BTW $30 isn’t like a crazy high number for minimum wage. The current number is well below the poverty line for families everywhere in the United States, and New York has a very high cost of living. Minimum wage is explicitly intended to provide “the wages of decent living.” $30 per hour might actually be too low for New York City. $61,500 a year is barely going to pay the rent in the shittiest neighborhoods. https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/new-york-ny/
I’d genuinely be interested to know how many human beings need to work a 40-hour week in order to produce and distribute enough food, medicine, clothing, shelter and education for all 8.2 billion humans, and how many of the rest of us are really just building follies purely just to keep everyone busy.
If tech billionaires insist on continuing to make jobs like “taxi driver” and “checkout operator” obsolete via automation while also refusing to share the proceeds of that automation with the humans whose expertise was used to train said AI and then got replaced, then the question of “exactly how pointless do the new jobs (I mean, ‘influencer’? Really?) need to be before we accept that money has ceased to make sense as the way we incentivize people to not have more kids than the global industrial output can sustain?”.
You can have 80% of the population unemployed given the 20% are elite workers using automation and nearly perfect/efficient automated systems (i.e: Not farming by hand trowel, but one person controlling 10 combines/tractors simultaneously like they’re playing Factorio or Farming Simulator)
It depends a bit on what we need strictly necessary to keep people alive and happy. Also we probably only need people to work 6 hours days iirc, it would be the same efficiency.
Let’s assume there is no money and everybody gets what they need, like when we lived in smaller self sustainable communities.
We would need transport for a lot of things, we also need people to repair that infrastructure.
At the same time, we also need more people to do sports to keep healthy, so you need to be able to do that. You don’t strictly need a lot for that, but still.
We also need things like swimming pools on top of normal education to teach people how to swim (more important in some countries than others)
Don’t we also need some way for people to have hobbies etc to keep everybody sane and happy?
I like the thought process of how many people have essential jobs, this also started for me during covid when the Dutch government didn’t make concrete lists of what was essential.
I also don’t believe that we need more people on the planet, we need less people to help with climate change. Yes we will have issues with the ageing of people, but automation should help fill the gab with when those people retire.
I agree with your point, but I’ll also say fuck the bare minimum. Any business that cannot afford to pay a living wage has no business being in business. Poverty is exploitation.
I get what you are saying, but I disagree to some extent, at least from my NL point of view
Almost all small/local restaurants would have gone bankrupt during Covid if the government hasn’t stepped in.
A lot of theatres would go bankrupt if government subsidies would stop.
And there are more companies that are subsidized by the government to help them keep afloat, either temporary or structural like in the theatre example.
Personally, I believe we should stride for a minimum income, not a minimum wage. Because the minimum wage does nothing for you if you wan’t work (anymore). Currently in a NL (and other countries) you get a fixed percentage of your last wage if you get sick for longer than x years. I know people who live under the minimum income because of this and can never get anywhere in life because they get 70% from only working 3 hours a week before they got to be confirmed sick. A minimum wage increase does nothing a minimum (or universal basic income) does work.
In Zurich, Switzerland, the cost of living is insane. It’s similar to NYC that way. The difference is that their minimum wage is 23.90 CHF / hour which is almost exactly $30 USD per hour.
Because it’s such a high cost city, people earning a minimum wage aren’t living a luxurious life. But, they do live a pretty “normal” life. They can go skiing in the winter (getting to the slopes using trains and trams). They can go out to eat as a treat, or go to a club. They can buy healthy foods, and can easily afford their (mandatory) health insurance.
It means a lot of things are more expensive, which basically means the middle class and rich are subsidizing the people earning the least. And this is despite Switzerland being an extremely right-wing country by European standards. You really see the affect of high minimum wages when you’re paying for things where a big part of the cost is minimum wage labour. Like, if you order food for delivery, you might as well order something expensive and luxurious, because you’re going to pay the equivalent of about $20 as a delivery fee.
It’s a system that seems to work a lot better than what NYC currently has. When even the lowest paid person is “comfortable”, they have more pride in their job, and more confidence in their value. They know they’re not as disposable. It also helps that Switzerland has much stronger unions than the US. 45% of all workers in Switzerland are covered by collective bargaining agreements, which is very low by European standards, but is way, way higher than the US rate of 12.1%.
There are already parallels between Zurich and NYC because of the presence of some extremely highly paid people, especially finance bros. But, Zurich should be a model for NYC, and with a $30 minimum wage, they’d take a big step towards that.
Everybody should have a minimum income that they can comfortably live from in every country, period.
In CH are all the restaurants etc. expensive due to the wages being higher? Or is it mainly due to extra food costs?
What if we don’t increase the minimum wage, but increase the minimum income? Aka give people extra money if they work for minimum wage in certain area’s like restaurants. Just a theory.
(In NL we have had situation where the company would get extra money to compensate the higher wage cost, mostly the NOW during Covid)
Time to go skiing? NO. They should be working 9 days a week. No one should have time for anything except working to make the rich cunts even fucking richer :/
It’s Switzerland, skiing is a normal sport, like swimming or bike riding. It’s not something glamorous with champagne and caviar, it’s what you do on the weekend with your buddies, going by train or carpooling and eating some sausage with French fries, or a packed sandwich.
Most people aren’t a short drive from the resort. It’s staying at the resort, renting equipment, eating out, and daily lift passes that’s the biggest expenses for most people. For locals all you need is your own equipment and a $350 annual ticket and it’s basically free after that apart for parking.
In addition, in the US most skiing is at “resorts” and you can only get there by car or bus. In Switzerland you hop on a tram, maybe take a train, get another tram, and then you’re at the hill. You might not even need to pay for the tram because you have a monthly pass you use to get to work the other days.
I live in NY, not NYC, and make $30/hr as a single guy. I live in someone’s garage just so I can have a savings/retirement investment…
Rent at a legitimate apartment complex would eat every remaining dollar I had after my other expenses. NY is definitely expensive…
My dad joked that I need to find a wife with 2 jobs if I wanted a house and then paused for a second, doing the math and realizing that’s actually true if we were all around the $30/hr mark…
Back when it was created, it was enough for a single earner to feed and house a whole family, it should always be compared to that metric and adjusted accordingly.
Yeah it just sounds ridiculously high in low cost of living areas where Fox’s faithful all live.
They really do hear this as “look at this outrageous tax on small business owners” instead of “oh look a living minimum wage - that would be good for Timmy when he graduates high school next year.”
Sure, that’s how we got here, but that’s not even true anymore. The most destitute and depressed regions still have a higher cost of living than the minimum wage would provide.
my two cents (and if my upvotes are any indication my two cents is worthless) the real problem is that when you raise the minimum wage, you build an opportunity for companies to raise the prices on everything, and then we get into an inflation problem.
Example, my home state can raise minimum wage from 9 to 12 dollars an hour, but that 25% increase in pay would be all the excuse Walmart would need to jack up the prices to cover their loses;
Not saying we shouldn’t have a working/livable wage, but we gotta do something that forces companies to pay the workers more, and the owners/CEO less some how. Like an inverse tax calculation that benefits the company for paying lots of people more, instead of just the few at the time a premium.
We find that a 10% minimum wage hike translates into a 0.36% increase in the prices of grocery products. This magnitude is consistent with a full pass-through of cost increases into consumer prices.
Yeah, but note that if the supermarket pays its employees 25% more, that does not mean that the costs for the supermarket rise by 25% overall, since wages are only a small part of total expenses. The cost of products would rise way less than 25%.
Do you also have a paper about the wage increase in things where the price of the employees is a bigger part of the total costs (restaurants, accountants, notaries, etc)?
In a restaurant, the costs of the wages (plus social security and pension payments) are often as much as the costs of the food itself.
This would assume that these same businesses wouldn’t raise prices regardless, which is what they have already been doing, without the wage increase.
A higher minimum wage is how you force companies to pay employees more. There’s no real way to limit ceo pay that they won’t find loopholes for, but you could try to tie the max to some upper percentage of employee median pay
I think a potential solution to CEO pay and inflation, would be to set absolute income tiers for UBI and jobs. Work as a waitress? You get $40k a year, no more or less. Don’t work? Just $10k, plus everyone gets universal benefits such as free food packages, universal healthcare, and utilities. The highest paying job? $100k. This isn’t considering taxes, which effectively turn the $40k to $30k, and the $100k to $60k. This essentially means that a CEO is only twice the income of a clerk, so the market will be forced to set pricing of goods and services to reflect that.
Of course, advocates of malicious capitalism would scream bloody murder, talk about how some people deserve 1,500x the wage of an average person, and so forth.
Bluntly, I hate the excessively wealthy and want their excess to cease existing. They are a distortion that destroys lives. If there are distortions, they should be the kind that benefit EVERYONE. Not just Bezos, Musk, or Trump.
I think especially in New York going after landlords, both housing and commercial, would do a great job at making it so smaller businesses (which New York has a ton of) don’t have to raise prices and to make it so the minimum wage doesn’t have to be as high. That’s why I think his rent freeze policy and whatever else he is going to do against land lords will help a lot.
That’s one argument against, but it’s not proven true anywhere it’s been tested. Shoppers at Walmart have a price point they expect. They can only raise prices so much before sales begin to falter, and their labor costs are not the most significant cost in their stores. Think about how few Walmart employees you see in their massive stores. Real estate, fixtures, even the utility bills are going to outpace the labor increases. Plus, the additional costs are typically offset by the additional sales that happen because everyone has a little more disposable income.
Chain stores and restaurants charge roughly the same amounts regardless of the local labor rates. Things that do affect local prices are the things that affect unit costs, like tariffs, taxes, and transport costs.
You are completely correct that corporations will use any excuse to raise prices, but they’re going to raise prices as high as the market will bear regardless. That’s not a reason to depress demand by keeping wages too low to survive.
You’re not wrong that it can be inflationary, but the inflation has already happened. Besides, productivity is so high these business could afford to pay more with out a price increase, but they want to keep their margins.
Productivity is irrelevant if you sell hours, if a notary works 1 hour they invoice 1 hour most of the time f.e.
The bigger companies and a lot of companies like tech companies will have the margin to increases prices without it hurting their bottom line.
But what about the local restaurant around the corner? Or the mom and pop electronic store with a couple people working there.
I don’t have an answer to that to be fair.
BTW $30 isn’t like a crazy high number for minimum wage. The current number is well below the poverty line for families everywhere in the United States, and New York has a very high cost of living. Minimum wage is explicitly intended to provide “the wages of decent living.” $30 per hour might actually be too low for New York City. $61,500 a year is barely going to pay the rent in the shittiest neighborhoods. https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/new-york-ny/
If you give your whole life of working hours to a business, the compensation should be a bare minimum of all of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Period.
I’d genuinely be interested to know how many human beings need to work a 40-hour week in order to produce and distribute enough food, medicine, clothing, shelter and education for all 8.2 billion humans, and how many of the rest of us are really just building follies purely just to keep everyone busy.
If tech billionaires insist on continuing to make jobs like “taxi driver” and “checkout operator” obsolete via automation while also refusing to share the proceeds of that automation with the humans whose expertise was used to train said AI and then got replaced, then the question of “exactly how pointless do the new jobs (I mean, ‘influencer’? Really?) need to be before we accept that money has ceased to make sense as the way we incentivize people to not have more kids than the global industrial output can sustain?”.
It’s about 20%, according to Ricardian Theorems.
You can have 80% of the population unemployed given the 20% are elite workers using automation and nearly perfect/efficient automated systems (i.e: Not farming by hand trowel, but one person controlling 10 combines/tractors simultaneously like they’re playing Factorio or Farming Simulator)
It depends a bit on what we need strictly necessary to keep people alive and happy. Also we probably only need people to work 6 hours days iirc, it would be the same efficiency. Let’s assume there is no money and everybody gets what they need, like when we lived in smaller self sustainable communities.
We would need transport for a lot of things, we also need people to repair that infrastructure. At the same time, we also need more people to do sports to keep healthy, so you need to be able to do that. You don’t strictly need a lot for that, but still. We also need things like swimming pools on top of normal education to teach people how to swim (more important in some countries than others)
Don’t we also need some way for people to have hobbies etc to keep everybody sane and happy?
I like the thought process of how many people have essential jobs, this also started for me during covid when the Dutch government didn’t make concrete lists of what was essential.
I also don’t believe that we need more people on the planet, we need less people to help with climate change. Yes we will have issues with the ageing of people, but automation should help fill the gab with when those people retire.
You’re thinking of garden hermits who often hang around follies.
And yes, most clerical offices and upper management dudes have them buzzing around them in swarms looking busy.
I agree with your point, but I’ll also say fuck the bare minimum. Any business that cannot afford to pay a living wage has no business being in business. Poverty is exploitation.
I get what you are saying, but I disagree to some extent, at least from my NL point of view
Almost all small/local restaurants would have gone bankrupt during Covid if the government hasn’t stepped in. A lot of theatres would go bankrupt if government subsidies would stop. And there are more companies that are subsidized by the government to help them keep afloat, either temporary or structural like in the theatre example.
Personally, I believe we should stride for a minimum income, not a minimum wage. Because the minimum wage does nothing for you if you wan’t work (anymore). Currently in a NL (and other countries) you get a fixed percentage of your last wage if you get sick for longer than x years. I know people who live under the minimum income because of this and can never get anywhere in life because they get 70% from only working 3 hours a week before they got to be confirmed sick. A minimum wage increase does nothing a minimum (or universal basic income) does work.
Not sure I would want my company involved the top three. Bottom two for sure tho!
But having the time and resources to pursue all of them should fit into any lifestyle package.
In Zurich, Switzerland, the cost of living is insane. It’s similar to NYC that way. The difference is that their minimum wage is 23.90 CHF / hour which is almost exactly $30 USD per hour.
Because it’s such a high cost city, people earning a minimum wage aren’t living a luxurious life. But, they do live a pretty “normal” life. They can go skiing in the winter (getting to the slopes using trains and trams). They can go out to eat as a treat, or go to a club. They can buy healthy foods, and can easily afford their (mandatory) health insurance.
It means a lot of things are more expensive, which basically means the middle class and rich are subsidizing the people earning the least. And this is despite Switzerland being an extremely right-wing country by European standards. You really see the affect of high minimum wages when you’re paying for things where a big part of the cost is minimum wage labour. Like, if you order food for delivery, you might as well order something expensive and luxurious, because you’re going to pay the equivalent of about $20 as a delivery fee.
It’s a system that seems to work a lot better than what NYC currently has. When even the lowest paid person is “comfortable”, they have more pride in their job, and more confidence in their value. They know they’re not as disposable. It also helps that Switzerland has much stronger unions than the US. 45% of all workers in Switzerland are covered by collective bargaining agreements, which is very low by European standards, but is way, way higher than the US rate of 12.1%.
There are already parallels between Zurich and NYC because of the presence of some extremely highly paid people, especially finance bros. But, Zurich should be a model for NYC, and with a $30 minimum wage, they’d take a big step towards that.
Everybody should have a minimum income that they can comfortably live from in every country, period.
In CH are all the restaurants etc. expensive due to the wages being higher? Or is it mainly due to extra food costs?
What if we don’t increase the minimum wage, but increase the minimum income? Aka give people extra money if they work for minimum wage in certain area’s like restaurants. Just a theory. (In NL we have had situation where the company would get extra money to compensate the higher wage cost, mostly the NOW during Covid)
Time to go skiing? NO. They should be working 9 days a week. No one should have time for anything except working to make the rich cunts even fucking richer :/
/s
You can’t talk about having a normal life and mention skiing right away. Most people can’t afford to go skiing
It’s Switzerland, skiing is a normal sport, like swimming or bike riding. It’s not something glamorous with champagne and caviar, it’s what you do on the weekend with your buddies, going by train or carpooling and eating some sausage with French fries, or a packed sandwich.
Most people aren’t a short drive from the resort. It’s staying at the resort, renting equipment, eating out, and daily lift passes that’s the biggest expenses for most people. For locals all you need is your own equipment and a $350 annual ticket and it’s basically free after that apart for parking.
In addition, in the US most skiing is at “resorts” and you can only get there by car or bus. In Switzerland you hop on a tram, maybe take a train, get another tram, and then you’re at the hill. You might not even need to pay for the tram because you have a monthly pass you use to get to work the other days.
In Switzerland they can.
Skiing in Switzerland is like skating anywhere else.
I live in NY, not NYC, and make $30/hr as a single guy. I live in someone’s garage just so I can have a savings/retirement investment…
Rent at a legitimate apartment complex would eat every remaining dollar I had after my other expenses. NY is definitely expensive…
My dad joked that I need to find a wife with 2 jobs if I wanted a house and then paused for a second, doing the math and realizing that’s actually true if we were all around the $30/hr mark…
Or you could split the difference and get two wives with one job each.
Or you could get four wives with a part time job each.
Or you get 8 wives with one job each and now you are making profit over the money you need to buy a house.
My point is
You just invented inverse polygamy. You’re not getting multiple wives because you have a lot of money but because you need a lot of money.
Nah, just the odd man in a female dominant polycule.
Back when it was created, it was enough for a single earner to feed and house a whole family, it should always be compared to that metric and adjusted accordingly.
I make just over $30/hr plus some bonuses. I’m struggling in a midsize Midwest city. I’d need roommates in NYC to live.
Monica and Rachel seem to have a lot of room in their place, they might let you stay if you helped with the rent.
Will I get residuals?
Yeah it just sounds ridiculously high in low cost of living areas where Fox’s faithful all live.
They really do hear this as “look at this outrageous tax on small business owners” instead of “oh look a living minimum wage - that would be good for Timmy when he graduates high school next year.”
Sure, that’s how we got here, but that’s not even true anymore. The most destitute and depressed regions still have a higher cost of living than the minimum wage would provide.
don’t let great be the enemy of good
I’ll support any increase. I’m just saying that, after it passes, we’re not done.
At the very least it should go up at the start of every financial year by the current rate of inflation.
Or just at every normal year. Fiscal years are a bullshit thing.
Whatever. Pick a day, but do it every year.
my two cents (and if my upvotes are any indication my two cents is worthless) the real problem is that when you raise the minimum wage, you build an opportunity for companies to raise the prices on everything, and then we get into an inflation problem.
Example, my home state can raise minimum wage from 9 to 12 dollars an hour, but that 25% increase in pay would be all the excuse Walmart would need to jack up the prices to cover their loses;
Not saying we shouldn’t have a working/livable wage, but we gotta do something that forces companies to pay the workers more, and the owners/CEO less some how. Like an inverse tax calculation that benefits the company for paying lots of people more, instead of just the few at the time a premium.
I’m sure an economist can explain this better.
Science and reality disagree with your feelings. Do not parrot the disingenuous spam from the oligarchs.
Yeah, but note that if the supermarket pays its employees 25% more, that does not mean that the costs for the supermarket rise by 25% overall, since wages are only a small part of total expenses. The cost of products would rise way less than 25%.
Holy crabapples! Thank you for that link!
Do you also have a paper about the wage increase in things where the price of the employees is a bigger part of the total costs (restaurants, accountants, notaries, etc)?
In a restaurant, the costs of the wages (plus social security and pension payments) are often as much as the costs of the food itself.
This would assume that these same businesses wouldn’t raise prices regardless, which is what they have already been doing, without the wage increase.
A higher minimum wage is how you force companies to pay employees more. There’s no real way to limit ceo pay that they won’t find loopholes for, but you could try to tie the max to some upper percentage of employee median pay
I think a potential solution to CEO pay and inflation, would be to set absolute income tiers for UBI and jobs. Work as a waitress? You get $40k a year, no more or less. Don’t work? Just $10k, plus everyone gets universal benefits such as free food packages, universal healthcare, and utilities. The highest paying job? $100k. This isn’t considering taxes, which effectively turn the $40k to $30k, and the $100k to $60k. This essentially means that a CEO is only twice the income of a clerk, so the market will be forced to set pricing of goods and services to reflect that.
Of course, advocates of malicious capitalism would scream bloody murder, talk about how some people deserve 1,500x the wage of an average person, and so forth.
Bluntly, I hate the excessively wealthy and want their excess to cease existing. They are a distortion that destroys lives. If there are distortions, they should be the kind that benefit EVERYONE. Not just Bezos, Musk, or Trump.
I think especially in New York going after landlords, both housing and commercial, would do a great job at making it so smaller businesses (which New York has a ton of) don’t have to raise prices and to make it so the minimum wage doesn’t have to be as high. That’s why I think his rent freeze policy and whatever else he is going to do against land lords will help a lot.
That’s one argument against, but it’s not proven true anywhere it’s been tested. Shoppers at Walmart have a price point they expect. They can only raise prices so much before sales begin to falter, and their labor costs are not the most significant cost in their stores. Think about how few Walmart employees you see in their massive stores. Real estate, fixtures, even the utility bills are going to outpace the labor increases. Plus, the additional costs are typically offset by the additional sales that happen because everyone has a little more disposable income.
Chain stores and restaurants charge roughly the same amounts regardless of the local labor rates. Things that do affect local prices are the things that affect unit costs, like tariffs, taxes, and transport costs.
You are completely correct that corporations will use any excuse to raise prices, but they’re going to raise prices as high as the market will bear regardless. That’s not a reason to depress demand by keeping wages too low to survive.
You’re not wrong that it can be inflationary, but the inflation has already happened. Besides, productivity is so high these business could afford to pay more with out a price increase, but they want to keep their margins.
Productivity is irrelevant if you sell hours, if a notary works 1 hour they invoice 1 hour most of the time f.e.
The bigger companies and a lot of companies like tech companies will have the margin to increases prices without it hurting their bottom line. But what about the local restaurant around the corner? Or the mom and pop electronic store with a couple people working there. I don’t have an answer to that to be fair.
Then explain the following to me, please:
In the 1960s, families had enough income that they could easily afford food, housing, and much more.
Why didn’t that immediately lead to an inflationary spiral, as you have described? Why did living conditions remain stable for 20 years or more?