Upon inception it was set at $0.25. It is now $7.25.
inflation-adusted, the federal minimum wage peaked way tf back in february 1968 at $1.60 an hour (equal to $13.46 in ‘2022 dollars’).
Might as well use the latest numbers for this comparison. Yes, inflation is still absolutely sucking us all dry.
This is if you actually believe CPI is a legitimate measure, despite the cost of all the big ticket expenses like housing, education, and healthcare increasing 5x or more above inflation.
inflation is still absolutely sucking us all dry.
However, as a side note, inflation is absolutely essential to keep the economy healthy. Most developed countries around the world have a goal of 2 percent inflation. US inflation is currently 3.7 percent before seasonal adjustments.
Edit: Wow. Lots of people here who need to retake Econ 101.
Just when boomers were young (8-23 yrs old) … totally tracks!
Looking at the linked graph, there’s a relatively clear plateau from ‘56 to ‘80 … basically from oldest boomers being age 11 to youngest boomers being age 20. I’m a little astonished at how well it lines up with the whole fucking generation. Literally all of them, from the beginning of their teens to the end of their teens (at least), enjoyed the best minimum wage of the modern age.
It also, interestingly, justifies the seperate categorisation of the Jones generation (born 1960-1966) who were the first to see the steady decline.
The article explains it pretty concisely. Basically the generation between boomers and gen x that tends to get overlooked.
There are lies, damn lies, and then there’s statistics.
Im not here to say the minimum wage doesnt need to be raised, because it does, but another way of putting that is
“The minimim wage has increased 1500% in 85 years.”
That sounds a lot better even though its the same thing.
When I turned 14, I started working for $3.75 an hour. Minimum wage was $3.25 and I felt damn lucky.
I’m 40
I’m 40 and min wage where I was was $5.25/hr if I recall. (Non-tipped job, tipped jobs were lower.) A 1 bedroom in my area at the time was about $700. I remembering being SO damn confused as to why someone working 40 hours on min wage wouldn’t even pay for a 1 bedroom after taxes, much less utilities, car, food, etc. I redid the math over and over again, thinking I must be doing something wrong because school talked all about budgets and stuff…
…but no, school had just failed to tell me that min wage wouldn’t actually cover a real-world apartment in my area.
It was all particularly stressful to me because I was in foster care in a group home as a teen, and I did work and school at the same time and they were prepping for us to go live on our own…and no matter how I did the math, I couldn’t afford a real apartment on my own EVEN IF someone had been willing to rent to me w/out a co-signer.
If you lived in the US, your numbers (and your memory) are absolutely incorrect.
Editing to add info:
Assuming the previous commenter is actually 40 years old and lived in the US, the minimum wage would have either been $4.75 or $5.15 when they were 14 (not $3.25)…
In fact, minimum wage in the US has never been $3.25.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart
State minimums can be different for certain jobs, and certain jobs are exempt from minimum wage and have a lower set wage. Tipped workers are the ones everyone knows about, but farm workers and others are also exempt.
That in no way contradicts anything I said.
The person I was replying to never said they were exempt from minimum wage… They said what they misremembered the minimum wage to have been.
I’m almost 50. It was 3.25 when i started to work at 15.
In about 6 months i was 4.25
I’m about the same age as you and both of you guys are remembering incorrectly.
See my previous comment linked below…
If you do the comparisons in normalized dollars and compare to productivity, minimum wage (if it tracked to the same purchasing power as it did in the 1950s) would be somewhere around $26 in today’s dollars. If you do the same but track to inflation, it would be about $22.
When the wage doesn’t keep track to inflation, it’s not ‘increasing’, it’s a pay cut. When it doesn’t track to productivity, it’s a pay cut out of labor’s part of any growth.
When workers earning suppressed wages compete to buy things like housing, they’re bidding against the class of people that received the share of productivity they didn’t- and when the folks making more bid up prices of those things, it’s a double-whammy of foregone wage + increased cost-of-living.
Do you have a source on that nationally? Because that is very very high in many areas.
Well,
-
If it kept line with productivity Minimum wage would be $26 an hour if it had grown in line with productivity
-
If it kept up with inflation Advocates say minimum wage needs to be higher before it’s indexed to inflation or https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/21/politics/minimum-wage-inflation-productivity/index.html
These sources disagree among themselves if the right number is $21.45 or $26 or $20, they seem to base their analysis on productivity or inflation
Yeah, these numbers sound like a lot in some places, but those places where it ‘sounds like a lot’ tend to be really fucking poorer than necessary. It would hurt them not at all to have the minimum keep up with where it was in 1968 instead of being the output of both major parties in congress agreeing to fuck the working poor
Oh I see my confusion now I thought you were saying PPP against inflation, rather than PPP against productivity. But my point about nationally is that PPP differs based on area a lot, especially in housing. I don’t think comparing to productivity is fair because a lot of the money going to labor from US companies is going to offshoring or into automating jobs away.
Minimum wage here where I am is going to $15.30 oct 1st (Canuck bucks) and I don’t think it’s enough considering how expensive things are nowadays.
I don’t see how someone on minimum wage can even make ends meet in a lot of places. I live in the boonies and rent in my area is stupid, never mind what they’re asking in the city.
They don’t you cannot rent a 1 bedroom apartment on minimum wage in most if not all of America G Z is getting ducked harder than millennials with no end in sight. If you can afford rent you can’t afford luxuries such as healthier foods or decent health care (which ends up costing more in the fire when things go wrong). The inequality of wealth disbursement is the in the US “In the first quarter of 2023, 69 percent of the total wealth in the United States was owned by the top 10 percent of earners. In comparison, the lowest 50 percent of earners only owned 2.4 percent of the total wealth.Jul 17, 2023”. I’m very ecstatic that unions are coming back with force and people are fighting back, but it won’t be won overnight and the 1% are going to kick and claw and fight anyways they can ( look at Amazon using the Pinkertons to union bust). I think things can change, but it’s going to take a massive push on voting for people who actually represent the people and holding our politicians to a higher standard than we are now. Changing legislation such as, putting a limit on campaign donations and having a public ledger of where and who the donations came from (see you matter dark money!), repealing citizens united, getting rid of corporate welfare, extending voting rights (making it a national holiday to force businesses to make sure there is time off for their workers to vote while being compensated, and making sure employers no longer have a say in your healthcare (through universal healthcare) and end the privatization of the whole system, fixing the unchecked police system here would go a long way to making sure that those protesting would not be killed or beaten for exercising their first amendment right and would help us get in the right track to help mitigate climate change instead of the misinformation factory that is the oil and gas industry not to mention the disinformation machine that is alt right driven hate speech (looking at you Fox News for giving a breeding ground for that shit for bowers and Rudolf Murdock that with his media empire has done more to fuck humanity over than anyone is history). I do believe in gen z helping to change things for the better, but they can’t do it alone and it seems like the generations before them have given into apathy and and frozen into inaction by just straight death session and despair about the future.
Just realized I went on a long ass rant, my bad and did not mean to word vomit on you O agree with everything you said . I’ll delete if it gets into the negatives.
i live in the boonies, too. rent used to be reasonable for what i got (a shitty little walk up). it has now more than doubled in three years. all by a new building owner. over the twenty years previous (and three other owners), it went up a whole one time for about 10%.
rents used to be reasonable and stable in this little town, but not anymore. buildings like this are even being pulled off the residential market completely and turned into short-term rentals (they can charge more for a single 3-day weekend rental than they can for a whole month on a residential lease).
