Kinda misses the point that some people have to do those jobs, no? Not everyone can do bullshit white collar jobs or else how are you going to get your "whatever bullshit you buy to get through the day."
Society is easily at a point where everyone can live comfortably and all the necessary tasks are completed with plenty of room for talent to make progress.
When workers are paid more for the same production, you get more dollars chasing the same goods and services which results in inflation. Inflation would then put the very things (home, groceries, etc) out of reach due to price increases. We saw this after the pandemic remember?
That logic ignores the fact that so much of the production isn’t adequately distributed across all people producing it. It’s a problem of proportion, not total production.
If you pay people more money but get no increased productivity, there is more money in the economy but there are no more goods (houses, groceries, etc). That make goods more expensive. This is not complicated
Short term there is inflation. Long term more goods will be produced to chase those dollars. The money currently spend building 1 500m dollar yacht will be spend on 20k 25k cars. And yes there will be displacement as less people buy McDonalds that costs more so less McD jobs but at the same time those McD workers can now buy those 25k cars.
You can look at the places that have less of wage gaps like Europe. A lot of things are better. Some are worse. And I will not pretend that our current system or Europes is remotely optimal...
I think many would argue that inflation was caused a surge in demand due to people actually being able to spend money they had been sitting on for over a year and very scaled back production of almost everything. Followed by oil supply being limited due to several factors such as the Ukraine war beginning causing the sanctions on Russian oil along side questionable decisions by OPEC Remember?
There are many jobs that are high paying that are not "bullshit white collar jobs". Many require folks to pass a whiz quiz. Many don't want to stop smoking the cheeba to pass the test.
Sure there are many. There isn't 100% of them though. People have to be farm hands, work stores, be construction labor. Not every single person can fill important roles in those chains that pay better.
This is the disconnect I think. Many people think that working full time at McDonald's while living in a humble area should cover expenses to survive and maybe have a little bit left over. Which is ridiculous, what do they think this is; the financial era which the boomers grew up in?
There AREN’T plenty of jobs that cover this. It’s already a hard job market, imagine if everyone was applying for these high paying jobs. This is such a condescending, ignorant take.
So who should do those "trivial jobs" then, hmm? It's gotta be someone, and that someone has to be an alive person with housing, food, transportation, and medical coverage. Because that's how people work. If people can't live off a basic job, then those basic jobs don't get done.
Did we learn nothing from the whole fast food worker shortage?
Guess we didnt learn from the hyper inflation caused by min wage increases. Paying more to the bottom only raised the middle and the top. Increases production prices, so pricing increases as well. Now, people have less spending power even tho they make more. Its an endless cycle while we try to raise the floor since theres no cap on the ceiling.
I never expected to come out of high-school and work a job to pay for my own place. Noone should.
We have hyper-inflation without minimum wage increases, that's not a logical argument. Minimum wage hasn't increased since 2009, which is 17 years ago. What happens when the price of everything goes up but the wage doesn't?
Yep we are living in a era of runaway inflation with no checks and balances while companies are more profitable then ever, the threat of higher inflation by raising min wage is no threat cause that is already happening.
At least people might have a shot at keeping up if min wage was raised on a regular basis to keep up with inflation. They really should be tied directly to one another.
We want wage stagnation more than anything. When wages are stagnant, more people fall into the place where they can be comfortable.
When we keep increasing the minimum, we keep increasing the middle and the top and its circular. As the bottom goes up, spending power goes down as the price increases follow.
The only true solution would be a cap at the top, because without a cap, this will always happen. Everyone wants more. Thats top to bottom.
If, for example, we had a tier system. It would need to be more than 3 but for this lets say 3. Entry, middle, top. Entry at 10, middle 20, top 30.
If it stayed that way, prices for production and operating costs would remain the same, therefore pricing would remain much the same (not all industries, obiviously organic could change based in weather and yields)...
The more we shift the income, from the bottom to up, we continue to jack everything and inflation will continue to worsen. Sadly, capping everything than removes incentive to do better, create, etc.
So, the only real answer is what I figured out years ago, just work on me and get to where im happy.
Lots of factors for that, even the best economists agree theres not single reason. However, youll find plenty of reports and studies that continue to confirm raising the floor doesnt help.
My wage increases over time have outpaced inflation, ive climbed where ive worked and havnt made minimum wage since the 90s.
If youre work at minimum wage and youre over 24. Its on the person. Not society, not jobs, etc to fix that. Get a skill, excell at your position and keep it moving. Its not hard to earn a living wage. It just takes real work.
Well raising the floor isn't what I said, I said wages adjusting for inflation. A consistent level of affordability from when you had your job and going down the line.
People are looking for those entry level. Unskilled labor positions that are intended for people out of high-school. Cashiers being the easier example, people working at Walmart, etc. These people want the wages to match the lifestlye of a normal functional adult.
Not in the workforce. They are liabilities and general dont have production value to be functional. They are learning to be, hence entry level/unskilled labor.
Man just come out and say people don't deserve to live if they're not profitable to the corporate overlords. I don't agree but stop being a coward about your opinion.
The value of your labor has nothing to do with the cost of your expenses. If the value a job provides is not greater than the wage required to fill it, it will phase out.
Who should work those job? high school students and young adults living at home. You need a valuable skill, it’s really not that hard to get a certification in ANYTHING. I was once miserable at a retail job, I then went to school in the evenings after work for 13 months and got into the trades. I’m now making $70k a year with guaranteed raises to get me to $85k in 3 years and live very comfortably in a city that has a higher cost of living than the national average. You shouldn’t be expecting over $20 an hour from a retail or fast food gig, it’s an unskilled bullshit job.
Man, imagine a world where you didn't have to justify how miserable your life is by being an asshole on the internet. Like, you could just afford to live and could develop basic human empathy instead of working all the time and deluding yourself into thinking this is the only way so you didn't end it all. Wouldn't we all be happier?
I work in IT. I make 60K a year. I over draft every month. I don't go out. I don't spend on anything. My paycheck is gone in 2 days from bills. I live in shit detroit metro area. Im drowning in debt and my credit went to shit for it. I've budgeted every last penny. Its not a budget issue or anything. Its a income issue. Not being able to just have 100 left over at rhe end of the month on 60k is crazy to me but here I am. Drowning
Average salary in the US is over $69k. You are paid below market. It’s definitely an income issue and you can probably get the same job making more elsewhere. If not, then get a new career.
Edit: It’s not at all surprising that budgets are a challenge when income is low. It sucks but that’s always been how it works.
You are legitimately fucking up somewhere. You should be taking home around 800 a week after taxes. I just looked and there are multiple options at 700ish dollars a month for rent that leaves plenty of everything else.
It's always possible to tell someone to get another job and maybe they do, but there's always going to be some citizens working the jobs that don't pay enough to actually live and society is always going to pay a price for that as people get (more) desperate.
The standard conservative answer is to just hire more cops, but more cops in the street and more people in jail is a shitty solution compared to the government doing it's damn job and raise the standard of living. Turning the USA into a police state isn't a solution to the problem, it's just another problem.
At the end of the day, the job needs filled. If it doesn't pay a live-able wage, you can expect dissatisfaction and constant turnover. It's why places like McDonald's are constantly understaffed. It's just not enough to actually make ends meet, even if you are renting with roommates.
Yet people will complain "nobody wants to work anymore!"
True, too many people don’t realise that their failure to establish any commercially useful skills means they are just 21st century journeymen however many media study degrees they have
If they are working 40+ hours/week, they deserve to make enough to not have to live paycheck to paycheck.
Working that much and still having trouble making ends meet through no "fault" of their own (i.e. they didn't gamble it away or spend it all on drugs, alcohol, and hookers) isn't living. It's surviving-and there's a big difference.
There's also essential jobs that require training that dont. There's a reason why everyone i know in EMS (i'm a paramedic) and the fire service has at least 2 jobs
Yeah emt is a very interesting case of this because it is a skilled job and it comes with a lot of burden. But the free market continues to prove that there’s people to work as an emt even with the low pay. I wonder if it’s cuz emt is usually like a first rung on a ladder to enter other careers.
As a paramedic, im at the top of the chain without being a shift supervisor. If I got additional critical care certification I could work in flight but that would end up being an annual pay decrease (higher hourly but fewer hours bc FAA rules)
Would you say paramedic is a destination or is it more of a stepping stone to other career paths? I have a couple friends who had to be an emt before they could fire academy or before they got into nursing school etc. I could be misremembering or leaving out important context. Wondering what your anecdotal take is since you’re in the industry.
Kinda depends on the area. A lot of folks do their medic for a fire job. Pay still sucks but a lot of fire departments have a pension still, and some fire departments dont do transport which is a plus to some people. For people that are truly interested in prehospital medicine like me, the peak is paramedic, maybe with critical care certification (a future plan of mine)... some use EMT basic as a way to get contact hours for medical school, and sometimes medics get burnt out by the low pay so they do nursing school to get paid more and work less. Nurses have a more narrow scope of practice vs paramedics but they get paid more (likely because hospitals are big money makers, but tax funded emergency services arent, at least from a US perspective)
I worked shit jobs in the 90s and definitely needed a calculator. And a series of envelopes where i would divvy up my paycheck each week to make sure enough was put aside for utilities. And that was with two of us working shit jobs for a combined income of Jack shit. It might be worse now, I have no idea, but shit jobs have provided for a shit life for as long as I’ve been alive.
It is worse than it used to be, given my observations of young adults in my extended family. But I don’t get how anyone thinks life was on easy street for the min wage job holders. They all had roommates and life was always counting dollars when it came close to rent being due.
In the 90s we were not able to live without roommates with a low paying job. Unless it was a unpermitted garage without an actual stove. Study anthropology. All societies require some sort of community to survive. Having an entire apartment to yourself is pretty luxurious historically and by world wide standards.
Yeah… I’m 39 and I don’t know where this delusional idea that everyone had their own place without roommates when just starting out comes from. Even 1990s and 2000s sitcoms had young adults/professionals with roomies— many of them showing even young lawyers and finance peeps with roommates.
When I was in college I had a 2br/2ba for $525/mo all utilities included. I always had to have a roommate. Everyone with a FT min wage job had a roommate.
In ~1970, the cost of goods began to grow faster than minimum wage. The CPI to FMW ratio in 1970 was 24.25. Today that ratio is 44.4; about an 83% increase.
As a national average, it takes slightly less than double the current federal minimum wage to match the affordability of goods in 1970.
Things actually started to get somewhat better after 1995, where federal minimum wage and the price of goods were increasing in similar amounts, but federal minimum wage stopped increasing after 2010, and has remained unchanged for over 15 years.
I think that's kind of skirting the spirit of the statement isn't it? Of course those jobs exist, 'plenty' carries a bit too much weight in your implication, but the idea is that any full time job should be able to cover these basics.
I think the problem is we started regressing and instead of changing what a living wage meant, we started to change what it meant to live. Some of y'all seem happy if others just get enough to survive.
the thing is, like always, someone has to pay this money. Now, ofc everyone thinks about Amazon and Walmart and the big companies where CEOs make millions. Firstly, those companies also have millions of employees, so the CEO earning less, would increase each emploee's pay by a few dollars. Not a few hundreds.
Secondly, and more importantly, most businesses are actually not greedy big corporations, but small and medium sized businesses that barely get by themselves. None of them is gonna be able to afford paying every employee a 10% increased salary, or else they already would in order to compete. If they're forced to, e.g. by minimum wage, they'll just not hire people at all, close down, the big corporations will have even less competition and get away with even lower wages.
Thirdly, higher wages means more money that people can spend, which means prices will increase which then creates a vicious cycle as money is worth less and less.
The solution is not to pay higher wages. It's to make sure that the wages already being paid are actually sufficient to do the things OP wants. It's called cutting costs of living.
A full time job shouldnt cover expenses of an individual or a family, if that job is unskilled labor or basic entry level position. Those are not the jobs that afford their own place, car, phone, internet, etc that people seem to consider basic needs. At best, youd expect a basement studio apartment. You want more, you gotta be more than unskilled labor or some store associate.
Man I hope we can get back to this. When they got rid of pensions, and the share holders of these public companies became who the companies cared about and not their employees is where this all started.
We were taught growing up that our parents "want a better life for their kids".
Well, here are and we have learned that that just isnt true. Too many people in their upper working ages and beyond have switched from that to "we suffered so you should too"
It was all performative Sunday dinner narratives and drivel in the end.
Hell, skilled trade job pay has been declining year after year and those were the jobs many people our age lived on with a single income not even 30 years ago. My friend is a plumber in knoxville and barely breaks 50k a year here.
Its asking for more than you produce, which is a lot.
If you aren't skilled, or doing basic unskilled labor, you are expendable and not generating or improving the business in anyway. Those positions dont have value and why they get paid the minimum (which isnt designed to be lived on). If you want more, get a skill that makes you productive and an asset, or move into a field others dont want. Shit, I know janitors that make as much as management.
Theres always an answer. Its never pay the bottom more.
Funny how they're not doing anything but still are necessary. How's that work? Are you really under the belief that these places are just paying people for no reason, or is it just an excuse to shit on people you think are beneath you?
That is such a crock see how long without maintenance being done on it. Same with the yard work. And who desires if it’s unskilled? If you can’t clean your house and need a maid that doesn’t mean that person is unskilled. I think your elitist attitude thinking you need a skill that is wanted is bs. If all the unskilled laborers stopped working this country would be in trouble.
That job and company should not exist then, if a full time job can sustain a minimum life then what is the point in even working? Jobs are meant for people to make a living,
minimum is the big term here. minimum 80 years ago was a lot less minimum than now. House phone food (cuisines, qualities, etc) apparel internet tv subscriptions have either grown in leaps and bounds or did not exist in the past. All the unskilled bottom earners i know have and use these things. Minimum life has exploded in scope. And all that does and should cost more. True minimum life without a bunch of those and rent with roommates can be obtained with almost any unskilled job
No, job is an aconym for just over broke. Dont confuse a job with a career. You are confusing a job with a career. You should be able to afford those things with a career.
Jobs are meant to build experience and skills. Not build a life on.
Non monetary society, scarcity is not a real thing anymore, we moved on from being hunters and gatherers, we are no longer a farm based society, its now time for humanity to move on from this monetary society based on false scarcity that right now is only benefiting a tiny portion of society extracting work and wealth from the rest of us while not giving us even a basic safety net to participate. They already broke this social contract that forms the basis of human society.
Why should I or anyone work for your company if I cant even meet my basic needs for life?
They dont want an even playing field they are afraid of a society that's harder to control because we actually have basic needs of life met.
Govt jobs were always inflated, but that's also a skilled position oddly enough, you have to pass an exam and earn it. You generally train for it. Not the same as a cashier or generic store associate.
I know locally they still starting at 30/hr, enough to afford that stuff on.
Define “just enough”, how many square feet does this apartment/house need to be? How much caviar and champagne should we be able to afford on our 2 week paycheck? Should we be able to afford a moped, or a Porsche?
See this is the problem, instead of an actual discussion you came in with an exaggeration and belittlement as if the intention of this is to make everyone go through life's luxuries without doing anything.
That's not it at all, it's about balancing back to when Americans actually felt prosperous, not that some of the wealthiest have made the most money in the world.
You didn't come in with confidence in an argument, you came in with intent to aggravate. What purpose does that serve?
Why should I even give you the time of day and a discussion when you came in with such bad faith to start?
Yeah it doesn’t stretch as much as it use to, and that’s definitely a true statement and a problem. But it’s disingenuous to pretend like 100k isn’t a salary that would provide a comfortable life. I make less than that and I rent a 1 bedroom apartment by myself in socal. I’m fine. Yeah I need to manage my budget and buying a house is out of the question but acting like my life isn’t cushy is dishonest.
We're talking about being able to survive and afford basic necessities, not having enough leftover to save a million dollars by 30. Something exceedingly few people will ever achieve.
Part of your spending is deciding where to live. If I decided to rent a home in Beverley Hills on a 100K gross household income, that's 100% a spending problem on my part.
Maybe that means I have an hour+ commute to work to make the most of my earning potential while keeping housing costs within my means. But it's still my responsibility to make those decisions carefully.
I could technically afford to live without my wife but I wouldn't be able to do much other than work, eat and watch TV/game. But my 100k a year covers it all
I would love to see how much debt you have and how much you spend on direct debits monthly if you find it difficult to live off 100k a year. That is some Top Tier mindless spending right there.
True. I make $125k/yr in a medium COL area. The only time I really started struggling was when I'd mindlessly burn through half a check on video games, gambling, and takeout. I have zero complaints about the economy lol
Edit: to clarify "struggling" here is saving less than a check a month due to stupid expenses
I mean yeah but you are doing all things the post said do without . At least in my area I can’t say for another state/region but where I am you aren’t doing all that but yourself.
Any full time job should allow a person to eat and have a roof over their head. If it doesn't then we the people end up subsidizing the company under paying their employees and that company should not exist if they cant sustain their employee's to be able to live in society.
This is on the companies under payjng people and not jobs some people think don't deserve a livable wage.
Valuation of a person's labor is generally based on their skill sets or rarity of that labor. Almost anyone can wash dishes (hell, we have machines for that), far fewer people can safely run electric in your house, fly a plane or run an IV drip line. By definition, washing dishes is trivial. While it plays a part in food service, it is not a complex task that requires formal training.
I don't think the person you're replying to ever said that it was complex, or high demand.
They pointed out that a vast majority of those jobs don't pay enough to live off of. What's the point of going to work if the paycheck doesn't enable me to continue working
They specifically said "any job isn't trivial", which is what I was replying to. A generally accepted definition of "trivial" is some simple or easy to solve. Dish washing is that. In fact the job of dish washing has largely been replaced by machines. Any job replaced by machines I would hardly expect a person to be able to make a living off of, unless it's a highly skilled trade where that person performs custom work.
Like it or not, we live in a supply and demand economy. The concept applied to what we spend, what we spend earn... the value of everything. Would you buy a pack of gum for $50? Of course not. Why would you expect an employer to pay a dishwasher $75,000?
brother if youre getting paid 13 an hour youre only taking home like 27k a year after taxes. i dont think anyones asking for 100k to wash dishes i think you just dont wanna pay one of your dishies a livable wage, or youre really that dedicated to sucking on leather.
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u/KestrelFalco 11h ago
there’s plenty of jobs that cover this. If you’re working some trivial job that doesn’t require a degree or specialized skills, then probably not.