It has now been 15 years since the federal minimum wage rose to $7.25
It has now been 15 years since the federal minimum wage rose to $7.25
155 comments
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"Rose."
$7.25 was unlivable 15 years ago.
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And by the time we get a $15/hr minimum wage, a living wage in any state worth living in will be $75/hr.
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Which is exactly why I hated the "fight for fifteen" slogan... Great you got your $15 in some states 15 years later and now that's worthless.
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Minimum wage should not be voted on by congress. It should be pegged to cost of living by region. The government already does all this measuring of cost of living by region. Make the minimum 125% of cost of living and be done with it. It’s clear congress can’t handle the task.
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Make the minimum 125% of cost of living
Do the math for a 32 hour workweek to meet this criteria and make it so you have to include healthcare benefits proportional to the hours worked.
Ironically the company I work for would go under if they had to pay a living wage like this to the workers. We pay minimum wage in our state to close to 400 workers, almost all of whom cannot speak English today. It's miserable manufacturing work but 100% required, the product is positive to humanity and can't possibly be outsourced. Can be better automated though, which should be done.
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How's life at the fleshlight factory? Thank you for your service, by the way.
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Sure it would. No graft or overpayment management and ownership involved in the system at all.
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Yeah, an hour of someone's life is just worth less in the flyover shit states.
EDIT: Why don't the worthless people in the flyover shit states want to vote for us?
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The “low cost of living” in the “flyover states” is subsidized by a complete lack of accessible social services or government accountability.
You can get a house for a bit more than 100,000. But you’ll pay for it by sending your children to a school where your high schooler is being taught math by someone with a GED. Or when you lose a tire to a crater in the road. Or when a tornado hits your town and emergency services aren’t available because your Governor is in Paris and didn’t bother to tell anyone.
It’s really Galt’s Gulch here. The low cost of living/low pay works like a trap, because how the fuck can one save up to get out?
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No, but the same food and lodging costs drastically different based on location in this country. A New York City cost of living would bankrupt small businesses in rural Nebraska who also price their services based on regional costs. It’s just more logical than a flat minimum wage for the whole country.
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It's better than the current system of begging politicians.
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Sarcasm I hope?
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For reference, the cost of living doubles every 25 to 30 years. $7.25 in 2024 is worth less than $5 in 2009 money. Less than the $5.15 that was the previous minimum wage.
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Put a little asterisk after that number, a lot of employees who earn tips can be paid even less.
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That's truly inhumane. Even when I was a server - not America - I was paid the same wage as a line cook of similar experience.
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And Republicans are arguing to pay disabled people and children less.
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They don't make less just because they're paid less by their employer. The minimum wage of how much they actually make is the same.
And as a result, servers in the US make a lot more than line cooks of similar experience. That wage gap is a source of frustration for cooks.
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I see this mentioned a lot - and it's not technically true I don't think. If tips do not push their pay above the minimum wage per time worked, then they do in fact get paid out at minimum wage. Not that I'm here to defend a
$7.75$7.25 minimum wage - that's an obvious problem. But AFAIK, a server who did terrible in tips is still taking$7.75$7.25/hr home at the end of the pay period.
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You really really do. I don't mean to target you personally here. This is meant for everyone reading:
If you have time to hang out on Lemmy, then you have a couple mins looking up what unions the industry you're in has or is trying to setup.
Just learn, I'm not even asking that anyone do anything.. but if you know more about the situation where you live, maybe you can help people.
No corpo is gonna do it for you. It's workers for workers.
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Thanks for putting the caveats in there.
I will say that at my current job, remote IT work is in the contract. Because we're union. And getting it out of the contract and risking shutdown because so many critical systems are run by people far away? Not a good idea. I hope it's here to stay.
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they aren’t. tens of thousands of homeless people in just cali alone.
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$7.25 in 2009 is worth $10.62 today. $4.95 in 2009 is worth $7.25 today.
In effect, the value of federal minimum wage has decreased by 31% in the last 15 years, since a dollar today only buys 69% of what it did in 2009, on average (as defined by the consumer price index)
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If you could buy 69 for a dollar Id know about it.
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I do wonder if trying for $15 is just asking too much. Maybe a compromise at $10.62 to restore what it used to be, is all we can hope for at the moment.
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The minimum wage was supposed to be the absolute minimum a person could be paid in order to live. It's not an excuse to pay employees starvation wages. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, can survive being paid $11 an hour in today's economy (much less the $7.25 it is now). That is why nearly every liberal state has independently moved their minimum to at least $15/hr if not more.
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Coward.
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This is wild. Especially since the US separates tippable jobs.
I just looked this up. $7,25 is 6,68€
In Germany minimum wage is 12,41€ ($13,47) as of its last adjustment Jan 24. Thats f*cking DOUBLE. Further adjustments are already planned. And there is no difference between wait staff and other workers.Here the leading argument is, that one full time job on minimum wage should provide you the minimum you need to live on. You can not live on 7,25 working only 40h a week, can you?
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The "best" part is any job that is paying minimum wage is going to be part time, so more like 15-30 hrs a week.
Oh, and they want you to have open availability, so they can schedule you whenever they feel like each week, with no rhyme or reason to your constantly different shifts so you can't try to get a second job either...
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There was a study a few years back showing that there isn't a county in the country where full-time minimum wage could pay for a 1br apartment and basic necessities.
That should be the bare minimum. A full-time worker should be able to live within a reasonable proximity to their place of employment. I make 80 grand and have to drive 90 minutes to work.
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Country in the world or county in the country?
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Realistically for housing to be 1/3 of your income, the minimum wage should be closer to $20/hr right now. I live in a pretty small town and most basic 1Br apartments are starting at ~$700/mo so around $1k/mo once you factor in utilities. If we round the numbers a bit, 3000/160=18.75 so housing would be a bit less than 1/3 of gross income, and noticeably less than 1/3 of the person's income after taxes and insurance.
The abysmal wages compared to the cost of living are why micro-financing ("Buy now pay later") is a thing now
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…ideally, minimum wage should be set per-county at three times one standard deviation below the mean housing cost…
(3 ((600 SF σ $/SF) FHA 30-Year Mortgage)) / 2080
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Canada is us$12.50. That's getting close to double, and we share a long border.
You wanna make almost twice more money AND pay 1% less tax for the free healthcare, then go north.
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Quebec is 15.75 afaik, which is 11.30 us dollars
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Thank God there's been no inflation since then, or people might be struggling!
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And in 80 years it has risen $7.00 from its 25¢/hour origins.
We need a new word for dignity because the one we are using is doing it wrong.
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with context, that's a 2800% increase in 80 years, a 35% increase per year average. 15 years = 525% increase lost, final value would be 45 per hour. I have no idea if this is right and don't condone this math for any reference.
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That's not how compound increases are measured.
We can use the compound interest formula for this.
A = P * (1 + r) ^ t- A is the final amount.
- P is the starting amount (the principal).
- r is the rate (as a proportion, so 50% would be 0.5).
- t is the time.
To figure out the annual increase for the whole time we can plug in what we know and solve for what we don't:
7.25 = 0.25 * (1+r) ^ 80 29 = (1+r) ^ 80 years 1.043 = 1+r 0.043 = rSo that's about 4.3% increase per year over the 80 years.
Now we can see what we would have as minimum wage if it had continued over the past 15 years:
A = 7.25 * (1+0.043) ^ 15 A = 7.25 * 1.043 ^ 15 A = 7.25 * 1.88 A = 13.63So that's a $13.63 minimum wage.
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The math is not right. Percentages don’t multiply like that.
A change from 0.25 to 7.25 over 71 years means an annual increase of about 5%. That 5% annual change, starting with $7.25 15 years ago, would take us to around $15 today.
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we should tie the hourly minimum wage to the cost of spending one minute in a hospital bed. Maybe that'll get Republicans on board with free healthcare.
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Second Bill of Rights. Unpack the supreme court, get a super majority in all branches of government and make it law.
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Unpacking it takes on a whole new implication now that the President only has one way to force someone off the court.
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Actually, the Supreme Court just handed the President a whole new way of getting rid of them... Legally arresting and possibly even executing them if that President so chooses to make such acts official.
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you can also add to the courts. it’s been done before. there’s not just one option to rebalance.
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We need to stop looking at minimum wage as a set number across the country, It creates a wage disparity for the working class. A livable wage in Alabama would not be a livable wage in California, a livable wage in California would be an insane wage in a place like Alabama.
The minimum wage needs to be directly tied with median housing costs either at the state level or at the county level. The wage needs to be set where housing would only comprise of a max of 30% of income. So at 30% if the median rent is $2000 per month, the livable wage in that area would be set at about $6700 a month, or about $42 an hour. This would help control housing costs as well as keep wages livable.
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Regardless, nobody can live on 7.25
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I acknowledge that, but people keep quitting a specific number and specific numbers don't work across the nation. Because of varied COL. Minimum wage should be tied to a major COL item like housing
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Minimum wage in California is $16. Berkeley it is $18.67
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B-but Big Macs!!!
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No where near a livable wage
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The median required minimum livable wage in California for a single person with no children, according to MIT living wage calculator is $27.32
Even if it does get increased to $18, it's not livable.
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It's probably more realistically possible to put some rent caps in than implement $42/hr minimum wage. Virtually all minimum wage employees would be laid off with all the businesses who employ them shutting down too. The only businesses that could survive that much dramatic increase in payroll costs would be the ones making really huge profits, which would almost certainly not include every restaurant in most cities.
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Suppose that happens. What's stopping the landlords from just raising their rents then? Can the government control housing costs? Is it even possible in a "free" economy?
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The government wouldn't need to control housing. Landlords would be under pressure from other companies to keep housing low so their wage costs remain as low as possible.
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Hasn’t it been 25 years? I could have sworn that happened in 2000
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By memory Obama largely raised the federal minimum wage to match many state minimum wages in 2009
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I think someone misunderstood what the "Fight for 15" was getting at
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Well done USA. Approaching 3rd world wages. 🙄
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but inflation!!!
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Nice
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...not to sing the praises of minimum wage, but if it kept pace with inflation from when i was compensated accordingly it'd be $8.05 today; if it kept pace with its inception hourly folks today would be paid $5.57...
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Where are you getting these wildly wrong numbers?
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https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart
https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm...you can do the math yourself: minimum wage has never been pretty but false assertions undermine the legitimacy of reform advocacy...
(edit: these same values are clearly graphed across the entire history of the federal minimum wage in the parent article)
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By 1950 though it was $1 an hour, which would be over $13 an hour today (using your sources below).
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You should have gone to school, you could've learned a trade But you laid in the bed where the bums have laid Now all the time you're crying that you're underpaid It's like that (what?) and that's the way it is Huh!
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...IN.. AMERICA.
do you people really forget about the other 200 nations?
155 comments
For the love of god, increase it to something reasonable then implement yearly increases based on inflation so that I never have to hear about this again.
This or tie it to the average government wage of a member of Congress, they get a raise and the people get a raise.
They would slash their own salaries to $7.25 or less and enjoy the usual net pay raises from their billionaire donors and stock increases as a reward for keeping it that way.
And voters will cheer them on for being so selfless and suffering with the common man.
Tie minimum wage to GDP/GNP, inflation, etc.
Tie congressional salaries to be a fixed multiple of minimum wage.
If congress wants more money, they have to make everyone’s situation better.
CT actually does the annual increase based on inflation thing. It's at $15.60-something currently I believe. It can be done.
That's something for sure, but if they took it back to the beginning and adjusted for inflation it would be $25+
That's the best thing that can be negotiated in a collective agreement, after that you can finally work on negotiating things that aren't salary related.
It's absolutely wild that raising the minimum wage needs to be legislated every time. Other countries just appoint a body that has the authority to increase it every year based on XYZ, no legislation required.