Comment on The federal minimum wage is officially a poverty wage in 2025
AJ1@lemmy.ca 1 week agoIsn’t that what servers make in the US? when I lived there in the 90s, minimum wage was 4.25/hr, but the servers in the restaurant I worked at were making 2.35/hr, and that wage hadn’t changed since like the 70s or some crazy shit.
MrVilliam@lemm.ee 1 week ago
$2.13/hour. In 2025. Fucking insane.
kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
De jure, the restaurant has to make the difference up if they make less than minimum wage after tips. De facto, wage theft is about twice as much as all other forms of theft combined.
MrVilliam@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Yeah lol, I was gonna say how many underpaid tipped workers do you think know about that requirement, and of those few how many do you think actually confront their boss about it, and of those handful how many do you think get that money they’re owed without retaliation.
I know not what many of those numbers are, but I’d be absolutely floored if that last number weren’t zero. Especially in 2025 and beyond.
teije9@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
a 12 year old in the Netherlands makes ~3.50 an hour
MrVilliam@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I don’t live in The Netherlands, so I don’t pretend to have any sort of first-hand knowledge of what it’s like there, but this resource says that children under 13 can’t work unless they’re sentenced to community service due to an offense, or working as a performance like as an actor in a commercial or a play. It also looked like there’s no minimum wage for workers under 15?
But I don’t doubt that Dutch workers have much higher labor standards. Current minimum wage for 21 and older there looks to be nearly double American federal minimum wage (€14.06 vs $7.25). I live in Virginia, which has a much higher minimum wage than the federal one, currently $12.41. The Northern counties and around Richmond are ludicrously expensive, however, so it’s not like people could reasonably get by on that in those areas. You won’t find a half decent house in those areas for under $500k, and actual nice houses start at like $750-900k. If you somehow got a 0% mortgage and somehow had zero expenses outside of paying off that $500k house, it would still take 20 years of working full time at that minimum wage job to pay that. More realistic mortgage rates and expenses would make that take closer to 70 years.
Average life expectancy in the US is 77.5 years.
teije9@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
technically you’re not allowed to work at 12, but most companies, especially smaller ones that don’t get checked that strictly ignore those laws if a 12 year old approaches them and asks them for a job.