This sounds high to most people, but if the minimum wage had kept up with its inflation-adjusted peak (1968), it'd be somewhere in the range of $31 to $32 an hour right now.
It never caught back up afterward, and has been severely harpooned in the years since, shifting unfathomable quantities of money to the wealthiest people. And it's not just minimum wage workers... when you sink the wage and salary floor, nearly everyone made less than they should have been.
And it's not just minimum wage workers... when you sink the wage and salary floor, nearly everyone made less than they should have been.
This is the main roadblock to getting the issue fixed. People making more than minimum but not much more than the increased amount compared their salary and work to minimum wage jobs, never considering that their pay would be raised as a side effect. If people can get nearly the same pay for what they perceive as less work then companies would have to raise wages to keep current and hire new staff going forwards.
Yes other product prices would raise as well, people have more money to spend, but all evidence shows that those would not be the same rate as the wage increase.
It's the classic, "fuck you, I got mine", attitude so prevalent today in our society.
I have a coworker that will bring up how places like Target are starting to offer a minimum wage almost comparable to his wage as a engineering field technician. “It’s fucked up, I mean imagine if they raised it to your wage as a college grad, how would you feel? Random teenagers making as much as you!”
“It IS fucked up, but not for the reason you think. They SHOULD be making more money… but so should the rest of us!”
He usually just mutters to himself and drops it. Propaganda is a helluva drug.
Where did your values come from? I found minimum wage for 1968 at $1.60, which is about $15 an hour today. It's about 45% lower real wages today.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted, $1.60 in January of 1968 is equivalent to $14.47 in 2024. Maybe they're also accounting for the uncompensated increased efficiency of modern workers?
Regardless, it's a legitimate question and getting rebuffed for legitimate questions is a pretty Reddit thing to do. Come on everyone, we're better than this.
This thirty something an hour assertion has been going around for years. I've long since stopped bothering with the inflation calculators.
I was born in the early seventies, and witnessed that financial struggle existed even back then.
Yes, getting a house was more realistic (double digit mortgage interest rates notwithstanding). If you could snag a good job. The biggest difference I can remember is that a whole lot of blue collar jobs were good jobs.
Just about all of us in my age group remember food stamps and watered down frozen orange juice to stretch the food dollar and only getting five dollars of gas because filling the tank was way too ambitious.
The rose colored glasses of past financial wellness are heavily focused on the post war white new middle class that lasted what, twenty years?
I should note that I spent the seventies sharing a bedroom with my sister in a two bedroom rented duplex unit. Sharing a bedroom was quite common at the time. Even middle class houses were generally in the 1,100 square foot range, not the 3,000 square foot behemoths we've come to view as normal today.
... and $50 would be 60% more than that?
50$ is well into the range of middle class wages - it'd probably be easier to just shift the discussion to UBI.
Only because of 50 years of middle class wages failing to keep up with productivity gains.
Oh, definitely - but UBI is the solution to kill this problem dead forever (or better social safety nets) such a high minimum wage would likely just exacerbate wealth inequality as decades of underwhelming wage increases means that everyone but the rich would be making about the same amount of money and all that extra income would be captured by landlords and greedy corporations.
I like increasing the minimum wage - I think sudden drastic increases just erases middle and lower class savings while letting the richest capture more wealth.
Por que, and I mean this with total earnest, no los dos?
Los dos would be pretty sweet - my only concern is that this might make small savings (less than 200k) essentially worthless and widen the inequality gap.
If this was implemented with a graduated wealth tax it'd be amazing but most of the good would be from that wealth tax.
The thing to be cautious about with minimum wage increases is that outstanding debts and credits are minimized due to some inherent inflation - that's great for lower income families in debt but bad for people with modest savings (people with excessive wealth will usually ride the stock market and avoid feeling any inflation)... an increase that steep would put everyone but the super rich in the same position and further the wealth gap unless other actions were taken.
UBI is always the star compared to increased minimum wage, since it allows a lot of decoupling of your access to basic necessities from your ability to work or find employment.
A world with adequate UBI, or similar arrangements, and (obviously) universal healthcare and a functioning education system and all that jazz, is a world where unemployment rates don't matter, where you don't need to create artificial jobs to accomodate for the large amounts of people who can't find work.
When you think about it, the entire concept of "this policy is good and should become law because it creates paying jobs" is pretty fucked up, why are people starving as a result of job roles in society being sufficiently filled? High unemployment is often a sign of a healthy and functioning society, yet with our economic system it's a sign of a dysfunctional society because not having paying jobs available means people can't obtain a decent standard of living.
And our system's response to this issue is to abuse it by subjecting the remaining available jobs either to extremely low pay, poor working conditions, little to no protections, OR to make the job inaccessible to most people, to make the (usually financial) barrier to entry so incredibly high that it creates an artificial shortage of workers.
Political rant incoming: And many people subject to this system are the first ones to claim that it's a necessary evil, that it's okay that our society relies on a large portion of the population being in poverty and forcing shit pay & working conditions on the majority of the labour force, because "if it were any different, then surely nobody would work the hard jobs". It's very convenient to ignore the fact that a large portion of people go out of their way and sacrifices their own time and earnings to do volunteer work, to participate in elaborate hobbies, often doing the same things which are thought of as "undesirable" under this economic system.
What's most funny (or maybe sad) is that the people that peddle this kind of anti-human rhetoric are often also right-wing "libertarians" and "anarcho-"capitalists who claim that people's goodwill and charitable donations would prop up the unfortunate in a society with little to no taxes (or my favorite, "society can and should totally be funded by regressive sales taxes and no other taxes"), no healthcare, or welfare at all for that matter, no public education, etc. It's absurd how they view the world like that, thinking the ruling class will willingly fund destitution out of society, but then do mental gymnastics to act like the idea that most people will voluntarily contribute their labour, even to the "dirty jobs", in a society where doing unpaid labour isn't unsustainable for them and where the "dirty jobs" aren't looked down upon and stigmatized like they are now, is absurd and truly an unsolvable paradox.
They couldn't imagine that people would want to keep their own home nice and clean and would give their own energy to make sure it stays that way – likely because they can't comprehend seeing their community, certainly not a society in general, as their home, they don't have any meaningful connection to the world around them and are only capable of seeing it in a selfish and individualistic manner, with "us" and "them", with castes based on shallow, surface-level judgements/criteria. They claim nobody would willingly do the hard and dirty jobs because they wouldn't, they think most people are as oriented towards doing the least amount of work possible as them, that people will only do things they need to do for others if there's a constant threat of lowering quality of life, despair, starvation, death, disenfranchisement/imprisonment, etc. looming above their heads if they don't submit.
I don't know how the hell the idea – that you, along with everyone else, can take a few hours out of their week to contribute to basic maintenance of society – is so hard for some people to wrap their head around. Have you never done housework/chores, or assisted your neighbours with some handiwork, or willingly done an ounce of community service by picking up & disposing of trash in public? Have you never volunteered to do social work? Hell, have you even had things you did at all not for capital gain, but because you were passionate about it or just cared about it? I'm pretty against being religious now, but when I was younger and went to church, we (a LOT of the church, a majority of the hundreds of members would regularly be involved) would frequently go on days-long "activities" which would just be things like assisting severely disabled seniors, helping children/middle schoolers with their responsibilities, cleaning & repairing places for members or organizations who needed the support, hosting events where everyone would bring their own food and all were invited to come, that sort of stuff. (I miss the days where I actually had the means to volunteer and didn't have 70K in medical bills, an all-consuming work life, and lack of funds for college that I had to prioritize LOL). I could swear that that's a pretty common thing across the country, but I guess not, seeing how people treat the subject of society's willingness to do for the community rather than just avoiding anything that's hard/dirty and doesn't benefit them. Maybe it's only when the big man upstairs is focused where these people are willing to do good?
Thanks, American-style capitalism, I hate it
If fifty an hour became minimum wage, I'd get the hell out of my soul crushing accounting gig and go become a parking lot attendant faster than you can say, "cash or credit?"
It's three o'clock in the morning and I'm just leaving for work. I got home after eight last night. This won't stop until late October. I spend those hours getting yelled at by rich people. I'd LOVE to downgrade my profession.
Imagine how much they’d have to raise your current wage to remain competitive. Especially with such a poor work life balance.
That's my point. The whole thing sets off massive currency devaluation
I wonder what that would be like... /s
sounds like you just need a new employer. Most people don't work 3am-8pm...
“Of course we have national minimum wages that we need to raise to a living wage. You’re talking about 20, 25 dollars, fine. But I have got to be focused on what California needs and what the affordability factor is when we calculate this wage.”
To me this sounds like she's calling for a $50 state wage, not a federal one.
I mean yeah, it is unsustainable to live in California, especially in LA. It sounds like it'll just lead to inflation, which it will to some degree, but realistically it'll allow you to move to different locations, afford to live somewhere closer to work, afford transportation easier, and a bunch of other things that boost the economy and improve the quality of life for the people living there.
Not everyone is a minimum wage employee, so this isn't going to be the same as giving everyone $100 for rent, ie. Increasing the price of a specific thing. The inflation will be spread out amongst a large amount of items and so a 50% increase in wage with an increased inflation per item of 1% is a net positive, and this is for the people who struggle the most with affording living necessities.
Why not pay people $500 instead ted Cruz asks? Bc you don't value people's lively hoods
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