Upon inception it was set at $0.25. It is now $7.25.
All the blue team cares about is the mean thing someone said the other day. All the red team cares about is guns and abortion.
So… in a way… everything’s working as intended, as depressing as it is to consider that thought.
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Both sides!
Not another one… get lost.
Another what? I’m good here, get… yeah nm.
Spouting bumper sticker slogans doesn’t change facts.
When it comes to the minimum wage you are both the same.
Bullshit, one side has members that have consistently fought for increasing the minimum wage, one side hasn’t, in addition to attempting a fucking coup. Put that on your bumper sticker.
False.
Obama had a supermajority for six months of his presidency. Dems have had the presidency with congressional control twice since 2008.
All we’ve gotten for it is more expensive health care and more money for war.
Nothing you’ve said applies to anything I said, but nice try. Anyway, cool, go vote ® then, they’re much better for the working class.
It would seem that way if you didn’t understand it.
I’m not a Republican. I’m a Green Party supporter. One can’t look at the last 40 years of American governance without concluding that both major parties are complete shit, and that’s especially true on the issue of the minimum wage.
Ah, the Russian-funded Green Party, enough said! I understand you and your ilk’s nonsense “arguments” perfectly. One side has proponents of increasing (and has accomplished it in many states), and one side fights it (and everything else that might help) tooth and nail, period.
Major nitpick - there is WAY too much, like orders of magnitude more than ever was on reddit, assuming the position of a commenter. “You” instead of “they” - you are literally forcing your assumption on to the other person. Quite often it is accurate, but quite often it is NOT accurate, and intentionally or not it comes off as picking a fight.
I’m not assuming anything here. This person is making their position abundantly clear. They are Democratic partisan ideologue.
I could have probably picked a better example than your comment, to be fair. I’ve just had way too many people assume my perspective on here. Had one person who made a confusing comment, and their perspective was not at all clear - after two folks asked for clarification, they had a meltdown, started shouting “FASCISTS SHALL HAVE NO VICTORY HERE,” calling everyone white, Nazis, fascists, and telling them to go into a bunker to kill themselves like Hitler. When all that people wanted was to understand the person’s confusing comment. That’s an extreme form of assumption but milder instances happen all of the fucking time. I don’t know why it is so worse here than reddit was (maybe selective memory and its the same, I don’t know).
No. Not both sides. One side will still change in response to voting. Slowly but it does happen. The other specifically tried to overturn the election on Jan 6th.
You’re partially right. What you need is 2-3 more sides.
I absolutely agree. And with political positions tied to land and first past the post voting it’s a dream. The best we can have with the current setup is factions inside the party.
All the blue team cares about is the mean thing someone said the other day
Tribalistic nonsense. I assume you’re referring to the Democratic party?
Wondering where you’re getting that stereotype from? Do you think believing it’s a problem that trans people exist is just, “saying a mean thing”?
“Both sides”-ism aside, if you’re gonna do it, you should at least be honest about the things each side are currently focused on and what their platform is…
The equivocation goes away pretty quickly when we’re honest to ourselves about the differences between parties. Usually that’s intentional, and the entire point is to minimize the absolutely insane fascist, anti-democracy priorities of current American conservatives. I understand that, but…
Ever stop for a moment to think that maybe, if you’re that embarrassed about the things the party you identify with are saying/doing, that you can’t even be honest to yourself about the levels of insanity they’re reaching, then maybe it’s time to take a step back and think about what you’re so vocally supporting.
Bla bla bla, people exist that don’t like either party. Get over it.
Alternatively, 29x the original
Why are you booing him, he’s right
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$7 or 800%
The best (fairest) way to express it would be in terms of average percent per year for x years. If that matches inflation, then everything is just status quo in some sense.
Hm. That wouldn’t correct any established injustice.
Good point.
Yes any for most of the time it was sufficient
Hasn’t been sufficient for 40+ years.
Ah survivorship bias.
when
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Obligatory GTA 5 “This is 7 dollars” meme
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I agree it needs to be raised but that’s a terrible and misleading way to present the data.
I strongly agree with this comment.
You could as easily say it’s increased by 2800% (correct me if I’m wrong) since then, which sends the opposite message, but neither are good ways of showing what’s really going on…
inflation-adusted, the federal minimum wage peaked way tf back in february 1968 at $1.60 an hour (equal to $13.46 in ‘2022 dollars’).
Just when boomers were young (8-23 yrs old) … totally tracks!
Looking at the linked graph, there’s a relatively clear plateau from ‘56 to ‘80 … basically from oldest boomers being age 11 to youngest boomers being age 20. I’m a little astonished at how well it lines up with the whole fucking generation. Literally all of them, from the beginning of their teens to the end of their teens (at least), enjoyed the best minimum wage of the modern age.
It also, interestingly, justifies the seperate categorisation of the Jones generation (born 1960-1966) who were the first to see the steady decline.
Might as well use the latest numbers for this comparison. Yes, inflation is still absolutely sucking us all dry.
I love how its just flipped the numbers around.
inflation is still absolutely sucking us all dry.
However, as a side note, inflation is absolutely essential to keep the economy healthy. Most developed countries around the world have a goal of 2 percent inflation. US inflation is currently 3.7 percent before seasonal adjustments.
Edit: Wow. Lots of people here who need to retake Econ 101.
Most lemmings have never taken econ 101, because they are in middle school
Inflation is important because it punishes the hoarding of wealth and encourages spending. When investments grow greater than inflation but wages grow slower, it’s problematic because the investing class is rewarded for having money while the working class is punished.
well no, the econ 101 guys are the ones calling for getting rid of inflation, you actually need to get a bit further down into the mud to get to “inflation is super important and one of few reasons for investment instead of dragon hordes”
This is if you actually believe CPI is a legitimate measure, despite the cost of all the big ticket expenses like housing, education, and healthcare increasing 5x or more above inflation.
That’s why they’re conveniently not part of the inflation equation.
That’s true, though I can’t say for the US, in the UK, inflation is still ridiculously calculated.
about it, because staples like pasta and rice weren’t included, but champagne was.
Meanwhile in Canada minimum wage is at $16.55 starting Oct 1st.
Though I don’t understand how the tipping culter is essential the same between the US and Canada
To be fair that’s like 12 USD which would still require tipping. Also not sure if Canada has the same minimum wage exception for tip workers where they’re allowed to be paid significantly less than minimum wage so long as tips make up the difference. In the US it’s very typical for tip workers to only be paid 2-3 dollars an hour.
Going up to $14.00 on 1 October in Saskatchewan. Like the USA we have different labour laws in each province. We also get 3 weeks vacation to start, unlike the 2 weeks BC and Ontario get.
There are lies, damn lies, and then there’s statistics.
Im not here to say the minimum wage doesnt need to be raised, because it does, but another way of putting that is
“The minimim wage has increased 1500% in 85 years.”
That sounds a lot better even though its the same thing.
If it isnt tied to inflation then it is meaningless.
Thanks for making me chuckle.
Wow! That’s almost as much as a CEO increases in 3 months!
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7.25 / 0.25 is indeed 29, therefore a 2800% increase is correct.
Thus, another dishonest way of stating this number is that it has increased almost 33% for each year since it was first implemented. (Not per year)
Meanwhile the cost of living has increased 2077% in 85 years.
CYBERPUNK REFERENCE??!??!
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that actually makes it worse because housework still needs to be done.
Could be worse. 25 cents in 1938 is still only worth $5.44 today.
Listen here you little shit we’re here for class solidarity and memes not mathematics
2 dollars of progress for 85 years… How much has productivity risen during that time?
People working for minimal wage don’t produce more value. Considering advancements in mechanisation and automation over these years, their productivity has actually decreased.
Yeah this isn’t true. While automation has made machines more effective than humans in many cases, they haven’t made human labor less effective. Not sure why you would think that. Advances in tools and software have made every sector of the workforce more productive. There’s a million little things.
They have flattops at fast food places that cook the top and the bottom of the burger patty at the same time. So one worker can do more. Roofers have faster and lighter nail guns letting them work for longer. Hell, when I did lawn care as a teen you’d see another crew with some fancy new mower every month, and the improvements were usually worth the costs.
Roofers are not minimal wage workers. Minimal wage workers are redundant.
Minimum Wage workers/general laborers are the literal backbone of any work force. Their value is literally instrumental to any and all industries. These industries would simply collapse if minimum wage workers are taken out of the equation. And that’s without pointing out that wage isn’t indicative of how important someone is to a workplace.
And automation doesn’t mean much when you still need an entire force to upkeep all of those machines. And I’d bet my right arm and left leg that if wage pricing is left to corporations that they’ll place said workers at minimum wage if they can get away with it.
Nope. These jobs are a waste of time and money.
Essential workers from the pandemic looking at this shit take like
What essential workers? Ocado is fully automated.
Lol right? I thought we all learned this lesson like 3 years ago.
The development of cheaper manufacturing methods has been hiding the decline for quite some time now.
It should be noted that this is the federal minimum wage. Many states set a higher minimum wage than that. For example, California’s minimum wage will be $16/hr starting January 1st, Virginia is $12/hr, and New York is $14.20/hr.
California’s is actually even weirder, because they recently passed legislation that raises the minimum wage but specifically on franchised businesses
Berkeley’s minimum wage is $18.07
I think that got held up in lobbyists appealing to the court.
Pennsylvania is $7.25 lol.
If you do the comparisons in normalized dollars and compare to productivity, minimum wage (if it tracked to the same purchasing power as it did in the 1950s) would be somewhere around $26 in today’s dollars. If you do the same but track to inflation, it would be about $22.
When the wage doesn’t keep track to inflation, it’s not ‘increasing’, it’s a pay cut. When it doesn’t track to productivity, it’s a pay cut out of labor’s part of any growth.
When workers earning suppressed wages compete to buy things like housing, they’re bidding against the class of people that received the share of productivity they didn’t- and when the folks making more bid up prices of those things, it’s a double-whammy of foregone wage + increased cost-of-living.
Do you have a source on that nationally? Because that is very very high in many areas.
Well,
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If it kept line with productivity Minimum wage would be $26 an hour if it had grown in line with productivity
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If it kept up with inflation Advocates say minimum wage needs to be higher before it’s indexed to inflation or https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/21/politics/minimum-wage-inflation-productivity/index.html
These sources disagree among themselves if the right number is $21.45 or $26 or $20, they seem to base their analysis on productivity or inflation
Yeah, these numbers sound like a lot in some places, but those places where it ‘sounds like a lot’ tend to be really fucking poorer than necessary. It would hurt them not at all to have the minimum keep up with where it was in 1968 instead of being the output of both major parties in congress agreeing to fuck the working poor
Oh I see my confusion now I thought you were saying PPP against inflation, rather than PPP against productivity. But my point about nationally is that PPP differs based on area a lot, especially in housing. I don’t think comparing to productivity is fair because a lot of the money going to labor from US companies is going to offshoring or into automating jobs away.
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Do you remember that wages rose when unemployment was low?
Why is there a need for minimum wage?
Edit: downvoters, what do you want? A high minimum wage job while many are unemployed? Why focus on minimum wage when you can have low unemployment and decent wages for everybody at the same time by reducing unemployment?
If worker unions were required by law then I would agree. The issue is that companies will corner the job market to suppress wages. The government applies some pressure the opposite way via minimum wages to help force progress. Self checkouts and various other automated processes don’t occur without some kind of selection pressure.
Think of minimum wages as forcing weaker companies out of the market.
How do companies corner the job market?
Doesn’t minimum wage support the cornering because new competitors cannot start with lower wages?
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The unemployment rate does not take into consideration people who are under-employed or people who are working multiple jobs to get by. You could be working 3 part time jobs (none of which offer benefits) and still not make enough money to pay your bills. The “unemployment rate” is a load of bullshit and should largely be discarded in favor of tracking how many people are living above the poverty line.
Right. This is important to remember. I think my question is still valid because it’s about the real rate and not the published figure.
Except that the published figure is what gets used in policy and calculations. The real rate is largely ignored and the numbers are heavily skewed by ever-changing definitions and parameters making the “unemployment rate” a nearly useless metric. We need to run our country based on keeping people out of functional poverty, not based on keeping profits up.
Policy and calculations don’t matter if there is low unemployment. It’s minimum wage that’s gamed. Why fight that lost battle?
I’m saying that the unemployment rate is artificially low as well as being a stupid metric to use, but unfortunately, it’s the metric that powerful entities use to make decisions about manipulating the economy at large.
There is the published figure and there is the actual number of unemployed people.
You rightfully point out that the figure is manipulated. I am talking about the actually unemployed people.
The Federal Reserve has mandate to ensure employment doesn’t get too high, which is high enough to cause inflation. By increasing interest rates, unemployment increases because it costs more to pay people.
Wages rose when unemployment was low because inflation was running away. The Fed was behind on its mandate shortly after the pandemic. Because interest rates were low, it was relatively inexpensive to hire people, and that’s what businesses did, especially after firing so many of them during the pandemic. But, ya know, the pandemic gave people more time to consider what was important to them…and working was pretty low on that list. Thanks to the low interest rates, businesses could pay them more as an incentive to come back to work. That whole “Great Resignation” thing was about workers finally having some bargaining power. And wages rose because workers could demand more.
But now interest rates are having some pressure on inflation. It costs more to hire people, and it costs more to keep people hired. The bargaining power workers had is basically gone. The demand for employees to literally come back into work and stop working from home is evidence that business managers have regained the upper hand. And so, now there’s no reason to pay people more. Just threaten to fire them and watch them dance.
So, basically, the need for a minimum wage is because there is no incentive to raise wages themselves but there’s every incentive to lower them. And the Fed has other methods of dealing with low unemployment that will kick in before businesses start raising wages to attract workers in most cases. The post-pandemic era was “unprecedented”, after all.
What would be a fair way to manage wages without the need for unemployment?
Why are you so against a minimum wage when people keep telling you why it’s important?
Because I am not convinced by their arguments. It makes sense if you accept a minimum of unemployed people. But why should society settle for that? Employ everybody and find another way to prevent wages from rising too high.
But the workers don’t currently have either- lowering or removing the minimum wage might reduce the unemployment rate, but those jobs are not going to be paid at a livable rate. Currently more theft is wage theft committed by companies against workers, they’re already using the power they have against workers. There’s already a clear divide between union and nonunion blue collar benefits and wages: if there were a textbook play of economic principles, all nonunion blue collar employees would quit and join union companies or form their own.
Having neither, it’s the same as the saying about liberty and security. If you don’t seek employment for all then you won’t get minimum wage.
Let the people decide what a livable wage is. A bad job is better than no job. They can still refuse to work.
Of course, without new ideas, things don’t change. Not the workers but the companies need a reason for full employment.
Let the people decide what a livable wage is. A bad job is better than no job. They can still refuse to work.
The people have a gun to their head. If they’re not eligible for unemployment because a $3/hour job is available, they’ll take it not to starve to death. That doesn’t make it a free or advantageous choice.
We don’t need unemployment as it is. Stephanie Kelton makes the case here (pdf). Here’s an AI summary of how wages are managed without the need for unemployment using a public service employment (PSE) program:
The PSE program would pay a wage of $15/hr plus benefits, establishing an effective minimum wage and compensation level nationwide.
It would provide jobs to anyone ready and willing to work, eliminating involuntary unemployment. The authors estimate the program could employ around 15 million workers currently unemployed, underemployed, or out of the labor force.
By providing jobs at $15/hr, the program would lift wages at the bottom and reduce poverty. The wage floor would pressure private employers to raise wages to compete for workers.
The program is designed not to compete with private employers, except to establish minimum standards. In economic upswings, private employers would recruit from the program, while in downturns the program would absorb laid-off workers.
So the PSE program aims to reduce unemployment by directly providing jobs, while also lifting wages by setting an effective nationwide minimum of $15/hr plus benefits. It establishes a wage floor that would ripple up to benefit other low-wage workers.
In summary, the policy note argues the PSE program could simultaneously reduce unemployment and increase wages for low-income workers through its design and job provision at $15/hr. The wage floor and job guarantee are interlinked policy goals.
It should be insulting to Americans the country over that one of our main economic institutions has determined that people must be unemployed for economic growth. Unemployment has so many socio-economic problems it’s insane, and it leads to physical and psychological problems, and even ultimately to suicide. Why would we want this, and why should it continue to be implemented, if an alternative exist that better manages wages and doesn’t need call for unemployment?
This sounds reasonable. Too bad that the post lost focus. I would love to know what others think about this.
Because an employer paying minimum wage is their way of saying “I’d pay you less if it were legal”, because your employer’s interests are in direct competition with your own. A store manager is not only in direct competition with the store across the street, he is also in competition with his own employees. It is in his interest to ensure he maximizes his own profits, but it is in your interest to make as much money as you can aswell.
The focus should be on "Id pay you less but then you would quit”. Everything else is a weak position.
If there is no competition among stores, workers compete among each other. Though nobody complains because it’s the weakest humans who won’t find a minimum wage job. When there is a choice for the manager, they will pick the better worker.
Is it still a good deal for minimum wage workers? What should workers do with abusive managers? With minimum wage, there is no option to be willing to work for less but with better conditions.
