“let’s continue to devalue labor because some margin cases might 😱 end up with disposable income derived from a more fair compensation for that value”
There are a great number of jobs that pay a living wage. Working on a convenience store or Walmart does not need to be one.
And a living wage does not mean you should be able to live alone with your own kitchen and bathroom without roommates. Something past generations certainly need to do. Those single member working families that were paid s high wages typically worked in a mine or a higher paid job. No one could work at the convenience store and support a family alone.
So you think the parents of younger employees should subsidize Walmart’s business?
Even if you say that’s fine, there’s a deeper problem.
Let’s look at the most recent census: as of 2022, there are about 20 million people in the US between the ages of 15 and 19. Now that particular range is a little young, but that’s the breakdown the census gives us; and the cohorts on either side are about the same, so we can probably assume pretty safely that there are also about 20 million people in the US between the ages of 16 and 20 as well.
Since the end of the pandemic, about 20 million people in the US are getting paid below the almost-living wage of $15/hr. Cool, problem solved then, right?
Except no. The demographics are all over the place. First of all, not everyone between the ages of 16 and 20 are employed full time; in fact, almost 60% of them are not. Which means that, of those 20 million people making below $15/hr, only about 8 million are kids under the age of 20 who could reasonably expect to be able to live with their parents. Which means that 12 million of the people who are getting paid less than poverty wages for full time work are fully adults. That’s five percent of the US population.
“Ok so get roommates” you say. But the housing stock isn’t set up for that; in order to pay appreciably less in rent, you have to cram more than one person into a space originally only meant for one; often this is not allowed by the property. Plus, when you’re talking about people over the age of 20 (particularly once you approach 25), you’re increasingly talking about people with children; particularly in the demographic that works at a low-wage hourly job. In most cases, including roommates in that scenario would be inconvenient at best; and prohibited or even unsafe at worst.
“No one could work at a convenience store and support a family alone” you say—but again your assertion doesn’t line up with reality. According to a BLS report from 1975, “basic rates for grocery store employees averaged $5.19 on July 1, 1975”—that’s $29.46 in today’s dollars, and about 75% of the median household income across the country. Couple that with the fact that housing prices adjusted for inflation have more than doubled since the 1980s while wages have stagnated (median household income in 1970 was a little over half of the median home price; today it’s less than a fifth), and you see that, yes, a head-of-household could indeed have supported a family on a grocery store worker’s income. It wouldn’t have been easy, they wouldn’t have lived in luxury, but they would’ve been safely lower-middle class.
It’s also important to realize that when it was originally proposed, the minimum wage was intended to be a living wage. Roosevelt said, “It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By ‘business’ I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white-collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level—I mean the wages of decent living.”
(Sources are CPI, BLS, and the Census Bureau.)
Minimum wage in 1975 was around 2 dollars and many rentals are two rooms or more. Grocery store may have averaged higher as most included meat cutters on prepared products and I bet that includes management. The shelve stocker likely getting 2 dollars an hour.
Ya let us value that the same as a guy working in a mine or someone developing software. Get serious people. We are paying to subsidize someone to work at Walmart is because we choose to do this. And why wouldn’t a person want to work a higher value job if the government is willing to top them up to a higher rate?
yeah I see your point and the fact that the research supports your conclusion but I don’t like it so I’m going to ignore reality
Ok buddy. If you’re not willing to have this discussion in good faith then neither am I.
A living wage means exactly that boomer.
Not a boomer but not all jobs are valuable enough not do they need to be to be paid a living wage. Your 16yo babysitter doesn’t need to be paid a living wage while she lives at home. It is goofy how people think like this.
Boring lies
we literally had a bunch of underpaid minimum wage employees being pressured to work and take the risk on getting infected through the pandemic because they were essential to the fucking economy and logistics of our daily lives, yet we don’t want to recognize that as essential anymore because someone else has brainwashed you into it for no reason you’ve been able to elaborate. The 16-year-old needs to be compensated at the same rate as someone who does it for a living, proportional to the hours they work. It’s kinda wild how you’re angling to argue for underpaid child labor. This guy’s gotta be one dusty mf to think like that.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Oh no some kid might be doing pretty well for a month or so better grind everyone into poverty so boomers like @zippy have it fair