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?
Great, so you are now making $20/hr, but the cost to live just went up as well because apparently everyone else just got a raise as well.
People with actual skills and certifications and degrees aren’t going to stand for making just a few dollars more than some skill-less burger flipper, that’s for damn sure. So now their labor rates are going to eventually go up. When that happens, companies are just going to tack on another 10 or 20% to their prices.
So you solved absolutely nothing.
What used to cost $100, now costs $120. So you’ve made absolutely no headway in this because your aren’t adding to your skills and getting a better job. Instead you are simply trying to inflate skill-less jobs and pretend like they are artificially worth $20/hr.
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.
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.
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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.
And what does “raising the floor” do other than make everything more expensive?
Great, so you are now making $20/hr, but the cost to live just went up as well because apparently everyone else just got a raise as well.
People with actual skills and certifications and degrees aren’t going to stand for making just a few dollars more than some skill-less burger flipper, that’s for damn sure. So now their labor rates are going to eventually go up. When that happens, companies are just going to tack on another 10 or 20% to their prices.
So you solved absolutely nothing.
What used to cost $100, now costs $120. So you’ve made absolutely no headway in this because your aren’t adding to your skills and getting a better job. Instead you are simply trying to inflate skill-less jobs and pretend like they are artificially worth $20/hr.
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