It’s wild how conservatives have been led to believe that people shouldn’t make a livable wage doing whatever job needs to be done.
Then, when people don’t want to work for shit pay, they cry that “nobody wants to work anymore”.
For me to win, others must lose
That's the crux of it. Republicans almost invariably see life as a zero-sum game. It honestly does not occur to them that everyone could be happy and prosperous.
Well, of course. They agree that someone has to do those jobs, they just don't think they should be able to afford a one bedroom apartment while doing so.
A one-bed apartment! The lap of luxury! Get three roommates and stop being lazy!
They really just want slaves, but they know that's a line they can't say anymore. In public.
It’s wild how conservatives have been led to believe that people shouldn’t make a livable wage doing whatever job needs to be done.
Not just conservatives. My stepdad is far from being one, but he lives in a fantasy reality where "no one in the 80s made a living or supported a family working fast food or running a register." (I paraphrased a tiny bit, but this is a near-direct quote from him.)
In the 80s we were already on this path to severe underpayment. He was being fucked by the system already, it just wasn't as obviously destructive so he took it with the lube they provided and said thank you. Now they can't admit that's what happened because they would have to admit were/are idiots getting willingly fucked by the business.
Ask him how those Reaganomics are working for him.
The problem is that those Reaganomics affect younger much worse than older. He probably still did fine and that's why he didn't understand what others are complaining.
"makinh a living" and "surviving" are two different things
This. My parents and my husband and I went to the Smithsonian archival museum in Washington DC. They had an exhibit about the coal and steel strike from the 1800s-literally present day. My parents were raised in the era of "work hard put your head down". They really needed this to show class inequality of capitalism. I mean you can find that anywhere on the internet but it was cool to be there and talk about it. Fuck Capitalism and the cancer that it has always been. My parents are still voting for Trash but I feel its a step forward.
Aha, Snopes rates it as "True", therefore nobody wants to work anymore!
It's the mentality that billionaires use to impose on us. Yes, our life sucks, but it is not bad, because there are people for whom or sucks much more.
I am currently reading book called On Freedom by Prof. Timothy Snyder and is really eye opening, how we are being manipulated to hurt our and our children's future. I think everyone should read it.
Just a reminder that we’ve been trying to get the minimum wage to $15/hr for so long that if we kept up with inflation the minimum wage would be over $25/hr now. By the time $15/hr actually passes it’ll be less than half of what it should be.
I'm so fucking tired of hearing about a living wage.
I want a thriving wage! If that means that janitors and whoever the fuck conservatives want to shit on make $40-50 dollars and hour, so be it.
Wages have been so stagnant that I want a labor market and not a job market.
The whole concept of having to earn your right to keep on living is pretty wild
And, federally, it's still half that ($7.25). Cheers!
So... one approach you could take would be to say anyone working a full time job should be able to afford a one bedroom apartment. You know, New Deal kind of ethos for the modern era.
https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/united-states/?bedrooms=1
Ok, avg one bed rent ~= $1600 a month.
$1600 * 3 = $4800 (1/3 rent to income ratio)
$4800 / (40 hrs x 4 weeks) = $30 dollars an hour.
So yeah its actually worse than 'We've been arguing about $15 for so long its more like $25'.
Nope. Its $30 an hour. $62,400 a year.
Sure would be cool if we did literally anything to _actually_make housing more affordable.
(BTW 60% of working individual Americans make less than this)
Not just afford a one bedroom apartment. They should be able to do so and also afford to go to work. You can get housing for next to nothing in bumfuck nowhere, but if you can't get to work while living there, then there's no point.
If you've ever been to a restaurant with a conservative, the way they treat servers like shit is a dead give-away of their political orientation. Conservatives hate working class people.
Do you go out much? Most people treat their servers well regardless of political affiliation. My home town is majority conservative and are all very respectful when eating out.
I worked a career in an almost exclusively conservative line of work after being raised in the red south. I base my assertion on many, many years of close observation, but I admit this is only anecdotal evidence. I'm glad to hear your experience is different.
Would you say your local conservatives also tip well, or do they tip like the vile, sub-human pieces of shit I have observed?
I was a server for years and I don’t know what political views my customers had directly, but my absolute favorite people to serve were tradesmen with their families (at least locally, tradesmen are often assumed to be conservative). They tended to be pretty relaxed and tip well. Those are historically union jobs, and I don’t know if the people working them still vote in favor of worker solidarity, but they still culturally support it, ime.
My least favorite people were also people who are often assumed to be conservative, for what it’s worth: families on their way home from church. They were nitpicky, required a lot of attention, and tipped like shit, plus they often tried to get things comped off their bills by complaining about something on their way out.
$15/ an hour ain't shit anymore. $20+ should be minimum.
The "fight for 15" movement officially started in Nov 2012. CPI calculator says that's $20.54 in today's money. But we all know housing and groceries have gone up significantly faster than CPI, and mostly just because the people controlling the supply decided they wanted more money.
$15 is a start. How about $20 and adjusted to inflation yearly?
It's actually more like $25-30 now since we've been having this bullshit "conversation" for so long.
You're right, $23 is what I usually use and rounded, and that's an old number probably based on my own experience of when the minimum was okay. Looking back, even your range may be too low, as production began to outpace wages in the early 70s, making a comparable matching minimum close to $40.
In the end it's about a wage being livable, whatever that needs to be. And it probably shouldn't be a per hour number, as a company forced to pay per hour an amount can easily just reduce hours, defeating the point. Some sort of universal basic income, so wages become a supplement and not slavery? We have to change somehow.
If you think a job should exist, the people working that job should be paid enough to live comfortably.
You don't get to look down on people flipping burgers and sneer that they should get a real job if you want McDonald's to exist - you're essentially saying people should be punished for delivering a service that you want - it's sickening.
At least 15$/h. And even that's not enough to live on these days.
Low wages would honestly be fine if everyone was guaranteed housing and food and medical care. I just want a society where a person who is lazy or unambitious or disadvanted who just wanted to take a year off could survive with some reasonable level of comfort without working at all if they didn't want to.
“But you clearly deserve more than $15 an hour. What do you do, what do you deserve to earn, and why?”
Minimum wage should have been $15 an hour 10 years ago.
The focus on wages is misleading (intentionally). America has more than enough resources for everyone here to live comfortable lives regardless of what jobs anyone does, they’re just poorly distributed
But if you ask them if someone deserves a million dollars per hour for shitposting on Twitter they look at you like you just burned an effigy in their front lawn. Not the brightest bunch
The common argument for why 16 year olds flipping burgers shouldn't make $15 / hr is that they don't have the same expenses as an adult, so they don't need that much, and it's so fucking wild to me that they'd use that. Clearly what you need doesn't factor into what people are paid in any other circumstance, otherwise the top 0.1% would be middle class, too. So why does it suddenly matter for that one specific demographic?
Dare I say it's totally fucking Marxist and anti-American to suggest that people be paid for their labor based on financial need? This also makes boomers have a meltdown
People act like if people were paid enough to cover their rent and bills, they would be living some ultra life of luxury. The arguments against minimum wage being raised never make any sense when wealthy people use every loop in the book to extract as much as possible.
I support abolishing minimum wage... once every person has sufficient healthy food, safe shelter, and needs based access to healthcare and educational resources.
Yeah, make the employers compete against UBI. Can you pay me more to work than the government pays me to sit on my ass?
Makes me wonder if absolutely shitty jobs like janitorial work or garbage collection or working in sewers would go from being minimumally paid to being super high paying jobs if there was UBI, because it would become the only way to actually attract (a majority) people to the work. Or if it would just force robotics to get better specifically for these kinds of jobs humans don't want to do.
Both, ideally. Though UBI is still just a bandaid on the gushing wound that is capitalism; without radically correcting the housing market landleeches will just raise rents by the exact amount of UBI and we'll be in the exact same situation.
Gross income, roughly for a 35-40h workweek
$7.25? Woof. I made that back at a grocery store 20 years ago.
I'll take €1,969 and look out on the Mediterranean.
Some of those 7.25s will technically be even lower, that's the federal minimum that will apply to pretty much all jobs, but they still have it on the books that if they could, they'd fuck you over even harder. Georgia's for instance is 5.15 which can come up in some niche circumstances, and some don't even have a listed minimum
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