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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?
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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
If we peel about 50 billionaires and their families we could make every single American a multi-millionaire. I bet it would put a dent in wage theft, too. Scare the piss out of middle managers so hard they prolapse their ureters.
That’s not correct.
The average wealth in this country is ~250k a person
Yeah their number sounded really high, but fuck it hurt to see 250k as well. Do I count as 0 or a negative number if I have more debt than my possessions are worth?
I think 0? I’m not sure. I think the number came from total wealth as an object, not total net worth.
They’re optimally distributed if you’re near the top.
hey now why’d you have to crop it so we don’t get to see how fucking old this tweet screencap is?
I found it this way
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.
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.
Ssshhhh! Stop contradicting their overwhelming bias!
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.
I’m drag’s experience, conservatives tip the best. America is falling into fascism, and Americans are the ones who leave massive tips. Civilized countries with leftist labour laws don’t have as much tipping, if any.
Charity is something capitalists invented to get out of paying taxes.
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
This is a pretty privileged statement. We’re not at a point in society where robots and machines can produce everything we need, which means people need to do it. Why would other people need to labor for your existence while you do nothing? Every creature on the planet labors in its own way to continue living, and humans are no exception.
Did you consider they mean you have to pay others to keep living on top of the living part which includes feeding/caring for yourself. You are born into a system where you have to do many things outside of it. Just the concept that all of the land was divided up by groups and claimed so the people born in those areas have to pay them, work for them, and be forced to go through their education systems is crazy. You can’t exactly choose to leave either, the land is all claimed by other systems that will have strict immigration policies and their own rules for life forced on you.
Freedom is long gone.
and be forced to go through their education systems is crazy
Education is a huge gift, and your education benefits not only you, but the society you live in. Why would you complain about receiving a free education, which allows you to live a richer, and fuller life?
Depends on the education. I don’t think those born in russia or North Korea are getting that “richer and fuller life”
My point was more that people have a fundamental right to live, but sure
What does that even mean? Of course you have a fundamental right to keep your life. That doesn’t mean you have the right to receive food and shelter without effort, when those things require effort to produce. Yet we do sometimes provide those things to people who don’t labor. They’re not very nice, and they don’t provide a life of abundance, but they are available to many people who wouldn’t have had those options at earlier points in history. It is a great advancement in our society that we can provide for the basic needs of people who aren’t capable of providing for themselves, either in whole, or in part. But if you’re capable of working, and providing for yourself, then you should meet that challenge with urgency, especially since the taxes from your labors contribute to the assistance for the incapable that I mentioned above. We may eventually reach a point where nobody needs to labor, but not in our lifetime.
And, federally, it’s still half that ($7.25). Cheers!
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.
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.
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.
They really just want slaves, but they know that’s a line they can’t say anymore. In public.
A one-bed apartment! The lap of luxury! Get three roommates and stop being lazy!
- Sent from my house
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.
Baby Boomers really struggle to accept their enormous share of how we got to this place.
Invariably it’s some Millennial’s fault. And by Millennial, I mean anyone who looks under 40.
bankers don’t give a shit about red team or blue team, they’ve just been stealing from everyone. Good luck!
I mean they really, very obviously, do go in for conservatives. It’s their whole fucking thing.
@Soup 🤔 is it obvious? seems obvious they’re funding both sides to me, but apparently not to you? Are you sure you’re looking in all directions or just where you’ve been told to look?
https://time.com/6241262/sam-bankman-fried-political-donations/
https://nypost.com/2023/02/07/how-amalgamated-bank-became-the-the-lefts-private-banker/
https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/silicon-valley-bank-collapse-updates-03-13-23/index.html
Seems like you are making his point for him. The people being funded in these articles are all conservatives. Some are Democrat neoliberal conservatives, but they are still business-class conservatives, regardless of party affiliation.
Conservatism is a plague of oppression that benefits the wealthy.
@Burn_The_Right you think those are the only articles with those stories about those banks? search for yourself, or don’t, but don’t act like I just gave you the contents of the internet.
“makinh a living” and “surviving” are two different things
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.
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.
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)
1/3 of your income for rent is higher than financial experts advise. You should try to keep it under 25%
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.
I agree anyone working a full time job should be able to afford a one bedroom apartment but minimum wage in 1940 was $624a year and an average apartment seemed to be $324 a year so to meet that same level of pay we would “only” need a minimum wage of 17.25. That’s still way more than the current minimum wage of 7.25 but not as high as $25/hr
Minimum wage in major cities is usually in the mid-twenties these days. The idea of a federal minimum wage is kind of silly, considering how different the cost of living is across the country. Living wages should be calculated and enforced at the city or county level.
Show me how you convince someone making $40k that someone making $400k: 1. isn’t rich. And 2 shares their class struggle.
The fact is they don’t and they’ll never see it that way.
You can say you’re fighting billionaires all you want but what ppl see is you’re trying to fight 350k makers which they could be some day.$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.
“But you clearly deserve more than $15 an hour. What do you do, what do you deserve to earn, and why?”
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
This is why fast food locations are closed during school hours obviously.
I shitpost on Lemmy; what do I get?
A hard time?
Correct!
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
List of European countries by minimum wage
Don’t forget cost of living. Monaco might not be the easiest city to find affordable housing.
It’s notable that the countries with no legal minimum wage are also those with the highest wages. That’s because these countries have replaced laws with collective agreements. This goes to show that united workers can create better results than politicians.
It’s a really unfortunate effect of minimum wage. It turns into maximum wage, because employers can point at a minimum wage and say “hey I already pay you 0.01€ more than minimum, go back to work and be thankful”, whereas union wages are based on constant negotiation and actual statistics of what is paid in the market.
I really don’t want my wage to be determined on country-wide politics. In my opinion, it’s much more logical to let each sector determine it for themselves. Especially in times like this where right wing parties are gaining influence due to immigration issues. Why would I have to take a pay cut, because a lot of old people are afraid of immigrants? It makes no sense. Issues like that make people vote against their own interest.
The best way to put a value on work is by letting the people in the sectors decide. Both sides of the table of course. But just not political.
(I do realize that union agreements are also political in that both employers and enployee unions are democratic, but at least it’s confined to that topic and to that sector.)
I agree that legislative parliaments shouldn’t determine minimum wages.
Minimum wages are a safeguard against certain forms of wage theft, IMO, because the biggest stick around acts as your compulsory union.
Voluntary unions should then collectively determine minimum wages in a separate body.
I do not agree that there should be sector-specific minimum wage alone as every human being has worth and thus their time as well. This does not exclude sector-specific negotiations.
Yes, one builds on top of the other. That’s how it works ideally.
It is however easier to get workers to unite when there’s no legal minimum to fall back on. Also, when the majority of workers are unionized, the legal minimum is irrelevant and only serves as a talking point against the actual negotiations.
Minimum wage makes sense in countries where unions can’t get a foothold, but it’s a double edged sword: It’s keeping unions from establishing, because a lot of people will gladly leave their negotiations up to the politicians and not risking sticking their nose out.
Quite a lot of the things that people take for granted now started as union contracts. Paid holidays, working hours being less han 80h/week, maternity/paternity/family leave, sick leave/pay, paid breaks, paid pension etc.etc.
NONE of that happened due to political parties feeling a need to require employers to pay out more or secure the working class… Never happened.
It might be elevated to law in some countries by now, but it always always started with unions demanding it and going to conflict over it.
Even when the conflicts failed, it made the premises for putting it into law. That is how working hours have decreased. Unions wanted it, didn’t get it at first, but still got it second time around, when the notion hit the government workers, making it necessary to lift the idea into law to keep functioning.
Without unions, we’d still be shoveling coal into a furnace 80 hours a week, because that’s what made financial sense for the business owners.
I think New Hampshire is taking “Live Free or Die” too literally
… (yes)
