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this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
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The US minimum wage hasn't changed in TEN YEARS?! You guys need to revolt, that is awful.
To be fair, many states and cities have their own minimum wages higher than the federal minimum. I'll let you guess which states don't.
The ones where the people are most afraid of communism and think minimum wage is socialism?
That's a bingo
You just say "bingo".
For anyone about to downvote - it's a quote from Inglorious Basterds ^
It’s an older quote, sir, but it checks out.
But you said—
Lemming, chill
50 states makes this game too difficult. Can we just guess colors instead?
I live in a red state with an $11/hr minimum wage. We got that by amending the constitution, thereby overriding the legislature which was opposed to the increase. Unfortunately $11/hr is not even close to enough to live on here so apparently it's time to raise it via another constitutional amendment. Sigh
Gotta double it to catch up, and pin it to inflation at the same time so it stops falling behind.
Surprisingly, Florida has a higher minimum wage--nearly double that of the federal minimum, and will reach $15 in 2026. Of course, you can't survive on that working 40 hours a week.
And most people in those states that don't have their own don't work for the federal minimum wage. My state has no minimum wage, and most "minimum wage" jobs start at something like $10-12.
Which is still garbage. How does someone survive today on less than $25,000/year?
Live with their parents. It's doable to "survive", it's just that someone cannot "thrive", i.e. live the American Dream, or have health insurance, thus getting back to your point about survival, although that's generally considered a separate thing than income, bc e.g. someone could be on their spouse's health plan.
And then there are all sorts of tricks to go below minimum wage too... including having more black people locked up and working in for-profit prisons than were ever used as slaves; or Waffle House's trick where someone only gets a base wage of like $3.25 an hour and then while the minimum $7.25 per hour is guaranteed, in order to get more than that they have to make up the difference with tips (on what is <$10 meals).
But how do you help people when (a) things like the electoral college and gerrymandering exist, (b) preachers say from the actual, literal pulpit that God commands to vote Republican, and (c) those areas vote conservative not only for themselves but also apply that to the nation at large, e.g. keeping Mitch McConnell in power, and making abortion illegal in those states.
TLDR: it's how they choose to live. And they might be about to fight an actual civil war to extend those "rights" further.
Well we know how American civil wars end, and the country could use some more Reconstruction
Yes, it's not meant to support a family on, but it's totally possible to live on, especially if you live with other people (e.g. have a roommate). A 2 bed apartment is something like $1200-1500, so if you cut that in half (i.e. roommate, dual income family, etc), that's about 1/4-1/3 of a $25k/year wage, which is about what PF writers suggest.
And this is starting pay at the crappiest jobs, many easy to get jobs pay closer to $15/hr. The only people actually making $10-12 are teenagers, college students, and people with limited/negative employment history.
The solution here, IMO, isn't to increase the minimum wage (that'll end up reducing jobs), but to supplement the income of people who do those jobs (i.e. something like UBI).
Research has found that increasing minimum wage does not reduce jobs.
https://www.epi.org/blog/most-minimum-wage-studies-have-found-little-or-no-job-loss/#:~:text=Most%20minimum%20wage%20studies%20have,job%20loss%20%7C%20Economic%20Policy%20Institute
https://sp2.upenn.edu/study-increasing-minimum-wage-has-positive-effects-on-employment-in-fast-food-sector-and-other-highly-concentrated-labor-markets/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2023/05/20/does-raising-the-minimum-wage-result-in-job-losses-in-small-firms/
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/higher-minimum-wages-support-job-growth-economy-recovers-covid-19/
https://irle.berkeley.edu/publications/press-release/new-study-analyzes-impact-of-californias-20-minimum-wage-for-fast-food-workers/
Employment typically lags policy, and stores will prefer to raise prices than potentially reduce their ability to service customer needs. However, the higher the minimum wage goes, the more attractive replacements for workers become, meaning there will be more investment into kiosks and other ways to reduce headcount.
I think we'll really see how things will work in the next economic correction when stores cut costs to retain customers. So I'm less interested in data from a couple months after the policy change (basically the Berkeley study) and more interested in data 2-5 years after the change. Will fast food companies increase the pace of developing digital replacements for workers?
I don't have a link handy, but there was a study that showed that fast food businesses didn't reduce staffing when they replaced cashier's with kiosks. Rather, they shifted employment to areas that couldn't be replaced with a kiosk, enabling the staff to meet the increased demand and increased sales that were a result of the kiosks.
Which is just "reduced staffing" in different words. If the kiosks weren't there, they would have hired more workers, built more restaurants, etc. But they opted for the kiosks because they were cheaper than expanding hiring.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I think it's something that a lot of studies downplay. They instead focus on job loss instead of lack of job growth (i.e. we expect more employment every year as population increases).
And there absolutely is a breaking point where we'll see job loss, as in the risk of reduced business from crappy customer experience is worth the cut in jobs, and it's unclear where exactly that breaking point is. Maybe we've hit it, idk, I expect these types of things to lag policy changes by a few years because it takes time for innovation to happen. But once a company can successfully reduce headcount w/o reducing revenues significantly, we'll see other companies jump on board, and that will happen sooner the higher we push minimum wages.
Except the study specified that the increased sales were related to the presence of the kiosks. They could do point of sale promotions that just weren't reliably done if a person was in between the customer and the computer.
10 years... how refreshingly optimistic...
In 2007, Congress passed the increase to 7.25 to take effect in 2009. The minimum wage change 15 years ago was passed 17 years ago.
I wonder how hoarders of wealth will be thought of in the distant future. If we survive, I hope they are seen as fools with misguided goals, and criminals for being vacuums of human potential.
People should be contributing ideas, creativity and wisdom instead of worrying about their next meal.
The vast majority of employers can't pay the minimum rate, because their employees wouldn't be able to do basic shit like travel to the jobsite or afford to eat. Wages have been rising (particularly post-COVID, after a few million Americans dropped out of the labor force for some mysterious reason) as demand eclipses supply.
And a big reason AI has caught on as a techno-panacea is business analysts are looking at the median age and size of the labor force, the stark hostility to immigration, and the perpetually increasing need for technical work, then realizing this is going to put huge upward pressure on wages unless much of that workforce can be automated away.
But market forces are happening even in absence of legislative action. Union activity is reemerging as a socio-economic force. Not everything rests on a federal majority manually raising the wage floor.
You know, something always feels a little off with an underpantsweevil comment. I could never put my finger on it though, always seems so close to being factual but for some reason skewed. I think it's the declarative statements which turn out to be more of an opinion or editorial piece that's only backed up by other vague references much like a matt walsh or tim (can't remember his last name) might make.
This is a weird general statement that reinforces that "supply & demand" is a worth-while endeavor that has worked out for everyone economically and socially. Of course wages have been rising.... it would be beyond a depression if the average salary went down for the past couple of years. The important caveats are completely missed though...
AI..... are you talking about like a general AI or chatgpt? What right-wing or doomscrolling blog are you reading about AI from? All these companies trying to cram some type of "AI" into their program is a problem for sure, but it's just a fad which only the most useful implementations will stick around. If anything, the companies are spending more trying to make it work (which it doesn't).
Amazon Fresh kills “Just Walk Out” shopping tech—it never really worked - "AI" checkout was actually powered by 1,000 human video reviewers in India.
Here is an article by the Mckinsey Global Institute.
Interesting you've again promoted "market forces" (reminds me of trickle-down economics). Union activity has been beaten down by a war being waged for decades, proper legislation and officials protecting the rights of Unions are the only way they will continue to have a chance. The recent changes in the Biden administration shows that unions can stand a chance if the branches of government would actually support it.
Wouldn't having a federal majority, manually raising the wage floor, protect future workers when the AI revolution comes? If the market determines the wage minimum, won't your points become moot when there is no more demand? I'm just still flabbergasted that you believe "employers can’t pay the minimum rate, because their employees wouldn’t be able to do basic shit like travel to the jobsite or afford to eat." I don't know what social circles you are in, but this isn't the reality most lower income people are facing.
It's a fundamental pricing mechanism. Low supply pushes demand up.
Efforts to shoehorn AI into daily business activity aren't just at the retail end. We're seeing it show up in doctor's offices, to replace transcription services, and legal offices, to replace paralegals, and in IT to replace developers.
The implementation is routinely worse than the human labor it replaces, but the cost is so much lower that business owners will justify the transition.
Union organizers who wait on corporately captured politicians to save them are fucked. You build the union first and you get the legislation later, when politicians recognize the union as a force worth pandering to.
By contrast, the Wildcat Strike and the Slow Down... hell, the very act of collectively bargaining, leveraged market force to exert pressure on employers.
Depriving businesses of their labor supply compels them to increase their compensation. That's Econ 101 tier material analysis.
Sure. But you need a movement large enough to obtain the corruptive force of private capital first. Where do you get that movement?
By the time you have a coalition big enough to compel the federal government to change, you've already built a union big enough to force private industry to capitulate independent of a legislative fix.
Again, just baseless conjuncture that sounds "almost right". You have the general principles, you even reference Econ 101, but analysis and expert opinion goes further (why there's so many armchair champions out there, unfortunately). Please cite some actual sources that have analyzed the systems and what your perspective has been formed by. This just seems like base-level pandering that gets no where like a "group chat" on one of the mainstream news outlets.
Things do not happen in a sterile chamber. You can't create union movements when they're getting destroyed by officials
Your AI argument is fear mongering, as I stated above, with sources, a net increase in jobs is projected. This is the telephone/computer technology fear now for the 2020's. You've yet to provide an actual argument for why technology shouldn't proceed. Should oil and gas not go through the same transition? God forbid we have less administration and more skilled workers, as my sources concluded would be the outcome.
Yes, supply-demand is a fundamental pricing mechanism, as econ 101 will teach. Unfortunately the subsequent classes that economists take after also include the million different factors with changes that mechanisms output. For further understandings, I would suggest Unlearning Economics (here is one of his videos going over a Sabine Hossenfelder's video on capitalism). He comes with credentials,
Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century is a solid one.
Richard Wolff also has a great podcast on the subject
That is part of the strategy to depress wages, certainly. But substandard substitution is also a standard business strategy.
It's way beyond that, but the majority of the population has become weak and complicit. Either a general strike or full-on revolution is needed. I guess people will wait until everyone is suffering except the mega rich to be angry enough to break free from their day to day fantasy of blissful ignorance.
Because eXcEptIoNAliSm and mEriToCrAcY, tHe aMerIcAn dReAm!!!1122
It just goes to show how powerful the indoctrination really is.
Seriously, I made overtly anti-fascist comments on a politicalmemes post that are getting downvoted...
Edit for your reading pleasure: https://lemmy.world/comment/13098744
For what it's worth, you're spot on and I gave you my upvote lol
But yeah, the resistance to the truth in favour of temporary comfort is quite scary to watch as it unfolds live in front of our eyes, but that just means we have to say it louder.
Thank you! And very frightening, we absolutely need to keep repeating it and louder in this sea of propaganda. Though it seems history will repeat itself, and "comfortable"/ignorant people won't budge until they are all personally affected and suffering themselves.
Yup, "first they came for..." seems as relevant as ever, it's almost like we never learn (more like are deliberately kept ignorant and just comfortable enough to benefit the ruling class).