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”.
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.
A one-bed apartment! The lap of luxury! Get three roommates and stop being lazy!
- Sent from my house
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.)
In the 80s we were already on this path to severe underpayment. He was being fucked by the system already, it just wasn’t as obviously destructive so he took it with the lube they provided and said thank you. Now they can’t admit that’s what happened because they would have to admit were/are idiots getting willingly fucked by the business.
bankers don’t give a shit about red team or blue team, they’ve just been stealing from everyone. Good luck!
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.
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.
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.
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.
The whole concept of having to earn your right to keep on living is pretty wild
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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
1/3 of your income for rent is higher than financial experts advise. You should try to keep it under 25%
True, but afaik, basically every place in the US has a functionally, if not outright legally mandated 3 to 1 income to rent ratio.
Occasionally some smaller or more charitable landlords may waive this, or there may be different rules for some specific affordable/elderly/disabled communities, but for the overwhelming number of places, 1 to 3 is either legally required or enforced via industry standard.
If you’ve ever been to a restaurant with a conservative, the way they treat servers like shit is a dead give-away of their political orientation. Conservatives hate working class people.
Do you go out much? Most people treat their servers well regardless of political affiliation. My home town is majority conservative and are all very respectful when eating out.
I worked a career in an almost exclusively conservative line of work after being raised in the red south. I base my assertion on many, many years of close observation, but I admit this is only anecdotal evidence. I’m glad to hear your experience is different.
Would you say your local conservatives also tip well, or do they tip like the vile, sub-human pieces of shit I have observed?
I was a server for years and I don’t know what political views my customers had directly, but my absolute favorite people to serve were tradesmen with their families (at least locally, tradesmen are often assumed to be conservative). They tended to be pretty relaxed and tip well. Those are historically union jobs, and I don’t know if the people working them still vote in favor of worker solidarity, but they still culturally support it, ime.
My least favorite people were also people who are often assumed to be conservative, for what it’s worth: families on their way home from church. They were nitpicky, required a lot of attention, and tipped like shit, plus they often tried to get things comped off their bills by complaining about something on their way out.
I think the key difference is that I grew up in the North. I can’t speak on what everyone did but my conservative friends and any conservative relatives of my friend group were acceptable if not very generous with their tip. In any case, I know this is how politics goes but generalizing your ideological opposition as the scum of the earth isn’t terribly productive or insightful. However, the people you grew up around sound pretty bad and your criticisms of them are much more justified.
I’m drag’s experience, conservatives tip the best. America is falling into fascism, and Americans are the ones who leave massive tips. Civilized countries with leftist labour laws don’t have as much tipping, if any.
Charity is something capitalists invented to get out of paying taxes.
$15/ an hour ain’t shit anymore. $20+ should be minimum.
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.
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.