Based on the number of downvotes of people critical here, the overwhelming majority here must make minimum wage.
So when you get your bachelors degree and get your first job making $25 an hour… why did you go to college and rack up tens of thousands of dollars in debt again?
What are we doing to help people build enough wealth to own a home? because minimum wage is never going to afford it, even if it you make it $50/hr by 2030.
Raising the floor should cause all other wages to increase as well. No need to bucket-crab. All worker wages have been stagnant for almost a half-century, while their efforts have created more and more wealth due to technological advances.
What are we doing to help people build enough wealth to own a home? because minimum wage is never going to afford it, even if it you make it $50/hr by 2030.
That’s literally what minimum wage was intended to be. A living wage that allowed one to have a family, save for a house, and retirement. That sort of stuff was near reality in the mid-20th century. Even the character Al Bundy on Married with Children was portrayed as being able to afford a house and support a family on a single income as a shoe salesman, without being thought an unusual premise.
Minimum wage should be closer to $100/hr then in Boston. I can’t imagine anything less than 200k supporting a family with the white picket house, a retirement plan, and a commute that isn’t 2+ hours each way.
Definitely gonna quit my professional job to be a Barista at that point though. Way more fun.
I mean that would be an absolutely valid decision. We as a society have decided that we want Baristas to be a job. There’s people who would love nothing more than to do that with their lives and there’s no legitimate reason that they cannot - the world takes all kinds to stay interesting and make life worth living.
When you’re doing 1099 work you end up paying for your own health insurance and a little bit more in income taxes. The problem with construction contractor work is that it destroys your body over time. Definitely have seen master electricians, plumbers et al pull 150k+++ for many years in Mass.
It is great to see the US apply some sort of protection laws that actually matter. I would have liked to have seen this applied as a minimum wage across the board not just large companies. I get the feeling that companies will downsize just to avoid the law.
This quote is bloody awful to me. It is like an exert from a dickens novel.
Ingrid Vilorio, a fast-food worker at a Jack In The Box in the San Francisco Bay Area, said the increase in salary next year will bring some relief to her family, who until recently was sharing a house with two other families to afford rent.
And what does “raising the floor” do other than make everything more expensive?
What you’re talking about is what is referred to as a “Wage-Price Spiral”. While this is the idea that is pushed a lot, it is not actually based on factual data. All recent studies have refuted that it is actually a real thing - even the Cato Institute, a right-wing libertarian think-tank, acknowledges this. Current inflationary forces are overwhelming related to price gouging, extracting more money from society to go into the hoards of billionaires.
Real wages have stagnated since the 70s and completely decoupled from economic productivity under Reagan. The lack of a living minimum wage is nothing more than massive theft of earned wages. I do agree that just setting it at $20 is barely a half-measure. It needs to be tied to cost of living and adjusted annually, without legislative action.
In Massachusetts IT wages have stagnated for 12 years. Minimum wage has doubled. Rent has gone up 2.3x or so. Housing prices have just about doubled but it depends on location.
Junior IT people now make a couple bucks more than minimum wage. My wife was hiring for a couple of positions and the pay was around 42k. I still don’t understand how that works as a salary in 2023 in Boston.
I make 20 an hour at a coal mine. It would be really awesome if i didnt have to be congested all the time and could still get all i need. Im not an ambitious person but i wont let my husband live in poverty. If the minimum wage went up a lot of coal miners would become fast food workers, and the coal company would raise its hiring pay to cope with that. Also, theyd start a hiring spree.
So by raising the minimum wage a lot of new desirable jobs would open up in my community and all the old workers who only did it for the money would have more freedom.
It might sound ridiculous, but A LOT of people in heavy industry dont do it for the money. They like the work. I sort of do too tbh. I woild probably quit and then come back to the mines once the next hiring wave started so i could get a quick raise.
I downvoted you, but i dont like how everyone is so mean on Lemmy now. Just a few months ago it was all smiles and conversation. Now its like reddit and everyone just want to argue. Im not arguing with you. Im adding on to what you said.
We already saw a lot of that in my part of the country organically. When there were a number of job openings for some reason (did a lot of people suddenly die or something?), people in the bare minimum wage locations jumped up the rung into better positions, both to better pay and to lateral moves with fewer bad customers. We started getting those “Wendy’s closed, no one wants to work” signs, but the owner makes zero from a closed store, so the pay went up. Now the other burger places have to follow suit to keep the lights on.
We can actually see the reverse in a floor raise like this. The crappy jobs that made $20 will have people saying “screw this, I’ll just flip burgers,” and the worker shortage will be in the formerly higher paying (but less attractive) jobs, which will have to raise pay to attract people who could just ask if you want fries and make the same money. I predict the next tier jobs will either immediately raise pay, or moan that “no one wants to work” while we go to well staffed burger places with very efficient staffs, and enjoy very talents landscapers that actually enjoy their jobs.
I just want to touch on the “things will cost more argument,” which sounds so very, very ridiculous after the past 3 years. No raise in the minimum wage, but everything soared in price. To make that argument and not realize that the whole world makes your words a joke is the providence of a fool or a shill.
Well except if the prices are already going up, why would you want to add stress to the system that encourages them to go up even more? You’re assuming that things are disconnected but that’s in no way proven.
small raises in the minimum wage lead to slower wage growth for low-wage workers
minimum wage reduces job growth over a period of several years with the effects being strongest for younger workers and for those in industries with a higher proportion of low-wage-workers.
Other research shows less clear results of increasing the minimum wage as an antipoverty tool in disadvantaged neighborhoods and a decrease of worker hours and increase in capital investment following minimum wage increases
Just raise the wages! surely less hours available, slower job growth and slower wage growth is the best way.
I’m in Massachusetts and practically nobody actually gets paid the state minimum wage. Ice cream scoopers were making 16-18/hr+ before we had $15/hr minimum wage. I was making 10 back when our min was 8 as a cashier.
A National minimum wage hike is going to encourage job outsourcing. It’s already possible to pay someone $900/mo in Chile who speaks fluent English to recruit tech people. (That’s $5.19/hr.) Do you think lower tier professional jobs are going to increase, stay the same, or shrink in the US?
How do you think the rising cost of american labor will affect the import/export balance?
If you want to fix our problems start with insurance and pharma and continue on with the finance sector. Only by crushing those huge-profit-leeching industries by having similar regulations to what exists overseas will you bring down the high wage jobs and reduce the disparity.
Health insurance is only expensive because drugs have no standardized national pricing (like most of the world does.) Our health insurance is the highest in the world despite not providing the highest standard of care and paying not so great compared to single payer countries.
Then comes insurance… some of the highest paying roles out there are in big insurance companies. I’ve seen IT helpdesk roles advertised in Boston for 170k+ for executive support roles because insurance is such a glut with profit - they cannot ever lose. Medical insurance going single payer is an obvious thing but other insurances suffer other problems like maximum profit %s being regulation encouraging insurance companies to up gross price and cost to make an end result profit of X% based on the gross. They want to make more money and the only way is to raise prices and expenses.
It’s like the nursing home problem. They are designed to never make any actual money but they seem to pay their external company cleaning crew $1000/hr to clean and they are informed about inspections ahead of time so they can adjust staffing to appear appropriate. It’s all a game to make it look like their non-profit is really not making a profit for the owners but all the associated business to business supports they have also happen to be owned by the same owners as the nonprofit and those businesses are private and make a killing.
I’m not going to go into the finance side. I know i’ve already lost everybody.
Anyway, I know i’ll just get downvotes because “I WANT MORE MONEY” but the problems we have require a lot of big losers to reverse the hoarding of wealth by the wealthy and bring it down, and honestly a lot of the more well-to-do upper middle class would be greatly affected - it’ll never happen.
Hi, I make six figures and I’m very happy to see this (and also downvoted you for spreading this kinda division). Most half decent people are happy for others getting good things, not upset because they get something better or because it means you’re not as much better than them anymore.
We absolutely should also help home prices to be affordable. The current prices in many cities are completely unmaintainable for far too many people. Everyone needs housing, so it’s dumb for us to keep cropping the price of it up.
Shills who behave like bots are bots. Anyone spreading bullshit to destabilize legitimate discussion via fallacious reasoning can fall off a cliff, for all I care
Based on the number of downvotes of people critical here, the overwhelming majority here must make minimum wage.
So when you get your bachelors degree and get your first job making $25 an hour… why did you go to college and rack up tens of thousands of dollars in debt again?
What are we doing to help people build enough wealth to own a home? because minimum wage is never going to afford it, even if it you make it $50/hr by 2030.
Raising the floor should cause all other wages to increase as well. No need to bucket-crab. All worker wages have been stagnant for almost a half-century, while their efforts have created more and more wealth due to technological advances.
That’s literally what minimum wage was intended to be. A living wage that allowed one to have a family, save for a house, and retirement. That sort of stuff was near reality in the mid-20th century. Even the character Al Bundy on Married with Children was portrayed as being able to afford a house and support a family on a single income as a shoe salesman, without being thought an unusual premise.
Minimum wage should be closer to $100/hr then in Boston. I can’t imagine anything less than 200k supporting a family with the white picket house, a retirement plan, and a commute that isn’t 2+ hours each way.
Definitely gonna quit my professional job to be a Barista at that point though. Way more fun.
I mean that would be an absolutely valid decision. We as a society have decided that we want Baristas to be a job. There’s people who would love nothing more than to do that with their lives and there’s no legitimate reason that they cannot - the world takes all kinds to stay interesting and make life worth living.
deleted by creator
When you’re doing 1099 work you end up paying for your own health insurance and a little bit more in income taxes. The problem with construction contractor work is that it destroys your body over time. Definitely have seen master electricians, plumbers et al pull 150k+++ for many years in Mass.
It is great to see the US apply some sort of protection laws that actually matter. I would have liked to have seen this applied as a minimum wage across the board not just large companies. I get the feeling that companies will downsize just to avoid the law.
This quote is bloody awful to me. It is like an exert from a dickens novel.
Removed by mod
What you’re talking about is what is referred to as a “Wage-Price Spiral”. While this is the idea that is pushed a lot, it is not actually based on factual data. All recent studies have refuted that it is actually a real thing - even the Cato Institute, a right-wing libertarian think-tank, acknowledges this. Current inflationary forces are overwhelming related to price gouging, extracting more money from society to go into the hoards of billionaires.
Real wages have stagnated since the 70s and completely decoupled from economic productivity under Reagan. The lack of a living minimum wage is nothing more than massive theft of earned wages. I do agree that just setting it at $20 is barely a half-measure. It needs to be tied to cost of living and adjusted annually, without legislative action.
Removed by mod
It feels like you think the things you said are against raising the minimum wage, and I strongly recommend you read your own post again.
In Massachusetts IT wages have stagnated for 12 years. Minimum wage has doubled. Rent has gone up 2.3x or so. Housing prices have just about doubled but it depends on location.
Junior IT people now make a couple bucks more than minimum wage. My wife was hiring for a couple of positions and the pay was around 42k. I still don’t understand how that works as a salary in 2023 in Boston.
I make 20 an hour at a coal mine. It would be really awesome if i didnt have to be congested all the time and could still get all i need. Im not an ambitious person but i wont let my husband live in poverty. If the minimum wage went up a lot of coal miners would become fast food workers, and the coal company would raise its hiring pay to cope with that. Also, theyd start a hiring spree.
So by raising the minimum wage a lot of new desirable jobs would open up in my community and all the old workers who only did it for the money would have more freedom.
It might sound ridiculous, but A LOT of people in heavy industry dont do it for the money. They like the work. I sort of do too tbh. I woild probably quit and then come back to the mines once the next hiring wave started so i could get a quick raise.
I downvoted you, but i dont like how everyone is so mean on Lemmy now. Just a few months ago it was all smiles and conversation. Now its like reddit and everyone just want to argue. Im not arguing with you. Im adding on to what you said.
We already saw a lot of that in my part of the country organically. When there were a number of job openings for some reason (did a lot of people suddenly die or something?), people in the bare minimum wage locations jumped up the rung into better positions, both to better pay and to lateral moves with fewer bad customers. We started getting those “Wendy’s closed, no one wants to work” signs, but the owner makes zero from a closed store, so the pay went up. Now the other burger places have to follow suit to keep the lights on.
We can actually see the reverse in a floor raise like this. The crappy jobs that made $20 will have people saying “screw this, I’ll just flip burgers,” and the worker shortage will be in the formerly higher paying (but less attractive) jobs, which will have to raise pay to attract people who could just ask if you want fries and make the same money. I predict the next tier jobs will either immediately raise pay, or moan that “no one wants to work” while we go to well staffed burger places with very efficient staffs, and enjoy very talents landscapers that actually enjoy their jobs.
I just want to touch on the “things will cost more argument,” which sounds so very, very ridiculous after the past 3 years. No raise in the minimum wage, but everything soared in price. To make that argument and not realize that the whole world makes your words a joke is the providence of a fool or a shill.
Well except if the prices are already going up, why would you want to add stress to the system that encourages them to go up even more? You’re assuming that things are disconnected but that’s in no way proven.
In no way proven? Like, researchers looking at historical data for minimum wage increases and comparing it to inflation increases? Like this?
https://www.upjohn.org/research-effects-raising-minimum-wage
(Spoiler: Prices generally go up 0.36% for every 10% the minimum wage is increased.)
Per YFA:
Just raise the wages! surely less hours available, slower job growth and slower wage growth is the best way.
I’m in Massachusetts and practically nobody actually gets paid the state minimum wage. Ice cream scoopers were making 16-18/hr+ before we had $15/hr minimum wage. I was making 10 back when our min was 8 as a cashier.
A National minimum wage hike is going to encourage job outsourcing. It’s already possible to pay someone $900/mo in Chile who speaks fluent English to recruit tech people. (That’s $5.19/hr.) Do you think lower tier professional jobs are going to increase, stay the same, or shrink in the US?
How do you think the rising cost of american labor will affect the import/export balance?
If you want to fix our problems start with insurance and pharma and continue on with the finance sector. Only by crushing those huge-profit-leeching industries by having similar regulations to what exists overseas will you bring down the high wage jobs and reduce the disparity.
Health insurance is only expensive because drugs have no standardized national pricing (like most of the world does.) Our health insurance is the highest in the world despite not providing the highest standard of care and paying not so great compared to single payer countries.
Then comes insurance… some of the highest paying roles out there are in big insurance companies. I’ve seen IT helpdesk roles advertised in Boston for 170k+ for executive support roles because insurance is such a glut with profit - they cannot ever lose. Medical insurance going single payer is an obvious thing but other insurances suffer other problems like maximum profit %s being regulation encouraging insurance companies to up gross price and cost to make an end result profit of X% based on the gross. They want to make more money and the only way is to raise prices and expenses.
It’s like the nursing home problem. They are designed to never make any actual money but they seem to pay their external company cleaning crew $1000/hr to clean and they are informed about inspections ahead of time so they can adjust staffing to appear appropriate. It’s all a game to make it look like their non-profit is really not making a profit for the owners but all the associated business to business supports they have also happen to be owned by the same owners as the nonprofit and those businesses are private and make a killing.
I’m not going to go into the finance side. I know i’ve already lost everybody.
Anyway, I know i’ll just get downvotes because “I WANT MORE MONEY” but the problems we have require a lot of big losers to reverse the hoarding of wealth by the wealthy and bring it down, and honestly a lot of the more well-to-do upper middle class would be greatly affected - it’ll never happen.
Hi, I make six figures and I’m very happy to see this (and also downvoted you for spreading this kinda division). Most half decent people are happy for others getting good things, not upset because they get something better or because it means you’re not as much better than them anymore.
We absolutely should also help home prices to be affordable. The current prices in many cities are completely unmaintainable for far too many people. Everyone needs housing, so it’s dumb for us to keep cropping the price of it up.
Delete your account, bot.
People who do not agree with you are bots?
Great way to dehumanize the opinion of others I guess.
Shills who behave like bots are bots. Anyone spreading bullshit to destabilize legitimate discussion via fallacious reasoning can fall off a cliff, for all I care