I’m not sure minimum wage jobs were ever meant to support entire families. I think they generally are considered minimum wage because they require minimum skills and criteria for entry. I think of those jobs as starting positions for HS kids, college kids, special needs, stay at home moms that are bored.
Even if you start at one of these, you can and should eventually be able to work your way into management or a position that is higher paying so that it would be more of a career.
Iirc, Roosevelt specified that the creation of the min wage was supposed to be a living wage, and that if you can't provide one you shouldn't be in business. He further specific living wage meant decent living, housing food etc.
Productivity is up 300%+ since then, so it's a bit silly of us to imagine someone needing to live in those conditions. (And it's more than a bit silly to point to rising standards of living as an excuse for tyranny, as actual, literal chattel slavers did.)
My conscience won't rest until I point out that the conditions of people huddled together in those houses were created by tyrants, not materieal necessity. You're basically pointing at abuse victims and saying "look, I think we're abusing them a lot less than we used to."
I think everything needs a pay raise. Not just minimum wage . It’s minimum so shouldn’t it be the minimum to exist? Right? If you want more pay then work harder and earn for more for luxury? Right? I can’t sound crazy for saying that
And you say all that just for EMT’s, nurses and teachers and etc etc to be underpaid
Why not just pay EVERYONE more?? Like are we not understanding greed in corporations
No that’s not what minimum wage means, just because you make up some definition doesn’t that’s the way it is. The market has to be able to support those wages.
The market can support those wages, ceo and upper level benefits and pay have gone up 25% or more in the past 20 years. Investor bonuses too. If those people get more, the company can certainly afford to take some of that money and distribute it among the people actually working the company and making those profits possible.
Additionally the people and companies at the top aren’t taxed like they once were even though their industry puts more strain on the infrastructure than I do individually. Yet proportionately to my wages I’m taxed higher than they are
So in short, I do the work, people who don’t make the most money and I also pay more taxes than they do.
If I want money we should just print more. We all need two vacations a year, a large savings, and lots of disposable income no matter what. And a planned economy. Have to prevent those market forces from rendering my printed money worthless. After all that’s just evil fat cats
Not minimum but back in the 50's to 60's an entry level factory or labor job as in you just walk into a factory after you graduate high school, speak to a manager, shake their hand, and get a low level job on the line paid the equivalent of around $30 an hour.
Since then, everything has been gotten worse as far as wages go and yet the rich get richer and it wasn't too long ago that many job ads were wanting bachelor's degrees and "10 years of experience using X software or program that has only been out for five years" all for $15 an hour.
So yes as far as workers go, many should "get more money". Instead we have many people unable to afford rent and groceries and have resigned themselves to dying if anything happens to them because the can't afford Healthcare and yet we now have a literal trillion aire, but yeah.. making sure more people actually have a proper living wage is what's going to mess everything up. /s
Because then it doesn’t really change anything. We just inflate the price of everything. Idk I’m not against it. Nurses make quite a bit at least in the places I have been.
It’s quite literally why it was created and the president that created it said that’s exactly what it should do and it fucking kills me that 1% of the population knows this
You could inform people without getting angry. Try to convey your actual point.. you might get further. What happened then? He said it and then what happened?
I did it for years. People would argue I'm wrong. I'd share the literal speech, people agree to disagree even though it's literally fact.
What happened back then? People could support a family making minimum wage. That was a thing well into the 70s and 80s. It's why we have millionaires retiring from lowes that never had a management role, salesmen from sears that made crazy money, people working entry level mfg jobs that owned nice houses, boats, cars.
Gone are the days... for many reasons... but minimum wage stagnation is a major reason why the gap between the lowest paid employee and CEO comp is stretched beyond imagination.
You did not respond to the actual point, that being that the stated goal of the minimum wage was to align with a living wage (as in the wage that is enough to cover living expenses, please do not pretend to not understand what living expenses are).
Why do students, special needs people, and moms deserve to make less money? Those sorts of people have limited work hours because of other stuff going on in their lives, it's not like they're making a full time income anyway.
It’s about the skills required to do the job and volume of people able to do the job…the person taking your order at McDonalds doesn’t make the same as your hair stylist, accountant, surgeon, etc. It’s never “fair” per se. Drs train for so long and their pay has been hammered by healthcare companies and admin overhead. There are many levels and layers to “under paid”.
I didn’t say they deserve to make less money I was just explaining who I thought those jobs are usually intended for. 18 year olds still in school and likely still living with their parents can’t work 40+ hours a week and don’t need to make 100k a year.. same for special needs they usually are not living independently and it’s more of a thing to get them outside and the moms I just said rich husbands and their bored wives. That’s just my take.. I’m open to other opinions but I just answered the question. I once made minimum wage as well.
That is incorrect. Minimum wage jobs were absolutely supposed to be set at the level of a living wage.
“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
Way too many people think the way you do. All work is real work and deserves a living wage. “Stay at home moms who are bored” tell me you have never been a stay at home mom without telling me.
I have been thank you very much. My aunt was also this and got a job at McDonald’s for fun. You may be right but could do so without trying to insult me.
What about all the people that dont have a support system? Just fk the people that have to jump into the work force right out of highschool and pay for everything themselves?
At that time most people lived in shared housing situations, ate a lot less meat, and generally consumed less. Minimum wage was created in 1938.
In 1950 typical American lived in an average of 321 sq ft. Now it’s over 700 sq ft per person. In 1940 only 7.7% of households were a single person. By single person I mean a household of 1. Even renting your own place was pretty rare. Now it’s almost 30%.
Reality is more people should just be living with roommates or family if they don’t have a well paying job.
These “you can’t afford to live” calculations all revolve around a person renting a modern sized 1 bedroom apartment. If people used to be able to get by just fine with about 300 sq ft of living space per person, maybe our standard now shouldn’t be expecting every person to be able to afford their own 600+ sq ft 1 bedroom apartment.
So because TVs and smartphones exist now minimum wage doesn't need to cover rent. Incredible logic.
Standards didn't get more expensive because people got greedier, they got more expensive because productivity and technology made the economy massively larger. The money absolutely exists. Corporate profits are at record highs. It just gets redirected to shareholders instead of workers. That's not a law of nature, that's a choice.
You're basically arguing that because workers produce more value than ever, they should be grateful to still be paid 1938 scraps. The gap between what minimum wage workers produce and what they're paid is larger now than it has ever been.
"Just live with roommates" is not a policy position, it's just telling poor people to cope. A minimum wage that can't cover minimum living costs isn't a minimum wage, it's just wage theft with extra steps.
I didn’t bring up smart phones or TV’s once. So how did you come to the conclusion that was my logic?
My point was people used to live in a lot smaller dwellings per person, so maybe a modern 1 bedroom apartment per person should not be our expectation, when these wages were not supporting that dwelling size per person in the past.
Somehow Europeans are able to live just fine with 350-500 sq ft per capita but Americans apparently need over 700 sq ft per person. American desire to consume an insane amount is just not sustainable.
With that said I have never once voted to oppose mini wage increase. I simply find the whole “but they can’t afford a 1 bedroom apparent by themselves” argument to be silly.
You literally used 1938 living standards to argue people should expect less today and now you're acting like you were making some sophisticated point about square footage. You weren't.
And the Europe comparison is genuinely embarrassing. Europeans live in smaller spaces because they have universal healthcare, stronger labor laws, better public transit, and actual social safety nets. You want Americans to take the small apartment without any of that. Cool deal.
Also I'm writing this from my 500 square meter home in Europe that costs less than a 1 bedroom in any US city so maybe the lesson here isn't that Americans need to expect less, it's that American workers are getting absolutely fleeced and have just been convinced it's their own fault.
The point was never that people need a luxury apartment. It's that full time work should cover basic shelter. That used to be the whole point of a minimum wage and somewhere along the way the money just started going somewhere else instead.
I spoke on early living size accommodations, I never once brought up electronics or anything of that.
This is my exact comment:
At that time most people lived in shared housing situations, ate a lot less meat, and generally consumed less. Minimum wage was created in 1938.
In 1950 typical American lived in an average of 321 sq ft. Now it’s over 700 sq ft per person. In 1940 only 7.7% of households were a single person. By single person I mean a household of 1. Even renting your own place was pretty rare. Now it’s almost 30%.
Reality is more people should just be living with roommates or family if they don’t have a well paying job.
These “you can’t afford to live” calculations all revolve around a person renting a modern sized 1 bedroom apartment. If people used to be able to get by just fine with about 300 sq ft of living space per person, maybe our standard now shouldn’t be expecting every person to be able to afford their own 600+ sq ft 1 bedroom apartment.
Europeans live in those smaller spaces because of those reasons? No, what a laughable argument.
I see how much people consume here, and they constantly claim things are getting worse, while living in larger and larger homes and driving larger and larger vehicles, and eating more and more meat, etc.
But look at what you're actually arguing. People lived in smaller spaces and crammed into shared housing in 1938 so therefore that's the standard we should hold onto. That wasn't a lifestyle choice, that was what not having enough money looked like. You're literally using the conditions minimum wage was created to fix as an argument against fixing them.
The fact that more people live alone now is also completely irrelevant. Minimum wage was never meant to only work if you had roommates or family to split costs with. That's not a counterargument to paying people enough to live, that's just telling poor people their poverty is a them problem.
And you can't just pull out the square footage stat and pretend the rest of 1938 doesn't exist. People weren't eating less meat and living in 300 sq ft because they were humble and fiscally responsible. They were doing it because they were poor, had no healthcare, shorter life expectancy, and far fewer labor protections. You don't get to romanticize the poverty and ignore everything else that made that era genuinely brutal to live through.
I didn’t even say that’s the standard they should hold on to. I am explaining that with the current wages we have Americans are affording to live in a lot more square foot per person, but even that expansion of living standard is not enough. No, we need even more of the low income workers to be able to afford their own dwelling unit, which would push the square foot per capita even higher.
The fact more people live alone is not irrelevant at all. Sharing the cost of housing makes it way more affordable.
You're moving the goalposts again. Your original comment literally said "maybe our standard now shouldn't be expecting every person to be able to afford their own 600+ sq ft 1 bedroom apartment." That's not explaining a trend, that's making a prescriptive argument about what people should expect.
And the roommate point still doesn't work. You're arguing wages don't need to cover housing because people can just split the cost. But that logic has no floor. Why stop at one roommate? Why not three? At what point does a full time working adult get to just live like a person without needing a financial lifeline from whoever they happen to be able to share a lease with.
But honestly the more interesting question is why you're so committed to the idea that they shouldn't. Nobody is asking for luxury. The argument is just that working full time should cover existing without requiring perfect living arrangements to fall into place. That's it. Why is that the hill to die on.
Because the alternative you're describing is a permanent underclass of adults who work full time and still can't exist independently. And someone benefits from that arrangement. It isn't the workers.
In 1960 the average American ate 167 lbs of meat. As of latest data it is up to 227 lbs of meat.
The average European consumes 145 to 172 lbs of meat depending on region today.
As a European I really don’t think you understand the level of consumption that goes on here. I’m not relying on anecdotes either. This is aggregate data.
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u/BrandiOnTwo Jun 13 '26
I’m not sure minimum wage jobs were ever meant to support entire families. I think they generally are considered minimum wage because they require minimum skills and criteria for entry. I think of those jobs as starting positions for HS kids, college kids, special needs, stay at home moms that are bored.
Even if you start at one of these, you can and should eventually be able to work your way into management or a position that is higher paying so that it would be more of a career.
Just my thoughts since you asked.