I can’t imagine living on minimum wage as an adult, even here, where the cost of living is relatively low. Minimum wage here is $9/hr, which is about $1200/month after taxes. Ouch! I don’t know how you could survive on that.
I do think using McDonalds as an example for this discussion can be useful. Not only is it one of the largest employers in the US and one of the employers with the largest percentage of workers on state support but also one of the first movers to this new low wage economy. While Ray Kroc gets most of the glory for McDonald’s success, it was actually the McDonald Brothers who pioneered the actual in store business success. Their Speedee Service System became the basis of the entire fast food industry and much of our modern economy. The brothers recognized two flaws in the then burger stand system. First was that the employees taking orders and delivering food (mostly young women) spent a lot of time socializing with/being harassed by young men. That was easy to solve. Don’t hire young women and keep employees behind a counter. The next was that short order cooking requires skill, experience and hard work. In other words these employees were skilled labor and expensive. What the Speedee Service System did was replace the short order cook with a machine. The human operators required little training and thus were easily replaceable, thus cheap. This model worked its way through first the food service industry then the economy as a whole. Take skilled (expensive) positions and replace with a machine and unskilled (cheap) positions. This is great for profits and shareholder value (and initially consumers, they get a cheap and quick good or service) but if you do this long enough you end up with an economy of a few highly skilled positions (those who make and maintain the machines) and a shit ton of unskilled ones. Just waving your hands and saying ‘back in my day there were more skilled positions so adults didn’t work those unskilled ones’ is ignorant and/or heartless.
And fake! It's an artificial social stigma sprouted up like weeds around corporate propaganda. Lie and say these jobs are "for teenagers", then make a social stigma around adults working there, then fuck the economy, and force adults to work there, then you make poverty a moral failing, and the criminals can get away with it.
If your backwards ass ever actually picked up "On The Origin Of Species", you'd burn like Dracula moisturizing with holy water.
Indeed, few people really actually get Darwin. Everyone thinks they do, but for most it boils down to "survival of the fittest", a term I hate.
That's all her labor is worth if she had a 9 dollar per hour job - you have trouble discerning the difference apparently. If you score a C (average) on a test does that mean that you personally are average or just your performance on that test?
And if that labour is all you have available to offer society at that point they become synonymous. People do not generally get paid for skills which are not required for their role and if the only roles they can find are unskilled any other skills or attributes become irrelevant. In a market where wages are driven down to the point where they do not support the basics of modern life then that is exactly what has happened, you have been deemed unworthy of a subsistence lifestyle. Frankly that should never happen to anyone, regardless of their abilities. If society will place the well being of the market over that of human beings we've gone very wrong somewhere.
Really? I'd say the people unable to make that difference are the ones saying that such a person "deserves to starve".
I don't know where this equation of the value of one's labor to the worth of one as a person comes from, but please stop ascribing it to me. I think the two concepts are totally disconnected. You may be a wonderful person, but your labor may only be worth $6/hour. You can have a six figure salary and still be a total piece of shit.
Adding to the list of things @Paladin is OK with: Murder Sexual assault Genocide/children dying in cages A return to feudalism.
yep...a lot of my son's peers & friends have second jobs and/or housemates. My son himself has a housemate and might end up needing a second part time job because when school is out (he teaches at a privately funded fine arts school) he doesn't get paid. And Augusta has some low rent prices compared to many other cities too. That's just the reality of the situation he is in until his experience & growing skillset moves him up the financial ladder.
I hope Scarecrow from Wizard Of Oz gets a paycheck for letting you beat the everliving shit out of him. Sucks being the jobber. Poor fella.
perhaps but your opinions define you to them, and frankly, you're looking a tad sociopathic. Tell me, what do you think the bare minimum wage of showing up on time five days/40 hrs a week should be?
that's presuming he sticks with a single career track for his working life. That's rapidly diminished this century.
You do realize the native Austin folks are getting priced out as the Texan landlords up the rents to take advantage of all the Californian expats who are moving there? And that Austin will very likely become Silicon Valley 2: Southwestern Boogaloo in another 20 years as a result? What happens to those folks? Where the hell to they "just move!" to? Moving to a new place doesn't fix the core issues, especially when Texas pays federal living wage, which was a laughable joke back in 2006, let alone now.
Where does this idea come from that if the minimum wage is $15 an hour, people won't have any incentive to improve their skills or find better-paying jobs? $15 an hour still isn't much to live on. There's no way in hell I'd trade my current paycheck for a $15/hour job. I did a little research, plugging my own salary history into the BLS inflation calculator, and found that the last time my income came out to less than the equivalent of $15 an hour in 2019 terms, I was 24 years old and three years into my first full-time job. (And at the time, I was in an area with very low cost of living, renting a two-bedroom house that cost me the equivalent of $445 a month today.) So don't worry, conservatives ... even at $15 an hour, the fast-food workers you despise so much still won't be comfortable. They'll still struggle to pay the rent on even a modest place to live, even if they can get 4o hours a week ... and, since one of the service sector's favorite tactics is to only schedule people for 20 or 25 hours a week while demanding so much flexibility that it's next to impossible for them to get a second job, that's unlikely. Making $15 an hour isn't going to cause any McDonald's employee to go "Gosh, I'm doing great! I want to live like this forever!" But it might keep them from being completely crippled by poverty, and at the same time it might make things like pursuing more education or career training a little bit less out of reach.
Especially since he graduated from college today! Santa Claus himself should pay him an early visit and increase his wages by 20 percent at least!
