• WaxedWookie@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    If you think a job should exist, the people working that job should be paid enough to live comfortably.

    You don’t get to look down on people flipping burgers and sneer that they should get a real job if you want McDonald’s to exist - you’re essentially saying people should be punished for delivering a service that you want - it’s sickening.

    • bitjunkie@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      The “fight for 15” movement officially started in Nov 2012. CPI calculator says that’s $20.54 in today’s money. But we all know housing and groceries have gone up significantly faster than CPI, and mostly just because the people controlling the supply decided they wanted more money.

        • cadekat@pawb.social
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          14 days ago

          If you’re suggesting something like cryptocurrency or a return to the gold standard, I challenge you to explain how that would help in this situation.

          • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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            14 days ago

            In this situation our pay is getting cut every year, at a greater rate than minimum wage is going up.

  • Veedem@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    It’s wild how conservatives have been led to believe that people shouldn’t make a livable wage doing whatever job needs to be done.

    Then, when people don’t want to work for shit pay, they cry that “nobody wants to work anymore”.

      • dalekcaan@lemm.ee
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        16 days ago

        That’s the crux of it. Republicans almost invariably see life as a zero-sum game. It honestly does not occur to them that everyone could be happy and prosperous.

    • Aneb@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      This. My parents and my husband and I went to the Smithsonian archival museum in Washington DC. They had an exhibit about the coal and steel strike from the 1800s-literally present day. My parents were raised in the era of “work hard put your head down”. They really needed this to show class inequality of capitalism. I mean you can find that anywhere on the internet but it was cool to be there and talk about it. Fuck Capitalism and the cancer that it has always been. My parents are still voting for Trash but I feel its a step forward.

    • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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      16 days ago

      Well, of course. They agree that someone has to do those jobs, they just don’t think they should be able to afford a one bedroom apartment while doing so.

    • sawdustprophet@midwest.social
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      16 days ago

      It’s wild how conservatives have been led to believe that people shouldn’t make a livable wage doing whatever job needs to be done.

      Not just conservatives. My stepdad is far from being one, but he lives in a fantasy reality where “no one in the 80s made a living or supported a family working fast food or running a register.” (I paraphrased a tiny bit, but this is a near-direct quote from him.)

    • takeda@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      It’s the mentality that billionaires use to impose on us. Yes, our life sucks, but it is not bad, because there are people for whom or sucks much more.

      I am currently reading book called On Freedom by Prof. Timothy Snyder and is really eye opening, how we are being manipulated to hurt our and our children’s future. I think everyone should read it.

  • mindaika@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    15 days ago

    The focus on wages is misleading (intentionally). America has more than enough resources for everyone here to live comfortable lives regardless of what jobs anyone does, they’re just poorly distributed

      • BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world
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        15 days ago

        Are they though? The mentally ill who think all there is to life is a digital high score in their bank accounts definitely don’t act like they’re living fulfilling lives.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      15 days ago

      If we peel about 50 billionaires and their families we could make every single American a multi-millionaire. I bet it would put a dent in wage theft, too. Scare the piss out of middle managers so hard they prolapse their ureters.

      • Kairos@lemmy.today
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        15 days ago

        That’s not correct.

        The average wealth in this country is ~250k a person

      • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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        15 days ago

        The 50 richest people in the US have a collective net worth of about $3 trillion. If you could wave a magic wand and turn that net worth (which is not an amount of cash money) directly into cash, something that obviously can’t actually be done, but I digress, and you distributed that $3 trillion evenly among the ~340 million people in the US, everyone would get about $8800, lmao. Not quite multimillionaire level.

        It amuses me how confidently people will state complete bullshit, even when it’s so easily debunked.

    • socsa@piefed.social
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      15 days ago

      Low wages would honestly be fine if everyone was guaranteed housing and food and medical care. I just want a society where a person who is lazy or unambitious or disadvanted who just wanted to take a year off could survive with some reasonable level of comfort without working at all if they didn’t want to.

  • Suavevillain@lemmy.world
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    15 days ago

    People act like if people were paid enough to cover their rent and bills, they would be living some ultra life of luxury. The arguments against minimum wage being raised never make any sense when wealthy people use every loop in the book to extract as much as possible.

  • m0darn@lemmy.ca
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    15 days ago

    I support abolishing minimum wage… once every person has sufficient healthy food, safe shelter, and needs based access to healthcare and educational resources.

    • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
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      15 days ago

      Yeah, make the employers compete against UBI. Can you pay me more to work than the government pays me to sit on my ass?

      • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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        15 days ago

        Makes me wonder if absolutely shitty jobs like janitorial work or garbage collection or working in sewers would go from being minimumally paid to being super high paying jobs if there was UBI, because it would become the only way to actually attract (a majority) people to the work. Or if it would just force robotics to get better specifically for these kinds of jobs humans don’t want to do.

        • BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world
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          15 days ago

          Both, ideally. Though UBI is still just a bandaid on the gushing wound that is capitalism; without radically correcting the housing market landleeches will just raise rents by the exact amount of UBI and we’ll be in the exact same situation.

            • bitjunkie@lemmy.world
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              14 days ago

              Yeah when mass unemployment hit with the pandemic, we were shown exactly how insufficient most if not all states’ unemployment benefits were for actually living on. I think having some kind of voucher system where this is one week’s groceries, one month’s rent, etc., would work, but of course they’re going to find a way to game whatever we come up with. Saying “but they’ll find loopholes” isn’t a reason not to do the first step. That’s letting perfection get in the way of progress, and it’s pretty much the entire corpo pol playbook.

  • sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip
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    16 days ago

    So… one approach you could take would be to say anyone working a full time job should be able to afford a one bedroom apartment. You know, New Deal kind of ethos for the modern era.

    https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/united-states/?bedrooms=1

    Ok, avg one bed rent ~= $1600 a month.

    $1600 * 3 = $4800 (1/3 rent to income ratio)

    $4800 / (40 hrs x 4 weeks) = $30 dollars an hour.

    So yeah its actually worse than ‘We’ve been arguing about $15 for so long its more like $25’.

    Nope. Its $30 an hour. $62,400 a year.

    Sure would be cool if we did literally anything to _actually_make housing more affordable.

    (BTW 60% of working individual Americans make less than this)

    https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

    • howrar@lemmy.ca
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      16 days ago

      Not just afford a one bedroom apartment. They should be able to do so and also afford to go to work. You can get housing for next to nothing in bumfuck nowhere, but if you can’t get to work while living there, then there’s no point.

      • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
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        15 days ago

        And you just know this is going to be the conservative argument regarding the subject. Joe Random makes $18 an hour in New York City and they’ll argue that this is sufficient because you can rent a 1br studio in Kentucky with it.

    • BussyCat@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      I agree anyone working a full time job should be able to afford a one bedroom apartment but minimum wage in 1940 was $624a year and an average apartment seemed to be $324 a year so to meet that same level of pay we would “only” need a minimum wage of 17.25. That’s still way more than the current minimum wage of 7.25 but not as high as $25/hr

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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        15 days ago

        Minimum wage in major cities is usually in the mid-twenties these days. The idea of a federal minimum wage is kind of silly, considering how different the cost of living is across the country. Living wages should be calculated and enforced at the city or county level.

        • BussyCat@lemmy.world
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          14 days ago

          Where in the U.S. is 7.25 even a remotely livable wage? The U.S. government already has locality calculations for different municipalities that wouldn’t be hard to do with a minimum wage where high cost areas would have a higher minimum wage and low cost areas would have a lower one

  • hogunner@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    Just a reminder that we’ve been trying to get the minimum wage to $15/hr for so long that if we kept up with inflation the minimum wage would be over $25/hr now. By the time $15/hr actually passes it’ll be less than half of what it should be.

    • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      16 days ago

      I’m so fucking tired of hearing about a living wage.

      I want a thriving wage! If that means that janitors and whoever the fuck conservatives want to shit on make $40-50 dollars and hour, so be it.

      Wages have been so stagnant that I want a labor market and not a job market.

        • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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          15 days ago

          This is a pretty privileged statement. We’re not at a point in society where robots and machines can produce everything we need, which means people need to do it. Why would other people need to labor for your existence while you do nothing? Every creature on the planet labors in its own way to continue living, and humans are no exception.

            • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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              15 days ago

              What does that even mean? Of course you have a fundamental right to keep your life. That doesn’t mean you have the right to receive food and shelter without effort, when those things require effort to produce. Yet we do sometimes provide those things to people who don’t labor. They’re not very nice, and they don’t provide a life of abundance, but they are available to many people who wouldn’t have had those options at earlier points in history. It is a great advancement in our society that we can provide for the basic needs of people who aren’t capable of providing for themselves, either in whole, or in part. But if you’re capable of working, and providing for yourself, then you should meet that challenge with urgency, especially since the taxes from your labors contribute to the assistance for the incapable that I mentioned above. We may eventually reach a point where nobody needs to labor, but not in our lifetime.

              • rockerface 🇺🇦@lemm.ee
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                15 days ago

                We could already have been at that point if 99% of the actual value of our labor wasn’t stolen by the rich. But sure, I guess we can’t reach it with this attitude

    • MisterFrog@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      Maybe the movement should stop pushing for a number and just say you want a regulator who just increases minimum wage by inflation every year, as well as setting absolute minimum federal minimum wage up to a level where you can actually live.

      But without asking for legislation that gives a regulator the authority to set minimum wages, even if you get $25/hr, you’ll just have to get the movement going again ever few years.

      This is not a novel idea by me, it’s done all over the world.

    • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.netOP
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      16 days ago

      $7.25? Woof. I made that back at a grocery store 20 years ago.

      I’ll take €1,969 and look out on the Mediterranean.

  • RegalPotoo@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    Society needs Mandatory Service Worker Service. Like Mandatory Military Service, except you are required to spend a year working a full time minimum wage job with no outside financial support before you turn 25

  • i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca
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    16 days ago

    “But you clearly deserve more than $15 an hour. What do you do, what do you deserve to earn, and why?”