“But like… that’s like so much more money than I make. Stop complaining.”
No.
I won’t stop complaining.
Just because your poverty wages are worse than my poverty wages doesn’t mean that I don’t have the right to be mad about my poverty wages. In many parts of the country you can’t even afford an apartment at $20/hr. Including where I live.
Not to mention the cost of medication for my disabled ass. Every wage looks a hell of a lot different if you have to spend hundreds to thousands a month on your life saving medication.
Minimum wage should be $30/hr. Period.
-fae
Minimum wage should scale with the cost of living for an area actually. In places where the cost of living is astronomical, even $30 an hour wouldn’t cut it. In San Francisco, a true living wage would be closer to $70 an hour. It would be a major incentive to regulate prices on damn near everything, but housing especially, because companies definitely don’t want to shell out that much in wages.
[ID: a tweet from @1anjohn that says: $15 an hour is poverty and I think we need to say that loudly because right now companies use it as a badge of honor]
Every time I get groceries I’m always appalled at how little you can get for like, $20. I was making banana pudding so I needed vanilla wafers but the brand name nilla wafers cost $4 a box. The minimum wage in my state is $7.25/hr. My friend put it really well when he said “imagine you work for an hour and someone hands you two boxes of nilla wafers and said ‘actually this is a bit more than what I owe you’”
How are some of y’all missing the point so bad. “Shop at aldi instead” “make your own food” “don’t buy brand name” “don’t buy unhealthy processed food” It’s not about the box of cookies. This is about how minimum wage pays peanuts and has stagnated for 12 years while the cost of living keeps growing. No one wants your financial advice about how to survive on beans and rice and frozen veggies. The smartest grocery list in the world is not gonna help you budget your way out of poverty. Please get a grip for the love of god
Without a planned economy, there is no way to ensure full employment.
Capitalism consistently operates under capacity. This means empty facilitates, full of productive machinery, while those who could operate it are unemployed.
That’s not an accident.
Competition for jobs drives wages down. If 1000 people are willing and able to fill one post, the employer can choose the cheapest from a large pool of workers, all undercutting the cost of each other’s labour to secure the job.
If there are only a handful of people to do a job, wages cannot be forced down as far.
Near-full employment would leave employers with a very small pool of potential workers, forcing wages to increase or stay the same.
The market drives unemployment, demanding the longest possible hours from the cheapest available labourers.
Capitalism is not freedom. Capital is a condition of freedom under capitalism.
What does that mean?
In order to have “freedom” of choice, you must have capital (wealth/property).
For example, those with capital can choose not to work.
Those without capital must find employment in order to buy food, clothes, shelter, etc. or to maintain acceptable living standards, although workers often live in poverty anyway. This means they have to sell their ability to work. The capitalist exploitsthe worker.
Employment does not provide workers with a wage that would allow them to accumulate enough capital to leave employment. This is a form of coercion, which holds the capitalist economy together.
In other words, the purpose of the wage is to ‘keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer’.
Workers compete for jobs. Employers choose those who will accept the lowest wage.
As poorer nations entered the market, employers moved jobs en masse to those places. Workers do the same work on very low wages.
This created mass unemployment in the countries where capitalism began.
Without an income, individuals cannot buy what capitalists are selling. Workers in poor countries can’t afford the products of their labour - wages are too low.
Welfare programmes, although they were won by workers, create a consumer base in the countries left behind by industrial capitalists (they enable the unemployed to buy).
The market depends on the capitalist state. They appear antagonistic, but the capitalist state continually saves the market from extinction by its own hand (this is a ’bourgeois dictatorship’).
Maximisation of profit minimises disposable income. Therefore, a ‘free’ market is impossible, as is ‘anarcho-capitalism’ (also known as ‘right libertarianism’).
“But like… that’s like so much more money than I make. Stop complaining.”
No.
I won’t stop complaining.
Just because your poverty wages are worse than my poverty wages doesn’t mean that I don’t have the right to be mad about my poverty wages. In many parts of the country you can’t even afford an apartment at $20/hr. Including where I live.
Not to mention the cost of medication for my disabled ass. Every wage looks a hell of a lot different if you have to spend hundreds to thousands a month on your life saving medication.
Minimum wage should be $30/hr. Period.
-fae
Minimum wage should scale with the cost of living for an area actually. In places where the cost of living is astronomical, even $30 an hour wouldn’t cut it. In San Francisco, a true living wage would be closer to $70 an hour. It would be a major incentive to regulate prices on damn near everything, but housing especially, because companies definitely don’t want to shell out that much in wages.
[ID: a tweet from @1anjohn that says: $15 an hour is poverty and I think we need to say that loudly because right now companies use it as a badge of honor]
Wages in the US have become wildly, fantastically unshackled from the costs of doing business, and they’ve been that way for decades. We’ve been told our entire lives that the world is such a way, and that it’s the Natural Normal result of things working the way they Have to work.
It’s a lie. It’s been a lie the entire time. They just Started Lying one day and didn’t stop until everyone who knew better died, gave up, or got their voice drowned out in all the noise.
You can’t tell me a combo at any fast food restaurant hasn’t doubled in price since the 90’s. Guess how much minimum wage has increased….
1) if food prices go up if wages go up, complain about CEOs not taking the cut, not the workers who need the money to pay their rent
2) smash this idiot idea that it’s only high school kids working minimum wage jobs: who do you think is making you your Starbucks at 12 pm? The highschool kids are all in highschool, idiot. At my retail store where people make minimum wage, we have no staff under 25 years old right now, about half the staff have families, they are all making minimum wage.
3) these people are providing you goods and services that are important and you want. You want a burrito. You want a coffee. Why on earth should the people providing us essential services not make enough money to pay their rent and their bills? Explain to me why this group of people deserves to live in poverty?
4) these jobs are not “unskilled” as in they’re easy to do and any asshole could do them. They are working harder than any prick sitting in an office chair all day.
5) Canada has raised its minimum wage. My province has had a minimum wage of $15 per hour for four years. Burritos do not cost $30 here, no one has gone out of business because they can’t afford to pay their workers anymore. What HAS happened is that I can now afford to live with my kids in my own apparent and not have to share it with my sister and her kids, I can afford to actually buy things, I can afford to cook healthy food and replace my shoes when they fall apart. The extra money I am making goes straight back into the local economy. My health and the health of my kids will be better and we will cost our government less. Don’t be a fucking idiot.
Fuck every single asshole who ever shits on minimum wage workers, ESPECIALLY these days after the pandemic when we all screamed about wanting to go out and get a coffee during lockdown. Fuck every single one of you with a rusty rake.
Reblogging for rottenbrainstuff’s excellent response.
Marx’s Capital Illustrated. So far it is very good. Clever little illustrations and to the point. I hear it’s excellent for add/adhd folks who have trouble focusing.
When implementing minimum wage, northern Dems/progressives were set on the minimum wage being a lot higher than it was eventually settled on, but, shocker, Southern Republicans and Dems weren’t having it. For them, it meant giving some black people and poor white people non poverty wages, and losing even more profit since chattel slavery was officially abolished. But Congress did end up implementing a minimum wage, (as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938), and it was significant in fixing the staggering wealth inequality and building what became a robust (mostly white) middle class. The times conservatives ironically refer to as when we were great were when we were notably as close as we have gotten to a social democracy.
The minimum wage stopped going up with inflation/cost of living in 1968, though, and it wasn’t until 2009 that Dems barely bumped it up within 2 years to …what it still is now. Lol And, overall, it certainly hasn’t gone up with productivity. Considering just these things, the current minimum wage should be at least $25.
This would make an ideal poster for spreading around university campuses, recreation centres, bulletin boards, etc.
You morons!! You have no understanding of even the basics of economics. Do you understand that the majority of employers are small businesses that cannot afford to pay $15 dollars an hour. They will either stop hiring or lay off employees at the very least. They will also pass on the extra cost on to their customers or go out of business.
“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…“
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
tl;dr business owners do not have the right to subsidize their profits on the backs of their workers. If a business cannot pay fair wages it is a parasite and should fail accordingly.
