I think it’s wild that the increase has to be legislated each time, why not just give the responsibility of increasing it each year to a government agency which needs to follow legislation to set it (based on XYZ metrics)? This is how it’s done in many other countries.
You do realize that if that were done, there would be a mass layoff, right? Because minimum wage is a price control. And so if most companies don’t think that workers are worth $24 per hour, they will just lay them off instead and give them zero dollars per hour. If you’d like an example, look at California fast food workers right about now.
Edit: I think it should be raised, but that would be far too much.
Right now I’m making a bit more than $24/hour and live in a low cost of living, rural area. I’m fortunate enough to have been blessed with inherited money after my father’s passing and now have a paid off house and vehicle. My living expenses are low to say the least. I have ZERO debt, I invest 15% of my income and put 10% into savings, 25% goes towards “wants” and the rest goes to bills.
All of that said, there is absolutely NO WAY I would be able to save/invest/spend the percentages I do if I had to pay rent, or a mortgage, and a car payment on top of that. If I had kids it would be even worse. I literally cannot even imagine if I had to pay for a kid right now and I’m in a good spot financially speaking. I would be BARELY scraping by at my pay rate (reminder: I’m in a low cost of living rural area).
How can you POSSIBLY think $24/hr is too much money???
Because tons of workers are losing their jobs in California because of a twenty-hour minimum wage. If it was twenty-four, it would be even worse. That is a three-and-a-half times increase from what it is currently. As I said, it should go up, but it should not go up that much. Double it to $15.5 maybe. Most places i am aware of pay around that so it shouldnt spark a mass layoff.
I promise you the companies that are now forced to pay $20/hr are more than capable of doing so. They’re only laying off people in protest; it’s purely for show. They must have at least 60 locations nationwide and be considered “fast food”. These companies aren’t broke. Starbucks for example, which just closed 7 stores in protest had a net income of $4.125 billion in 2023
I wish I knew the answer to this, but I don’t think a dollar amount floor on labor in fiat currency is it. That’ll just find a new equilibrium in a devalued currency.
I don’t write this because I disagree with the sentiment. I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment.
But wealth isn’t about dollars. It’s about assets. For day to day living, it’s about real estate.
I just wrote out a whole bunch of thoughts but I don’t think they’re applicable to the topic.
Maybe do things like:
Unoccupied residential real estate is taxed at some obscene percentage of assessed value.
No individual may own more than ten living spaces (apartments are a need, and somebody’s got to own them)
Entities (looking at you black rock) may not own residential real estate.
REITS are absolutely off the table.
Water is a public good and Nestle can get fucked
Student debt and medical debt are capped at some percentage of income formula.
And to get really crazy, instead of minimum wage, employers must demonstrate that employees can afford two bedrooms with no more than twenty five percent of gross wages.
I’m drinking beer and watching rich people ride horses. These are casual thoughts without citation and are not intended for academic review or criticism.
And to get really crazy, instead of minimum wage, employers must demonstrate that employees can afford two bedrooms with no more than twenty five percent of gross wages.
Stuff like that always backfires. You lose the businesses altogether, now nobodies got nothing.
I believe the standard counter to that is that if you can’t meet that standard then you either shouldn’t have employees or you shouldn’t have a business
That’s a brain dead retort, utilized by people that don’t think, just repeat ideas they heard elsewhere and barely understand. Note, I ain’t saying that to you in particular. Brings to mind the rent controlled buildings standing vacant in NY, because it’s below input/maintenance to rent out.
No this has been thoroughly disproven. the total amount of dollars doesn’t change, it just moves from the wealthy back to the workers. Raising wages doesn’t cause inflation, corporations raising prices does, so raising the minimum wage is just one piece of it. The myth that raising wages causes inflation is argued that more money for workers creates more demand for commodities which raises the prices, but again, the total amount of currency doesn’t change. You’re not going to buy 7 cartons of eggs just because you make more money, and spending it doesn’t make it more scarce. You’ll buy as much as you need for the week just like last week, except now you don’t have to choose between food and going to the Dr.
Real economic inflation or deflation is caused when the amount of currency doesn’t match the amount of production. Or to simplify, money is representative of something that was produced, and can be exchanged for commodities; and the whole money supply is representative of the whole productive capacity of a nation (or issuing body). Paying people more doesn’t lower production, it would theoretically stay the same though experiments have proven that productivity increases. Raising wages raises the amount of money that businesses make because there is more money in circulation, it isn’t just sitting in accounts collecting interest. Increase in demand actually drives hiring more workers.
Lots of nice ideas in your post but none of it are demands that bring workers together to organize and fight for what they deserve, we have to hope that some politician will give it to us. Fighting for wage increases does mobilize workers, and it has only ever been organized mobilizations of workers that have driven economic changes under capitalism.
Shit, does it make me conservative for me to want to go back to no Citizens United and reinstated Glass–Steagall? Throw Roe v Wade back in there for good measure?
All liberal accomplishments, but it would really just be regaining all we have lost in the past 25 years.
Secondary education is for the wealthy now. All you see at universities is kids whose parents gave them a leg up so they could get in. Nobody makes it on their own anymore, no kid that age should go into debt into the $100k+ just to get an education, and most won’t be eligible unless their parents are wealthy.
I started out at community College and got an internship at the state. The people I worked for at the state pressured me to transfer to university.
I lived on my own and survived off the 13 bucks an hour 20 hours a week and student loans.
Preparing for my third university semester, my student loans got rejected. They cited "you went from a Junior to a Sophomore" as the reason, didn't accept "I went from a 2 year program to a 4 year program" as an answer, and wouldn't tell me why it took them 2 semesters to come up with this rejection reason.
Never qualified for Pell or FAFSA. My parents were broke, but the house they foreclosed on a couple years later was too much equity for me to qualify for student aid.
Then the state fired me because of budget slashes (I interned for the Department of Education in the late 00s).
So I dropped out and carried the debt with no degree for a little over a decade, the principle actually rising, before I converted the debt to a consolidation loan and paid it off in 3 years.
Minimum wage shouldn’t be a dollar amount, it should be a living amount defined in a reasonable and realistic way. (Probably should be region dependent, too?)
Tying the minimum wage to inflation is a good strategy. Combined with a method to keep the executive class from exponentially lapping the labourers, you’d have the makings of a nice first world nation.
The road to getting there isn’t enjoyable though. Just go with the flow, and one day these problems will be irrelevant.
The government already intentionally understates inflation through changes to the CPI, this would just further incentivize them to understate it even further.
You’re right of course. I suppose in an idealistic world, elections would be publicly funded, with no methods of outside money to take influence over candidates and therefore policy. A utopian dream perhaps.
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