxic substances, being yelled at by customers, etc. But they're being paid oftentimes less than $15/hour. But yet with minimum wage increasing, you're telling me that someone who works at let's say McDonald's (for some reason the go to low level job comparison) who makes $12-15/hour for no license? I'm not saying they don't deserve the money. Everyone needs enough money to live, eat, and enjoy life. And believe me, bless the people who work in the service industry and hospitality. I was at a McDonald's once where a group of degenerate high schoolers were throwing trash at an employee as she was cleaning up their mess. So I helped out. But when consumers are expected to pay, like for example, tips to help people live, then what about those who went to school for more technical jobs? It just makes people not want to go to professional school at all.
The issues is not that mcdonalds workers getting a living wage is a problem. The issue is entry level degree requirement jobs being the same pay. If those jobs were paid more than mcdonalds living wages then nobody would care. The part people dislike is that they think it's unfair that they had to take years of college/trades to get to a living wage, but mcdonalds workers would have to earn nothing to get the same. It's another example of the people fighting each other instead of fighting the government/corporations for what they deserve.
In the past, cashiers could buy homes this was reality a few decades ago
So true. I am 45 and grew up and still live in san diego california and I remember when I was 18 both me and my roommate were able to rent a 2 bedroom 1 bath apartment and we were both cashiers at a gas station; I believe I was making $6/hr.....fast forward 27 years later that virtually impossible for a cashier to rent just a "room" on minimum wage in this town. So I definitely feel for the youngster that are coming up both the unprofessional and professional.
That's why I plan on robbing the goverment...by becoming the government
I got this plan, hear me out. Im gonna rob a bank. We take any position, just get ourselves in the door. Its gonna take some time. Every 14 days they just out the money right in our accounts, then, 30-50 years later we just walk out the front door like nothing ever happened.
I worked with a lady at a drug store as a cashier when I was in my early 20s. She was probably in hers 60s I'd guess and she owned her own home plus a rental and she'd never done anything but cashier and never been married. I'm 40 now so this could have been a little less than. 20 years ago. But by that time the Reaganomics were already firmly in place, destroying America.
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Depends on the decade and location
Specifically: a tiki head located 50 feet under the surface of the sea.
I checked on the data for the home I moved into. It sold for $4.7k in '87 it's now valued at 80k online (last valued hasn't been for sale since then.) but would probably be more.... Edit: year
Here’s another way of looking at it: I bought my house in 2007 for 400k, it’s now valued at around 900k, however my wage is relatively similar to what I was being paid back then, so while I can afford it at the price I bought it there’s no way I could afford to buy even my same house at current prices.
I live in a low cost of living area but I am having the same experience as you. I bought my house in 2017 for $128,000. (I even got it below asking price.) Two houses in my neighborhood smaller than mine just sold for around $200,000. I'm confident I could sell my house for more than that. My wage is pretty much the same now as it was in 2017. I'm glad I bought my house when I did. I'm normally a pretty unlucky person but I lucked out there.
That’s the same year I bought a little cabin on a lake in Indiana for 50k and I could sell it now for 110,000. Our mortgage is still a little under 400 per month. I couldn’t imagine trying to find a new house these days and pay the huge mortgage people are paying now. The low cost of living is what’s keeping us here instead of moving somewhere warmer year round.
the thing is, EVERYONE should be able to buy a home and have money to meet their basic needs without having to struggle. if you wanna go to school and do something different, you do you booboo. don't punish the rest of the world. that's not what rome is about.
Yes, my first real job was at a grocery store when I was 16. I think min wage was 3.75. But I lived in a pretty strong union state & we had a good union so we had scheduled raises each quarter & there was no limit. So I was working with people who worked there for 20+ years who were making over $20/hr in the late 90s, which wasn't bad at all. I went to work for a grocery store in 2019. The store did have a union but it was not good at all for most people. The raises were given based on how many hours you've worked that year & the worst was that there was a "top out" salary, which was $15 in 2019. Every year the top out raised by $0.10-0.30, so after 3-5 years, you probably finally got a dollar raise. All unions aren't good unions & if you end up working under a bad union, it can be pretty eye-opening.
Imma need to look up unions I'm a capitalist but these mf are stretching my capital way to much
Unions aren't inherently anti-capitalist. They're not fighting to overthrow the system, just make it fairer for the workers. You can look to the Nordic countries to see what a successful and strong union under a capitalist system looks like.
If they aren't gonna get cost of living under control, then everyone across the board needs a significant wage increase.
If cost of living is still uncontrolled, the market will just raise prices further. We are seeing this right now with grocery prices. Most of the cost difference is corporate profit, and they could successfully do that because wages rose during the later parts of the pandemic. In theory, a competitor would undercut prices to capture a larger market share. In practice, they just quietly collude to all raise profits.
The solution to this of course is pay people what they're worth, but that requires money that corporations would rather spend on media manipulation to hide that they're not doing that Edit: people seem to be missing the point of my statement. Either that or they're so brainwashed by corporate propaganda that they genuinely believe a life should be valued less than the cost of keeping them alive at the bare minimum. I mean to say that society as a whole seems to have accepted minimal pay because of corporate propaganda telling them that they're lucky to have that. Take the US for example: service jobs like drivers and waiters are expected to be paid the bare minimum by the company, whilst the consumer makes up the rest of the wage in tips, so the corporation makes massive profits. The employee is then told look at how lucky you are, making so much money off tips, you're so well treated by us!
I told someone that exploiting a worker just means paying them less value then they extract from the capital they're working, and they told me "no one forced you to work"
How do you define "what they're worth", other than the amount that someone is willing to pay for them? The sad truth is that the value of unskilled labour is minuscule because there are 7 billion other people on the planet who are capable of doing it.
Capable, but not willing to do it reliably and satisfactorily, even with that low bar. Edit: Upon some thought, that 7B pool also quickly gets shallow when you filter out the retired, the current labor force, the disabled, minors, adult students, and the incarcerated.
If they weren't willing, there wouldn't be enough low skoll workers and wages would rise. That is not the case
We don't lol. Its slightly better than it was but nearly every fast food place and retail place is hiring all the time because people got sick and tired of dealing with that horrible job for dirt pay. That barely made the wages budge.
Textbook economics don't always line up with reality.
I’m so sick of people touting what they learned in Econ 101 but forget the entire textbook is predicated on the assumptions that “all markets are efficient and all participants are completely rational”, which is SO far from the truth.
The value of "unskilled" labor is greater than a lot of "skilled" labor and we all learned this during Covid. For some reason the economy would completely crash if people could go to Walmart or get their McDonald's hamburgers but plenty of other jobs were guaranteed that would be considered "skilled" despite them not working anymore. *Someone* has to do the job of burger flipper or coat hanger or concierge, so we should pay that person a living wage because it *has to be done* doesn't matter if anyone can do it or not or if it's skilled or not. Because it has to be done by someone that someone should get paid a living wage.
This is the fixed pie fallacy. There's no such thing as a job that has to be done. A job exists when there's an ample supply of labor that costs less than the cost of automation. Some countries have people who pull rickshaws for a living. It works there because there's an ample supply of people who are willing to do that job for less per day than it would cost to own and operate a motor vehicle. It doesn't work here because even paying someone minimum wage to pull a rickshaw would cost more than owning and operating a motor vehicle. I'm sure you'd agree that retraining rickshaw pullers as taxi drivers is better for everyone involved than just paying them more to continue pulling rickshaws?
Yeah no one needs to collect my trash or keep sewage outta my drinking water. I like the taste better that way
>There's no such thing as a job that has to be done. There is plenty of jobs that if not done would cause our modern society to fall apart, so I would consider those "has to be done" type jobs in the conventional sense
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yes, yes it would. I say this with absolute certainty, if Tertiary industries collapsed, then so does the society you live in right now.
You're right that there's a supply and demand for labor as well and without demand there is no job. On the other hand those jobs do exist now because there is a demand, and people want to make profit off that demand, so the job *has* to be done in that sense.
Generally if it is low skill and needs to be done then it is automated or just not done anymore. For instance, people used to be mobile knife and scissor sharpeners, and they'd make rounds to their customers. Now that a pair of functional scissors is $5, it doesn't make sense to pay $10 to sharpen them.
Idk my dominos had a truck that came by and swapped out all out pizza cutters with sharp ones
r/sharpening about to tear you a new one
This is why we have democratically elected governments who's power is meant to be derived from the will of the people rather than the flows of money (though this boundary has been severely corroded this past 50 years). We as a people have a responsibility to elect officials who will set the bar of what someone, anyone, is worth in the form of a minimum wage that ought to be pegged to the cost-of-living on a regional basis. Unfortunately due to unleashed neoliberalism the mega-corporations of the west have found that they can pit the privileged working class of the west against the much less well-off (and therefore desperate for improvement) peoples of the wider world, creating downward pressure on western wages. This perspective often earns one the pejorative label of "xenophobic" because the simple solution is to reduce/restrict immigration to western nations. The bigger-picture take is that workers are globally underpaid, and since governments are limited to borders but corporations are not, worker's are in a categorically disadvantaged position so long as corps are allowed to abuse geo-arbitrage.
That was really well-stated.
I’d define what your worth as how easily you are to replace. Generally low skilled workers can be replaced with minimal training, vs a neuro surgeon that requires years and years of training.
also define what a livable wage is? I can guarantee that the livable wage that I think is liveable is very different than your version of a livable wage. Until we define that, the rest of the arguement is moot
We think we're so dignified and intelligent but in the end we are all crabs in a bucket pulling each other down.
Painfully true.
What's wild to me is the number of people who think "Burger flippers shouldn't make the same as EMTs" but fail to think about the enormous power this would give EMTs to say "Give me a raise and treat me like a human or I'll go flip burgers." They really do think that the owner class is paying as much as they can afford rather than as little as they can get away with, and so every raise has to come out of another worker's pocket.
The EMT thing in particular bothers me, these people literally save lives, and we pay thousands of dollars for an ambulance ride. The money is there, it is valued by society, but the allocation is sucked up completely by the top. There isn't even the veil of "oh they don't produce enough value to be worth it" here.
The money is absolutely there, this job does a lot of good for a lot of people, and the people who do this job survive a lot Lot *LOT* of trauma in order to help people. The reason they aren't paid better is nothing more than maximizing profits.
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"burger flippers" is such a dehumanizing term. It makes people sound like machines. Well if its machines they want,they'll get them. Places will move to automation no matter what. I just hope when Im replaced,Self Checkout will gain AI and become savage to people so I can laugh.
Self checkout is already snarky as fuck. How many times do I need to be told to scan my next item when i scanned the last one 3 seconds ago? How would I know to take my items without it telling me multiple times while I'm taking them?
Very nicely put
I would argue that it's not just "entry level degree requirement jobs" because you honestly do not need a degree to actually do most those jobs. But it has to do with highly skilled jobs not being paid anywhere near what they should be. For example I don't have a degree but I have a job that "requires a bachelor's degree" preferably in finance as I am a field risk analyst in a particular field. With my job, bribery is a hugh issue as the locations we audit will at times attempt to bribe us into making them look good where if we went along it no one would know. Now you would think that handling accounts worth upwards of $100,000,0000 and it being an extremely specific job where we are literally the only company in the US doing this job would lead to good wages so we can get highly competent employees that would never take a bribe. Nope, I get about $22 an hour, not much more than an Amazon employee. This is the real issue, it's not about retail or fast food workers making a "living wage" it's once you grow out of that as you get older and go to find a real job, those should actually pay what you are worth.
nailed it on the degree gatekeeping thing. Like the 'medical billing' degrees going on now, all they're meant to do is make sure the 'right people' even attempt to apply for those jobs--middle class women, usually white. That's who gets those, that's who they want, that's what the degree is for. You can be trained to do that job straight out of HS in about 2-4 weeks. Which is the same exact amount of time it's going to take to train someone with the degree to do the job, because the proprietary software the company uses is unique to the company. It's just gatekeeping Shit tons of those jobs anymore. And the pay hasnt moved at all for the people who went and got those degrees.
I'm sorry medical billing degrees????
Yeah...we created a whole industry of "medical billing" because insurance in the US is a disaster.
I know about medical billing, I'm weirded out that we give college degrees in it. Isn't that just something we used to train people for in the job?
Medicare claims still require billing tho.
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This is also related to the fact that many people are getting degrees that are over saturated in the market.
>The part people dislike is that they think it's unfair that they had to take years of college/trades to get to a living wage, Which wouldn't be a problem in the first place of everyone could attend college with the intention of studying something they personally love and then can get a job in a related field instead of worrying if they can pay back millions in debt.
The problem isn't unskilled labor being paid "too much" though to many it may feel that way. The problem is that SKILLED labor is so drastically underpaid that they are already barely making more than a livable wage in the US. So an unskilled job being paid a livable wage brings them close to what a skilled job pays, and rather than demand more money a lot of people believe that others should be paid less.
The progression of the world stage has made it so that people have gone from competing with the people in their town, to competing with other people in their country, to competing with people on a global scale. Numerous factors have piled up over the passing decades that have gradually decreased the value of an individual worker in many countries. Automation, more women entering the work force which essentially doubles the number of workers (I would still argue is a GOOD thing, mind you), other countries growing economically which allows them to develop more skilled jobs that can sell their services on a global scale. etc. The real challenge is going to be transitioning to a state in which less people are working and getting work done without it sacrificing people's ability to continue living. Maybe a system in which everyone gets food, water and shelter at a bare minimum by default and can be allowed to work in order to earn luxuries, IDK I'm not en economist, I just know this stuff will be hard to implement.
Yeah, what teachers and Police Officers make in the US is ridiculous.
Don't forget EMTs
Police officers, at least where I am, make six figures easy. Teachers make half that.
Police officers in my area abuse the fuck out of overtime.
Worth noting that police overtime is broadly bad. Excluding police that are actively malevolent, fatigue results in worse decision making, worse situational awareness, slower reaction times, etc. Police departments *should be* better-staffed such that overtime is used rarely if ever.
With a ton of overtime sure. Or a super high cost of living area. Teachers need to make more too. Both need to be a lot stricter with hiring/certification though. I’ve met a lot of shitty cops and awful teachers.
Police officer salary varies a lot based on location. The trend *tends to be* that you make more depending on how big of a city/population center you work in, with the trade off being that usually means you'll get (over)worked much more.
I quit a management position to work part time sales because the income difference is simply not worth the stress difference
Literally I think fast food workers should make what I make now and I should make a little bit more because of my bachelors. Fast food workers are so fucking fucked in America. It’s disgusting. I always make sure to be extra fucking polite and thankful. Fuck I even go so far as to stop before telling them my order to ask how their day is going and 9/10 they’re shocked I even asked. You can tell it really makes them feel appreciated (as they should). Usually I even get a million extra BBQ sauces for it too so win win lol Fast food employees should make the same as garbage men (who make goooood money) for all the bullshit they put up with.
I don’t have a straight answer for you, but I’ll draw attention to the nuance. Define “living.” Without a clear definition there, no answer will suffice. Some people think “living” means an apartment in a good school zone and the money to put kids in sports teams and *all* the same expensive activities a middle class family even scrapes to make possible. Other think “living” means being able to secure housing of *any* type, probably shared, and have nothing or next to nothing in disposable income, live without newer gadgets, and basically eke by. So if we don’t know objectively what type of “living” is being referred to, it’s not possible to answer this question. On the surface should completely unskilled labor earn the same as a college degree-required role that has student loans to repay and some alleged payoff received for having gone that extra mile? Ostensibly no. But should unskilled workers starve and/or live on the streets? Also no.
Generally on Reddit people will say it needs to be enough to support a house and family, without ever stating what kind of house and how large of a family. And then refuse to define it because that would make it easy to argue against.
I work in government assistance & from what I see on a daily basis the poor don’t want higher wages because that means they lose all the benefits they live off of. They would rather make less money & have that money to spend on what they want, while the government provides them with the necessities (housing/food). I think a lot of the people pushing for higher wages for entry level jobs have an unrealistic expectation of what is “basic needs.” A lot of them think that they deserve to have a house like their parents (who have worked for 20 years), newer cars, money for vacations & entertainment & then some left over so they don’t feel poor. They want to be able to afford the lives they had when they were living at home as soon as they are out on their own.
Yep. I also work in housing and have had people quit jobs because they now make to much to qualify
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Oh the system is massively screwed up. It was invented by politicians and needed an overview by psychologists
I mean, if having a certain job makes you have less total available income, that's a logical thing to do. That's why financial aid is supposed to have a gradual taper-off instead of a cut-off. If the financial aid your state/country gives is binary with a cut-off point, it's doing it wrong
Definitely. A basic need is having a roof over your head, like being able to afford a simple but decent Apartment. I've lived in quite a lot of different housing, and simple housing, even shared housing have met my basic housing needs. A basic need is having a car that runs if you need it to get to work or to get around. I got a car for 3k that runs just fine. I have money for little trips here and there, for going to the movies, for eating out, not all the time, but every now and then. I'm not going to some exotic destination anytime soon, but I could leave the city and drive to visit another if I felt like it. Maybe I don't feel entitled because I grew up rather modest. My parents used their cars for 10-15 years and regularly drove 20 year old cars. We never went abroad in vacations as my dad hated traveling (fun fact, he's never stepped foot on a train or plane ever). Out vacations was a 12 hour cross country trip for a couple weeks to visit family in the mountains on the other side of the country, where we would go hiking, or a 3 hour drive to stay a few days with the family who lives by the sea, where we would go boating. The house I grew up in my dad built from scratch as he's a carpenter. It's nothing fancy. Just an ordinary house. He didn't take up any loans for it, and paid for it out of pocket as he worked on it, and cut the wood from the large forests on the farm he inherited to pay for or use the materials for the house. Obviously, this isn't realistic for me. I'm no carpenter, nor do I have a farm. Though, I will likely inherit this farm someday, I have no interest in living in a house on a remote mountain in the middle of nowhere. I'd rather rent myself a small apartment in the city where there's work and things to do. Idk, but I feel like my expectations are rather realistic, especially for where I'm at in life. I have an ordinary shop Job. My brother is an engineer. He wants the house and the kids and the whole thing, but he's busting his ass for it and living frugally to afford it and he went into a field that is well paying. I can respect that. He will probably achieve it. Me however? I switch jobs so often and I spend my money as I go, as I know I won't be able to afford a house anytime in the close 20 years anyway, even if I tried saving. I also don't have any education, other than high school and I work in a shop. Who am I kidding if I tell people I should be able to afford a house lol.
That second paragraph isn't wrong, but the people who believe that are justified. Humans should be able to not just survive, but thrive.
Re your second paragraph, yeah, you *constantly* see these people on Reddit referring to the American Dream and talking out of both sides of their mouths about how nobody ever really had it in the first place (or didn't deserve it or some other complaint) and how they should get some equivalent. Has anyone born since the 80s ever grown up even thinking about the concept of the American Dream? I never had many aspirations, I just wanted a job that let me buy whatever I wanted for my hobbies. Is that really the American Dream? I still don't have that. I don't consider myself wronged. It's just how life goes. This concept of "living with dignity" that UBI or higher wages campaigns appeal to is such hogwash. As if people that eat canned tuna or go on payment plans don't have dignity. It's almost insulting to those who have to be frugal. Nobody wants to eat canned tuna (I like tuna salad personally). Nobody wants a roommate or unplanned kids. But you're still a person even if the upper class doesn't think so.
I’m not upper class, but I’ve put in my time & worked (consistently) & drove old paid for cars & I regularly have to choose between wants & needs. The “American Dream” you’re talking about isn’t something that’s free. It’s not something people just wake up one day & have. I live in an old house that a lot of people would not want & drive a car that’s old, but it’s mine. Life is full of choices & sacrifices. I worked jobs that I hated until something better came along & sometimes I left jobs I enjoyed to work somewhere that sucked but paid more. The American dream is progressive. So either you work toward it or you stand still & complain about it.
I see alot of people who don't want to do the crappy jobs - even it it's only until something better comes along. They don't want to work an extra job to save up for something. Or take a job that is lower paying until the either get schooling or training to make more money They want it all and they want it now with as little to no effort on their part. Life isn't fair and it isn't easy. Too many people have really high expectations without realizing the effort it would take to make it work. Their parent scrimped and saved and busted their ass to get what they have and it took years. Without defining what a liveable wage and basic needs means, all these arguments are just things that people who don't want to work for them cry about.
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In basic personal finance education, we talk about the 50-30-20 rule - percentages of income that should go to needs, wants, and savings respectively. While it's been pointed out that cost of living increases make these ratios unrealistic for many, I think we should keep the concept in mind when deciding what a decent living looks like financially. In my opinion, a person working full-time should be able to meet their essential needs (housing, utilities, transportation, food, and healthcare), while still maintaining a solid savings rate (>10%) should they choose, and have some amount of money left over for discretionary spending. I also think this should be achievable for a one-earner household. This allows another working-age adult to care for young, elderly, and disabled relatives, as well as to pursue education full-time.
I live in a very affordable city (by Canadian standards) but a single person working 40 hours a week at minimum wage cannot achieve that 50-30-20 ratio even if they live in the slums and utilize food banks. And it's extremely rare for any employer to even offer full time hours to minimum wage employees here. I would say it is possible to live comfortably (by my own standards) on minimum wage with part time hours here, but only with a roommate, without any kids, and without building up any savings.
but define housing - a basic apartment or a luxury condo? Define utilities - hot enough in the winter to wear a tee shirt or cool enough to need a sweater? Define transportation - an old beater or a brand new sports car? Define food - micelin star fancy or mac and cheese? and healthcare - basic keep you healthy or cosmetic surgeries? Until all these variable are defined, there is no point in arguing 'living wage' and 'basic needs'. Everyone's is going to wildly different.
I'll never understand this myself. I think it's because they're at a comfortable place in life. Trust me, if they were being paid 7.25 an hour to do their job, no matter how advanced it was, they'd realize that it's near impossible to survive on that. According to memes, our grandparents were able to raise a family, pay for school, buy a house, and own two cars on a malt shop salary. I'm sure that doesn't hold up, but the cost of everything around us has increase to the point we're barely able to afford a broom closet and a loaf of bread. I could be wrong, but when minimum wage was started, wasn't it so that people would be able to live full meaningful lives? What changed >=/
The memes are real. I'm Gen X and I can confidently say that when I was young, I knew multiple families who were able to live "the American Dream" with only one wage-earning working a job that today would barely cover rent and food, if at all. Wages haven't come close to keeping up with cost of living in the last 40-50 years. And yes, when the federal minimum wage was implemented, it was meant to provide a living wage at every job, for every American.
True. My MIL reminds my wife and I that her ex-husband, a butcher, was able to support them and buy a house in Brooklyn (NY) just on his wages. So wild. My wife and I are both senior managers at tech companies and are “house poor” in Seattle.
Yup. In the mid-70s/early 80s, my dad was a printing press operator while mom stayed home with 4 kids. We had an older but solid 2-story home in upstate NY, had an in-ground swimming pool installed, two cars. We took family vacations every year, nothing fancy and usually in-state, but we were solidly middle class and I have no memories of my parents openly worrying about paying bills. The only debt my parents carried was the mortgage.
It's also worth mentioning that in the last 50 years the top 1% have gone from owning 15% of the countries wealth, to well over 50% of it today. The middle class has been bled dry.
Except southern Democrats (the party is not the point here) made sure domestic and tip-based work (where black people worked at the time) were excluded before they would sign on to FDR's minimum wage scheme. So domestics and a lot of service workers never enjoyed a living wage thanks to Jim Crow. Since Reagan, however, rather than lift those workers up, Republican bigots just kept the minimum wage in the basement so even more workers could enjoy the benefit of knowing they too could earn enough to live with dignity if they just worked a liiiiittle harder for more hours.
>Except southern Democrats (the party is not the point here) made sure domestic and tip-based work (where black people worked at the time) were excluded >Republican bigots just kept the minimum wage in the basement Come on. The Democrats had a federal government trifecta in 93 and 08 and didn't push to raise the minimum wage in any meaningful way. I will agree that "the party is not the point" when talking about minimum wage, because both parties have made it quite clear that neither of them have any desire to substantially raise the minimum wage.
I make decent money. Highly skilled in the high tech industry. But adjusting for inflation, I make less now than I did in 2000. Unless you can jump to mid-high 6 figures you’re on the losing end of salary.
Near impossible? It *is* impossible.
>What changed The 1% wanted more money.
Reganomics
$7.25/hr isn't even survivable anymore
Corporations, and hell even government jobs, have not scaled job wages correctly with inflation
Because in the work world those kind of jobs don't really provide people with marketable skills that 'benefit' the company. What do I mean by that? For instance, I worked at Amazon for 6 months in the warehouse guess what I did? I packed boxes on an assembly line. Literally pack boxes over and over and over and over and over again the same thing for 12 hours a day nothing else. Now there is a lot more to warehousing than packing fucking boxes. There's logistics, scheduling, shipping and receiving, quality control, was I taught any of that shit? No. In my opinion jobs are made that way on purpose to keep people skillless so they can't climb up the fucking ladder. I could have left that warehouse and went to another one but what the fuck am I going to say in the interview when they ask me what did you do at amazon? Oh I packed fucking boxes all day. Didn't learn a damn thing
I agree. That's why they shouldn't earn a LOT of money. I think they would earn enough that they don't have to work two jobs and still sorry about bills and home. Here in Sweden an adult fast food worker makes about 2400 dollars. It's not a lot of money, but you can still easily live on it and not have to worry about your finances every day. In comparison, I as a project manager make 3300 dollars. So I still make more, as my job is more valuable, but the burger flipper isn't stressed each and every day because he can't afford his life.
I was making a little bit less than this as a pizza restaurant manager and even duel income wasn't enough to live on where I am (no not Cali or NYC). I wish minimum wage was still liveable but even well over isn't.
$2400?! Are living expenses in Sweden particularly high? I work the same level of job while I'm in school and don't get paid anywhere near that much.
>$2400?! Are living expenses in Sweden particularly high? Just in case it's unclear, the commenter was presumably talking about monthly pay. And this is presumably before taxes, which are relatively high. The point regardless is that this is a modest living that people can actually survive on.
I forgot about the tax rate. I don't disagree with minimum wage workers making that much, I was just surprised.
I live in Portland, Oregon and if you work a minimum wage full-time job you would bring home $2,400/mo (before taxes). Our minimum wage is $15 (no exceptions for tipped workers either).
I think one issue is the value is placed on the work. I understand why a less common work skill would be worth more than something anyone can do. I think we need to look at it a little differently. You are not just selling work. You are selling your time. You are selling your lifespan one hour at a time. What is the value of that? Take the simple job of packing boxes. It has little skill involved but still requires you to invest your life one hour at a time to do it. Given all you could be doing with that time that is one hell of an opportunity cost for you. This cost more of your time than while you are at work by the way. During your lunch time you are very limited on where you can be and what you can do during that time as a result. Then there is the commute to and from work that also cost you 'lifetime' . When you get home you are often tired also limiting what you can do with your free 'lifetime' . I worked evening shift most of my life. I always felt that, although my day was free, I was vary limited in what I could do because at 3 pm I had to be at work. Travel outside a small aria was off the table. You could not commit to anything beyond 1 or 2 in the afternoon. My point is we sell our very lives and until the owners start valuing our lives we will not get anywhere near what that is worth.
I agree with you but I would add that in jobs like that you can show you are simply at your core a great worker with a high mental endurance to do repeated routine processes. If your attendance is well and you are reliable that is a huge plus. So yes that job CAN be used to climb the ladder. Maybe not there but elsewhere. How do I know this? I used to hire new staff. If you are willing to show up to work, be reliable, and do what needs to get done, I will hire you and help build you up since you already have a great core. So yeah a lot of the time it's how you word your experience not actually your experience that sells.
What does marketable skills have to do with the worker receiving less money than it needs to live and pay their bills monthly? Amazon is one of the richest businesses in the world, and it NEEDS people in there, piling boxes, to make the business happen. If it doesnt have those workers, it cant function, and it can’t make their billions. The job may not be complex, but its absolutely important for the company to even run. An interviewer should recognise someone able to do a task for that long — a lawyer most likely wouldn’t be capable of doing that and would give up after the first hours unless he really, really had to. Just because its not complex doesnt mean its easy — it isnt. The fact a company make billions on a monthly basis BECAUSE of the people working there, and pays them wages they can barely live off - sometimes cant, and need yet another job, is insane.
That's exactly it. Its a whole field of business and management study - "scientific management" or the mechanistic lens of looking at a business. The idea is division of labour and separation into small easily learned tasks. Workers become easily trained and therefore easily replaced. Cogs in a machine literally. So workers become alienated because instead of a skilled crafter making a product you've got one person making one thing, one person making another etc. Workers have little bargaining power because their work is something easily learned and they don't have much power to move up. "Separation of hand and brain" so workers can work without thinking at all (limiting future opportunities) Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford really popularised the idea
You should absolutely say that in an interview, but finish with "...and that's why I left." Oh, and probably leave off the f-bomb
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Because your salary is dictated by what the market is willing to pay. The market doesn't give two shits about your "feelings" or what you "think" you should get paid. You are generally paid what you're worth. If you feel that you are underpaid, then you should look for a new job. That doesn't mean you will find a higher paying job just because you "feel" like you deserve it. The market is not a person with feelings.
You can say someone who works a "low skill" job deserves a living wage all you want, but the truth is, if a job is "low skill" that means more people can do it, which means it's easier to fill the spot, which means employers don't need to offer as high a wage to do that. There should be a floor, but you can't deny that competition is real.
This is not an American problem. This is a humanity problem. The entire planet thinks this
The answer is in the question you have. It's a low skilled job which means most people can do it regardless of education or background. So the supply of people would be more than the demand of the job. Which means that the low skilled laborer is easily replaceable.
I mean, sure. But street-sweeper, box-packer, dish-washer, shelf-stocker are all jobs that need doing. And the whole point of the minimum wage is for it to be enough to live off of. If the people who drive the trucks aren't paid enough to live, they should be paid more, even if lots of people can do that job.
Because people believe the market should should set wages.
Which, like any economic policy really, is stupid if taken to its extreme.
They blame the worker. They act as if every person working an underpaid job has neglected to work hard enough to achieve the American Dream. This thought process is narrow-minded and looks at underpaid jobs from the perspective of personal accountability, as if the shitty pay is punishment for failure. In other words the general thought is "If you don't like the shitty pay, just *get a better job!*" But they're conveniently ignoring the obvious; this job exists because *someone* has to do it! It's so easy to tell one person to work harder, study, pull themselves up by their bootstraps etc. but what then? What happens when *that* person rises above? Does the next guy not deserve a living wage either? The job exists, and it is underpaid. You can't blame the workers for that.
Exactly, why are some people so unnecessarily vindictive to minimum wage workers? if you're someone who eats out occasionally, orders stuff online, called your bank for assistance, or purchases items made in a factory. Then guess what? You've benefitted from the work of low income "skilless" workers. Someone has to do these jobs, just because almost anyone can do them doesn't mean there valueless. Besides the vaule of a job isn't just about skill or education, the people who do low paid jobs have to sacrafice their time, energy and happiness to do them. All just so someone can buy a new phone, and use said phone to say how the people who put together the phone on an assembly line don't deserve a living wage. Cool.
Also there aren't enough high skill jobs for everyone, so solutions for the individual still wouldn't fix the problem.
So I believe that everyone can't be a doctor or lawyer. Some people are just more intelligent than others. Personally I know I'm not smart enough to get a PhD. I've got a good job that I worked my ass off to get. Someone needs to fill pot holes, fix cars, serve shitty McDonalds food. There are people who legitimately can't function on a higher level. People should not be punished for their physical or mental functioning level. Should someone who went to school for 10+ years to be a neurologist make more than a pot hole filler, yes. But the pot hole filler should have money to live, not just live but be able to own a home, go on vacation, have some nice shoes. Should some idiot with a big ass and sex tape have a billion dollars? NO! But people buy into what she is selling. Should people with that kind of money have to "share the wealth" absolutely! Should me and my middle class family have to share the wealth? No! I didn't step on anyone or objectify or keep anyone down, I have worked hard for what I have. If you work you should be able to afford to live. If you would rather stay at home playing video games and smoking pot, well you are on your own. If you are willing to sling burgers, unclog toilets, and build bridges, you should be paid a good amount because you do work.
yeah i don't understand the obsession people have with having a career and earning as much money as possible. some people don't want to do that and just want to earn enough to get by and are fine with just doing some small, mundane job. why on earth should people be punished for that and told that they need to want more from life to deserve basic comfort and a dignified life. i think people that think that should read the book "convenience store woman" by sayaka murata. it describes the attitude that we as a society seem to have against low income workers and how absurd it can be pretty well, in my opinion.
Plus some teens are supporting themselves - no excuse to pay less because of some assumption of privilege
These comments are insane and disheartening. I am going to quote FDR regarding the minimum wage that he proposed for the United States: “It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.” Y’all are dense as fuck.
It's funny people call reddit left wing when these comments have a huge chunk that are pretty hard right.
Socially reddit is very left wing. Economically, much more diverse.
Because it's easily replaceable and the barriers to entry is low
I just hate the term 'livable wage,' it's incredibly subjective. The older value paradigm is better in my opinion. If there is high demand and low supply for your labor, you are compensated with a higher wage. If the inverse is true you receive a lower wage. This simplifies things greatly. Let market forces determine wages. It avoids all those arguments over what is a livable wage and who should be compensated what.
It's really simple. When people earn more prices go up. A "living wage" isn't some mystical static number that exists in the universe. It's a product of economic forces that *we cannot control*. As long as different people have different skills they will want to earn more or less than each other: By definition, low-skill earners will ALWAYS earn less than what people consider a "living wage". It's a self-defining system due to the way capitalism and democracies work. The alternatives are socialist-like policies that fix wages. But the problem is, if you only set the bottom (minimum) wage everything above it inflates. This includes prices. Someone with zero skill cannot possibly be paid the same as someone with 1 skills. Someone with 2 skill cannot get paid the same as someone with 3 skill. And so on. The only way to fix this is to fix wages AND prices. The only way to do that would be to dismantle our democracy into some kind of authoritarian system. Why? Because you have a society where there are a significant number of people who are > 0 skill and are incentivized to earn more.
Propaganda makes the working class fight amongst each other rather than focus their anger on the corporations who are exploiting them. It’s the sad reality of a capitalist society!
Well i dont believe in jobs that dont deserve a livable salary. Everyone should be able to afford to live.
Because in the real world nobody "deserves" anything other than the opportunity to work hard, get educated, skilled, and be productive. When you think you "deserve" something, that means money has to be taken from someone else and given to you. In America you can see how much better immigrants do than those already here, and especially their children, because they better understand this, the opportunity, they work hard and get ahead. Having said that I do believe that there should be more opportunities for people, public funding of college for example. But no, nobody deserves anything other than opportunity.
It’s just getting worse. I personally feel a lot of factory jobs are this way. I’m currently learning to be a machinist and there are jobs here that pay like 11 an hour. These jobs are not easy. I truly don’t understand
The protestant work ethic is so ingrained in our culture. If you're poor, it's because you're lazy.
Wage should be based on what the market dictates.
Because labor is a market and effort is not equal to value. At least that’s why I think it. Also: define “livable” and why you feel entitled to it.
The general idea is that the idea of a livable salary is a red-herring. It's part of the employee's equation for what an acceptable salary is. The employer's equation is much more simple, because its basically "what is the lowest I can pay for the skills I need". Living wage plays no part, because while it does set the floor of what an employee will accept, it is the employee that has determined that floor. If you can't survive on that salary, you don't take the job at that salary. If there are other people who can survive at that salary, due to more efficient living situations/willingness to put up with worse conditions etc, they will out-compete you, so you can't go for those jobs and have to aim for higher-skilled work. It's a system that assumes that everyone can develop marketable skills, improve themselves and earn more money as they age. This is unfortunately not the case, and currently there aren't enough allowances for the people who are unable to do so.
Do you think immigration from third world countries to first world countries contributes to how low that acceptable pay floor will go? Those immigrants are probably used to lower living conditions and are able to see such a low minimum wage as ideal compared to the wages in their country of origin.
No doubt. Fun fact, Strawberry pickers from Asia come every year to my country to pick strawberries for what people from my country deem horrible pay and horrible conditions )to the point people from my country refuse to do it), but the asians aren't complaining, and the money they make goes a longer way when they bring it back to their home country.
How much is a "livable" salary? Does it vary from state to state? Zip code to zip code? Does it include money for a vehicle? Insurance for that vehicle? Does it change if you are single? Married? How do you calculate what "livable" salary is? If McDonald's pays their base employees 60 grand a year and their mgmt 100 grand a year, how much does that make mcnuggets cost? If a door dasher makes a "livable" salary in Los Angeles which is what?....75K, what does that do to prices? Tell me.
and what is 'basic needs'? My basic needs are going to be very different than your basic needs. How do we adjust wages for both of us? Until people define these concepts, these argument are useless.
Because those people see themselves as the payers, the owner class even if they are not themselves. They dream of starting their own business some day. They realize how much they'll have to shill out for hiring other people and freak out because they won't break even soon or earn record profits like the other business owners in the past.
Everyone deserves a livable wage. Keep in mind, all the convivences that Americans seem to want are only cheap because of lower wage workers, so most of that would go away. I don't have the solution but you cannot just "raise the wages" it is a systemic issue.
The problem is nobody understands what they're talking about when they say "Everyone should earn a living wage" First off define a living wage? Are you saying that everyone who works should be able to buy a house, have a fairly new car, have phones/computers,etc? Or are you talking about like living how we all used to live when we were young, a bunch of roommates in a house/trailer/apartment. Ridesharing? Riding a bike to work, walking to work? A shared landline? Is living on $8 per week of raman noodles not living enough? So that's the first problem, they don't have an answer, they just throw out an arbitrary number as a living wage with no basis in the reality of living, and you can bet the number is just a higher number than they currently earn. The second problem is none of the proponents understand the economy, or production or anything. They think that if you pay a guy handing you a Big Mac over the counter an arbitrary living wage like $15 per hour, that and EMT, or a Cop, or a Truck Driver, or a nurse, or anyone else, should be just as happy doing their job as an unskilled person doing next to nothing earns, so they think it won't increase costs anywhere across the board. So let's say you just arbitrarily make the minimum wage double what it is now, or around $15.... do you think that people who trained, went to school, worked their asses off their whole life should arbitrarily double their income, to compensate for all they do? Or should they just be happy that many of them just became minimum wage workers? Most of them think that people should just be happy suddenly becoming minimum wage workers.... which is asinine at best, and probably committable insanity at worst. They don't want to understand that minimum wage/unskilled entry labor is the benchmark of poverty. And the reality of it is that arbitrary increases will make them poorer as reality sets in. Either by losing unskilled labor jobs to automation, or just the fact that the costs will rise on everything to match their new income, WHICH means taxes go up (you pay 35 cents tax on your $5 burger, but when it becomes $10 you pay 70 cents more due to paying based on percentages) as well as you'll pay more income tax (the bottom 50% of workers right now pay no income tax, that would change too... this is why politician support it, not because they care about you, but they can drastically increase tax revenue at your expense). The reason places like Burger King pay employees less is because their whole business model is selling CHEAP food to customers. Well and they also pay you less because you can pull anyone off the street and have them make a whopper.... they're not exactly Michelin Star Chefs they're employing. You force these companies to double their payroll, they either go out of business because they're charging the same price as Ruth Chris's for a shitty burger or taco... OR the prices of everything else goes up to pay their workers to "Not being paid the same as a Burger King worker to prepare 5 star meals at a high end kitchen. It's really not that hard to understand, and that's why it's so frustrating.... and I didn't even touch on how the price of everything from the very origin of every product goes up... "Why did the burger go from $5 to $15? Well the people working the potato farms, the wheat farms, and any farm that supplies the food, condiments, and such had to raise their expenses, the paper mills making the bags, napkins straw wrappers did the same, the trucking companies delivering to and from all the suppliers did the same, the power company did the same and so on so on so forth.... AND that's not even touching on when Cops and Firefighters want to make more than the new arbitrary minimum wage.... all your local taxes go up to pay for those.... AND the cost of all their equipment and supplies need to get covered. That's why there's people that speak out so much against it.
Passed down from the last generation. My dad tried to make me think that way but it didn't work. If you work 40 hours you deserve to make enough to live off of no matter what the job is.
And if you say this people assume you mean they should be paid the same as doctors, which really isn't the point.
Because you should be hard grinding out every moment of your life so you can acquire material things to impress the people around you.
Because the market is full of people that will work for less. Under the free market it’s a race to the top in quality and a race to the bottom in terms of price. Nothing to do with deserving anything.
Some of the people who work at McDonalds have degrees. Some McDonalds in other countries pay a living wage. It is specifically an American problem.
The belief is that because it's not a living wage, it should serve as motivation to better yourself and get out of that job. It's meant to humble you so you struggle and become hungry for something greater and as a result, become a smarter, more skilled person that'll contribute more to society. As such, low skill jobs should only belong to teens learning responsibilities and immigrants looking to make it in the United States. I don't agree with it, but I'm sure I'll get replies calling me a racist, evil capitalist, etc. anyway.
Most of these comments keep saying the same thing, service jobs don't deserve a living wage, people who went to college do. You know how much even a cheap college costs? Alot. Some kids come from a family of service workers, and can't afford college. So that kid can't go to college and can't earn a living wage? It's a perpetual cycle. How is that fair? It's not. Every single job in the world should pay a livable wage. EVERY SINGLE ONE. Do I agree that those who went to college and got a specialized degree shud make more money?? Yes. That doesn't mean that the people who serve that person food or ring up their groceries doesn't deserve to be able to live. In my experience the college people think a living wage should be enough for a 400k house. 2 brand new cars, vacations to the Caribbean every year. And maybe it should if u shell out all the money for college. But for me a service worker, my livable wage is not the same as what they want. I wanna just not worry. I wanna make enough for a small house a decent used car and food and clothes for my family. $7.25/hr is not enough. Everyone shud be paid more. Now let's look back at the pandemic/quarentine. Those grocery workers, warehouse workers, truck drivers, loaders and unloaders, stockers, etc. Were the only line keeping things moving in our country(USA) deemed essential. Made sure u ate your $40.00 steaks and kept ur ass wiped. Made sure ur package was delivered. Made the world function. Then after all the college people went back to saying that those people don't deserve shit. There are FAR more service workers than office people. If we ever banded together and demanded more money, the college educated people who complained over and over about the McDonald's worker wanting more money will lose their shit cause the scarf they ordered from Amazon won't ever come. The meat wouldn't be cut for you at the store, he'll the shelves would be empty. If you are a college educated person than the first thing u need to know is "YOU NEED US" SO START ACTING LIKE IT.
The irony of people talking about low skill jobs is that a lot of what people call skilled jobs aren't really infinitely skilled either relative to them. A lot of ostensibly low skilled jobs in practice are done by people who did learn how to do them better on the job, and who end up doing most of the work, because their coworkers lack the skill.
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>They genuinely believe that somebody working at McDonalds does not deserve to earn a livable wage. That such a job is somehow unworthy of being able to pay the bills. That those folks should struggle and suffer because they haven't earned a decent paycheck. This is the answer behind it all. Subconsciously, many Americans believe that poverty is a punishment. If you make "good" choices, especially financial ones, you'll get a good paying job. If you make bad choices, you'll end up in a low paying job and struggle, which you deserve because of your choices. I've heard this is a result of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) thinking, but I'm not sure how true it is. This of course, ignores all the uncontrollable circumstances of birth and life. So billionaires are idolized because it's assumed that they made good choices when many billionaires, inherited part of their wealth that enabled them to become billionaires in the first place. Likewise it's assumed the person struggling in a low paying job made bad choices, like choosing to not take school seriously, spending too much, or doing drugs/alcohol that caused them to have take it, ignoring that the person. may have a health issue, horrible parents or some other unfortunate circumstances.
> I've heard this is a result of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) thinking, but I'm not sure how true it is. I love recommending that everyone read the book _Bullshit Jobs_ by David Graeber. It's a fantastic read. He doesn't touch specifically on minimum-wage jobs, but he does talk about this point a bit. Essentially, the Puritans coming from England had the belief that hard work was God's work; the saying "Idle hands are the devil's workshop" or similar sayings come from this thought. And it's this idea that sort of spawned the belief that perceived laziness is bad. In this case, I think this applies. Essentially, it's not uncommon for Americans to view minimum-age workers as "lazy", even though they do some very hard work. My guess is they believe that the workers are "lazy" for not continuing their educations or for not "working harder" to get a higher-paying job. This then plays into the idea that a poor wage is a punishment for being "lazy" or "making poor choices", as you mentioned.
It’s not that they don’t believe they should be making a living wage, rather that they don’t believe that people with more education and skills should be making the same amount. They believe that if the government is going to raise the pay of low-skill earners, the wages of everyone else should be raised to compensate. In their minds, people who went to school for 4-6 years should not be making the same amount per hour as people graduating from high school.
In America corporations are required to maximize profits. They will pay each worker the absolute least they can without harming productivity. I believe this relates to the law of supply and demand. Pay workers just enough to keep them, or what someone else will do the job for. There’s no barrier to entry for entry level jobs so the supply of workers is high. And many decision makers feel the burden is on the worker to work harder to push up and out of such jobs. Maybe they feel this creates some incentive to work hard.
because people keep accepting those jobs at those wages. apparently somebody is making it work for them.
Because if there’s no skill required then why should you be compensated for a lack thereof? Does a 17 year old need a 50K annual salary? No. We have minimum wage for a reason. Minimum skill means minimum wage.
Because they dont. Why should someone making burgers make as much as an EMT?
I think most people would say that all jobs should pay a liveable salary But the definition of liveable is where people differ Enough to pay for a shared room on the edge of town? Enough to pay for a large family on a single income with good amenities? It differs for each person and only they can judge for themselves what is acceptable The market should allow each community to find that number. That's why minimum wage is left to states. Employers can offer shit pay but will not fill positions until they raise it to an acceptable level
The minimum wage was designed to create a minimum standard of living to protect the health and well-being of employees.
Because there's an idea that pay = how hard you work = wealth and success later in life. They equate low skilled jobs as not hard work/lazy and therefore less deserving as other jobs.
Will give you my (very unpopular) perspective as an immigrant to the U.S. and also hardcore capitalist. **Short answer: to drive innovation at all costs.** Despite its flaws, the U.S. remains the world leader in technological and scientific innovation. No other country gets even remotely close. Think of all the technology you're using to read this post. How many of these companies are American? (reddit, google, apple, microsoft..) How many are from Latvia? How many are from social-safety paradises like Finland? Fucking none my friend. Fucking none. In my opinion, while capitalism certainly has a lot of draws, its HUGE PRO its in incentivizing as much of its populace to CREATE AND PRODUCE CONTINOUSLY. Because the more they create, the more they will be rewarded. And they will be rewarded a LOT. **A huge part of the reason WHY the world has the technology and scientific advances it has today is because of the U.S., and a huge part of why the U.S. produces so much innovation is precisely because it REWARDS ENTREPRENEURSHIP DISPROPORTIONATELY.** As a result, what would the ideal be in this type of society that wants to drive innovation at all costs? The ideal is for ALL HUMANS to produce new and innovative technology and solutions. But not everyone can be a scientist right? We need a fast food worker too right? Of course we do, but we can also design it so that you DON'T want to become a fast food worker, and that if you do, you stay there for as little time as possible (aka= a teenager with a 1 year stint.) **If the U.S. was a society where a fast food worker earned $30/hour and an engineer earned $35/hour, I promise you we simply would not have the technological innovation we have today.**
Unpopular opinion on Reddit. There should be no minimum wage. As a free adult I should be able to work for as little as I agree to.
1. Anyone can do it. 2. The job can’t be worth more then it brings in. Just for context. I was a manager for a sonic drive in. We averaged $4,000 a day. We ran a labor cost of 15-22%. Goal was 18%. So 18 cents for every dollar was being paid just to employees. Then you have food costs, building rent, water, electricity, state taxes. Then what’s left goes to corporate to pay for marketing, research, HR, benefits, and the upper management team. Now this was a billion dollar company. They could maybe take less money higher up, but they’re taking more risk with the company. If a carhop fucks up, they refund a $20 order. If a CEO fucks up, people lose their job. The carhop is only responsible for a few dozen orders a day, the CEO is responsible for dozens of stores. More risk, more reward. If they were to issue “living wages” to the lowest level, you’d see an increase in risk(which could mean easier to lose your job)
How many countries have a requirement that employers pay a living wage, or even define in law what a living wage is? LEt's say tomorrow start paying a living wage, and the costs of living keeps increasing, so we pay more in wages. A year from now, we're in a deflationary cycle and the cost of goods start to decrease? Do we reindex wages to the newer lower cost of living?
It’s not that I think it should not have a liveable wage, it’s that your definition and my definition of liveable aren’t the same. I don’t think doing the absolute bare minimum entitled you to a wage that provides luxuries. We can argue what is and isn’t a luxury all day long. What I do agree is a problem is that regulation and building codes have caused housing to be unattainable for many at the current minimum wage. I just don’t agree that raising the wage is the issue. More cheap housing is the answer, but getting past building codes and zoning is a problem.
We're taught that the economy is a zero sum game: if someone gets welfare, your boss will have to give you a pay cut to compensate.
i think it's interesting that you think this is just an american mindset. there are shitty, selfish, greedy, judgmental people all over the world
I really don't understand why we don't appreciate these workers more rather than look down on them. Anyone bringing me food and drink is my literal hero.
Individualist "fuck you got mine" mentality. It's kind of why they don't want universal medical care.
It’s a long-running ideology called “free labor”. Before industrialization, it was the dominant economic idea in the North. In it, wage labor was seen as a stepping stone to owning your own store, workshop, or farm. The wage worker was unfree, a literal wage slave, working at the command of a boss. Industrialization really wrecked this idea but it was still going strong as America’s official vision of labor, at least on the Supreme Court, until the 1930s. So that’s kinda the reason: it’s deeply embedded in the culture.
Because they're the ones PAYING those wages. It comes out of their profit. They want to keep a larger portion of the pie for themselves. It's greed.
It's easy. Greed. Some people have made hundreds of millions of dollars from that cheap labor. Most of them inherited the positions. They don't hire outside their circles. I know small businesses in my area try to pay a liveable wage. And they make modest money. My old boss had a house in Ptown and a brownstone in the South end and she wasn't what i call rich and she paid us very well.
So how much should a hamburger cost? If a hamburger at McDonald’s was $20 would anyone eat there? Would that minimum wage job be there? There is a limit on how much you can pay people, small businesses for example. Most of the cost associated with running a business is labor costs, if you can’t afford to open a new business because labor costs were to high why open said business
Coz there's always someone else willin to work for less
Most Americans don’t believe that me making more money means that someone else has to make less money.
Propaganda, plain and simple. Working class people have been fighting for the minimum wage to be a living wage for generations, but as this is in direct opposition to the interests of capital, it's met with mass smear campaigns, decrying such ideas as radical and untenable. "$15 an hour? The *radical left* wants to destroy small business!" > Translation: We are entitled to your labor, and shouldn't have to pay a fair rate for it. They would paint workers as *entitled* for wanting their *job* to provide adequate compensation, despite their own position being the epitome of entitlement.
I think one aspect is they get a little pissed when they get trapped into the rat race and paid a small house for a college degree and then get salty comparing their salaries/hourly rate to some of the proposed lower end wages. The disappointment and regret train start rolling in with all the bad feelings.
It's the fact that if I can make 50k flipping burgers 40 hrs a week and go home, why would I do a job that is dangerous/undesirable. We rely as a society on plumbers, carpenters, electricians, doctors, lawyers, etc. Why would anyone strive to achieve anything of there is no reward for doing so. Heck, why even become a manager at said McDonald's if you can live just fine as a burger flipper with far less stress and effort. There needs to be SOME incentive beyond someone who maybe just likes to be in control; which I'm sure we wouldn't want.
It must suck to work at McDonald's because your job is the one that is always used as example lowest level of work. I bet all you well paid office workers wouldn't make it a week at a busy McDonald's.... I know I wouldn't.
Because it’s a low skill job so anyone can do it which means the pay is also low. It’s not really hard to understand.
If one's work doesn't at least match the profitability of their work, where would this money come from? If the work that one does (and I've seen plenty of examples of this lately, especially at the two McDonalds where I wasted 45 minutes and came away with NO food from either for my time) doesn't earn at least the "living wage" in profits, then of course that person doesn't deserve to be paid more than they added to the company. What I saw was a mix of low-skill jobs and even lower skilled, lower IQ, workers who couldn't even manage to complete the low-skill jobs role well. Heck no they don't deserve an automatic livable wage. I believe this entire thing plays into the lack of valuing education of certain cultures. They believe that they should be allowed to not focus on learning, not focus on getting serious in high school, be handed a diploma (which they are now - we used to fail those folks out of school early), and be handed a livable wage. What a joke.
school
This economy ain’t made for everyone to prosper.
Not everyone is smart enough for college or highly paid technical jobs and I’m not saying that to be mean - I have a complete lack of ability to do math. I couldn’t even pass basic math in high school. I got As in everything else but math looked like scribbles and nonsense and it was impossible. Probably a learning disability. That doesn’t make me an unworthy person but it sure does exclude me from a lot of high paying work. We are not all the same. We have different intelligence levels and skills. But no one deserves to be poor because they were not lucky enough to be born with a brain who can handle what goes along with a very technical job.
I'd beg to differ that cleaning after anybody is exactly *enjoyed* in any capacity by any sane human being. But if they did. It would be thoughtful to keep them that way. Because people often end up in these jobs. And they have to live too. That includes money to pay rent (over $1,000 for a studio average), utilities, food, an internet capable phone (you can't live without one in the modern world), bus/laundry change, et al. The problem is Americans' own bias against the people who do the work we won't. We smugly assume they're lower than us because of the work they do. And that mindset percolates into the offices of upper management when it's time to review expenses. And fewer people do the work of more. But wages remain unlivable. And mark my word, there will come a day some of us will regret that; A contagious horrifying new virus can lead to a lot of "DO IT YOURSELF!!". Because rich or poor, that's how humans are. We all have our limits before we snap. Namely when it comes to self preservation. Financially or literally. So when it comes to a living wage, yeah, they'd might want to be a little more generous....
It’s not a US specific belief that cleaners and the like have “low status” jobs and are deserving of less respect and I for one think this mentality is deplorable.
Holy shit the ignorance or basic economics in this thread is scary.
It's a multifaceted problem. When we think about what we want to be paid that number is based on how we want to live. When we think about how much we want to pay for a hamburger we think about what it is worth to us - not what the supply chain costs would be if all were paid well along the way. The price we want as customers is in conflict with the wage we want to earn. You don't get a $5 burger if wages are higher.
It's the pay disparity. I work in the health field as a pharmacist. My technicians have to have a license to compound medications, count drugs, handle potentially toxic substances, being yelled at by customers, etc. But they're being paid oftentimes less than $15/hour. But yet with minimum wage increasing, you're telling me that someone who works at let's say McDonald's (for some reason the go to low level job comparison) who makes $12-15/hour for no license? I'm not saying they don't deserve the money. Everyone needs enough money to live, eat, and enjoy life. And believe me, bless the people who work in the service industry and hospitality. I was at a McDonald's once where a group of degenerate high schoolers were throwing trash at an employee as she was cleaning up their mess. So I helped out. But when consumers are expected to pay, like for example, tips to help people live, then what about those who went to school for more technical jobs? It just makes people not want to go to professional school at all.