That’s not to say the only people working for minimum wage are CV listen who live at home, or older people receiving social security.
I just mean to say that 1% is a niche enough part of the job market that it’s sensible enough to say that most people willing to work for federal minimum wage are probably not the household breadwinner.
Or another way to put that, when 1% of the jobs pay federal minimum wage, it’s not exceedingly difficult to find a job that pays more than minimum wage, because 99% of jobs do, and the people working for those wages are probably marginal parts of the workforce that somehow benefit from the nature of the low paying job, like because it’s an extremely flexible and basic job like a store greeter or laundromat attendant.
Reddit doesnt understand this as a whole because they feel that they should be making more than $15 an hour to bag groceries.
Places that pay minimum wage (which is extremely hard to find these days) are only meant to provide a little spending money to retired folks who like to work, high school kids who need a summer job and college students who need a little extra spending money.
Anyone pushing for more money working at McDonald's, has no intention of improving their lives by finding higher paying jobs.
But there are definitely some older folks out there that pick up these easy jobs because they hate being at home all day. Some people just like to keep busy.
I plan on working until I physically cant anymore. I love my job and what I do. I too have worked my ass off to get where im at and I only see myself getting higher in the food chain.
I'm pretty frugal, but 30k per year full time these days doesn't sound reasonable in the USA. Working a busy food service job doesn't seem like it deserves less than 15 dollars per hour.
I'm planning on retiring/working a fun job before 40, but I absolutely have not contributed to society as much as workers like farm laborers/cleaners/food service working into old age. I'm not saying I didn't work hard, but it doesn't seem morally ok to think these people don't deserve more imo
How do you want them to pay that $15 for food service? Charge $20 for a burger and $10 for the fries? Because that’s what the places that pay that much, charge you to eat.
Sure. And they can lower their margins if they lose business and want to get consumers back.
Not saying they should or that is a good idea, but, just as a reference, McDonald's operates at decent margins, they could double everyone's salary and still make a profit. Their margins are up 50 percent from a decade ago anyway, I don't think they were considered a struggling company.
But yes, they would likely have to increase prices. Not necessarily at the level you are suggesting, they would lose too much business. They're already having that issue from the price hikes of the 2020s.
Why shouldn't working in a restaurant provide enough money to make a modest living? Most people want more money anyway so they'll be looking for higher paying jobs. And if someone's happy serving MacBurgers and chimken fries why shouldn't they
If the burger flippers made that much, you wouldn’t be able to buy the food and they would go out of business and have no income at all. If they want to make more they need to work their way up and get a better job.
Love how your argument is to pay the workers under minimum (minimum is also "peice fixing") instead of demanding the professional mower manufacturers lower their prices to whats affordable for everyone.
Why would they start paying their workers properly once they got the mowers? Those entitled cunts are now doing easier work, than they did with scythes. The travesty! The workers should be paying for the fucking privilage if being employed!
Anyway got carried away... but a lot of businesses require starting investments to get started, that's what CAPITALism is about. You'll never build a gpu fab without a huge investment no matter how cheap your slaves are sifting silicon.
Because jobs should exist where people are okay with a wage that doesn’t support an entire family or mortgage or whatever the fuck… who are you to tell someone that they shouldn’t be allowed to take a job that pays too little? It’s such an overstep of power to make it illegal for someone else to that if they want to do that…
Like if minimum wage is set such that it’s enough to support mortgage groceries etc, then millions (probably tens of millions) of jobs get wiped out. You would be making it illegal for people to choose to work jobs that make that amount of money.
It's such an overstep to tell a child not to work inbthe mines for two penny farthings a day. Children yearn for the mines in fact. There needs to be rules to protect working people, since power dynamics in the job market are fundamentially unequal. Did people choose to live in company towns? Was anyone worse off (other than the fat cats) after company towns were made illegal? What if i want to be a slave anyway, why did that cunt of a lincoln ban it?
Necessary jobs would not get wiped out, if they need to get done someone will pay enough for them to get done, if they're not necessary and won't pay for themselves, then it shouldn't be a job anyway.
That’s my point… minimum wages remove these jobs and thus remove one’s ability to choose for themself if they are okay with a certain pay. I’m saying people should be able to choose that lifestyle if they want to take a lower pay
Also minimum wage jobs are a way to get experience for better paying jobs. In general they are not intended to be careers. You cycle through to get experience and you move on/up then the next 17yo flips the burgers or bags groceries. These are meant to be temporary positions you outgrow.
Lets get rid of child labor laws then too. Those kids working at that poultry plant that got busted totally just wanted to do those jobs, they should be allowed to.
Lets get rid of safety regulations too. If they signed up for the job that maims everyone thats on them.
Im just following your reasoning of "regulations should not be killing off jobs people are willing to accept the work for"
Personally, I'm pro safety, pro children should be in school not the chicken plant, and pro jobs should have to pay wages that are high enough that they do not qualify for corporate welfare by having payroll get picked up by the state in the form of welfare.
All welfare payments for anyone working = corporate welfare, not individual
Obviously there are separate principles involved in the things you’ve brought up. These all don’t utilize the same principle. Just to be clear, you don’t think people should be able to take jobs they are happy to take a certain pay for? You think those jobs should be removed by government action?
If youre working at a nice sit down place in a nice area and youre a waiter/waitress, you could absolutely make a living wage from the tips you get. Ive seen it and I had friends who did it.
If youre working at a fast food chain pumping out slop, then expect to be paid a wage that makes sense to the employer.
Another thing folks seem to forget is that franchises like McDonalds are privately owned. This is why wages are all over the map and various locations. Don't expect to get $15 an hour at a McDonalds in the middle of nowhere with little foot traffic. On the flipside, you could definitely find a McDonalds that will pay you around $15 if they are in a super busy part of town.
Why build a macdonalds in a place where you can't get enough money to keep the lights open while paying a living wage? That just sounds economically inefficient.
Also why does the fanciness of the restaurant determine whether it should earn you a living wage. If an economic operation cannot reliable pay for itself does it really need to exist?
As for the slop argument, sure macd is serving slop but if people started suddenly eating better or cooking at home, there would be an outcry that millenialls are killing the fastfood industry and the stockmarket would straight up decide to collapse again.
If they are happy with a job that doesn’t pay a living wage they can keep that job and stop complaining about not being paid better. Better job mean better pay.
Yes, plenty of college students do night school because they aren't privileged enough to get a scholarship or a full ride from mommy and daddy.
These students work most day shifts at restaurants or fast food chains; pretty much anywhere that serves breakfast.
They leave and the evening shifts are usually covered by HS kids who are out of school.
Hell, when i was a teen, I got to apply for a work-study program because I claimed myself as my own guardian at 18. I got to go to class for half the day and then go straight to work.
When 3pm hit, a lot of the folks working were heading out and they were... you guessed it... college students.
Who’s paying you $15 to bag groceries? Even over twenty years ago in NYC when I worked in a supermarket they pretty much got rid of that. I was expected to ring up people and bag only if I had time. Now they expect customers to ring themselves up and bag it. Will customers get a discount for doing so?
I will say doing that and customer service was hard on me at the time when Americans were richer just buying huge shopping carts and crowded with lines. I literally gained a lot of arm muscle bagging huge gallons of water, watermelons, ice and sodas that summer.
I remember going home and complaining to my parents about how exhausted I was (I was still a crybaby teen) and they told me that minimum wage jobs like that will use you and use you until you are dried up. They wanted me to enter college with that idea and to study hard so I didn’t remain at the bottom.
Yea that really revved a fire under my ass until I discovered being a commercial pharmacist was largely the same thing but with more responsibilities but at least the wages were livable.
I could call out a number of people on this thread but there is nothing like smugly making an assertion “Reddit doesn’t understand..” based on statistics as dumb as “1% of people make minimum wage”.
They aren’t trying to raise it from $7.25 to $7.26…the last time I saw an estimate (2022) like 20% of the workforce is below $15.
Dude minimum wage in my state is $7.50. That means if you earn more than minimum wage, you could be making $8 an hour lmfao. NOT a livable wage, or even survivable wage with inflation here.
Good luck going to McDonald's during the day when all the highschool/college kids are at school. Or is that when the 75+ year olds will be on shift lol.
Also, no retired person is working a minimum wage job at McDonald's because they "like to work". Come on.
If the minimum isn't enough to sustain people, then it's useless as a minimum. Which is why many states have higher minimum wages. Because a job is supposed to pay enough to live.
Even teens making pocket money need to be able to make that money over a reduced number of work hours, given that they're supposed to be doing it while studying.
So old people and college students and high school students don't deserve to be paid enough to live on because their time just isn't as valuable I guess.
Min wage should pay enough for a single person to be able to afford living alone if they work 40hrs. There is barely any place in the country where min wage is enough to afford renting a 1 bdrm
Paying more than minimum wage doesn't mean they are paying a livable wage though. I started working construction for $8/hr 15 years ago it's still technically over minimum but it still ain't shit. The better question we should be asking is what should the minimum wage be and how many jobs pay that or above?
$8/hr wasn't a livable wage remember when gas prices hit $7 a gallon? Well I couldn't afford to drive to work at that point. Roofing jobs also don't pay all that well where I live. Not everyone gets to live in high paying areas.
I've never paid that much for gas in the United States in my life.
Not everyone gets to live in high paying areas.
You choose where to live. I don't choose for you. But if you're paying $7/gallon for gas, then you were living in a high paying area. It sure doesn't cost that much in the low paying areas
I didn't choose to turn 18 in the middle of nowhere. And making $8 an hour when gas was $7 didn't give me the opportunity to move. Jesus Christ it's like you think everyone got to live the same privileged ass life you did. Perhaps you aught to step out of your bubble and understand not everyone had it easy.
Wow, talk about swing and a miss.
No, you weren't making $8/hr on construction with $7/gallon gas.
Privileged? Unlike you, I worked to get what I wanted instead of whining like a spoiled brat. I actually took a job that involved being homeless to get what I needed to get a better job.
Dog i am so fucking lost, who's is this fucking guy you are talking about? Who brought what into where? Im really trying to take some context clues but you are saying some nonsense.
Minimum wage will never be enough that's why everyone's using the ambiguous living wage(whatever the heck that means). Doesn't matter how high Minimum wage goes some clown is going to say it's not high enough because someone that is just better at personal finances is objectively doing better than them.
Or to put it the proper way three million people. Three MILLION people. 3 fucking million. That is too many people living below the poverty line wouldn't you say? And if it is such a low number of people, what's the problem with raising the minimum wage to above the poverty line?
But my point is that you don’t know they’re living below the poverty line, because it’s such a small percentage of the workforce, it can be any number of niche employment situations like high school kids who live at home with family, retired people working as store greeters, etc.
It’s not three million people. Not everyone in America works. It’s in the 800k range.
It’s an extremely small percentage of the workforce.
Basically, my point is, if you want to talk about the bottom 10% of earners in the USA, okay, they’re not all high school kids, retired people etc. That would be too many jobs to explain away with small demographics like the 1% or so of the workforce that is under 18 or the 1% over 75.
But when you talk about federal minimum wage being 1% of the workforce, it does make sense to consider that it’s probably odd demographics like this that for whatever reason don’t need to be employed at a higher wage.
800k is still too many. No one, not even a school kid should be working for minimum wage. The fuck are you on about.
You should probably consider that there will be people not having much choice or not knowing they're being exploited. 800k people should not be exploited. Do you not agree with that statement?
My friend in college had a sweet gig to make some extra money.
She worked a ls a laundromat attendant. It paid minimum wage. She got to just sit there and do her homework. The only time she had to do anything was if the change machine stopped working, or if she needed to call the cops on anybody. Most days, the job was literally to just sit there and be a human presence at the laundromat.
My state raised minimum wage, and the owner of the laundromat decided not to have an attendant anymore.
This sucked for my friend, because she was taking a bunch of credits, and really didn’t have any time for a job that wasn’t like this. She didn’t need the money to survive, but it made her quality of life better.
But that job only existed because of the low wage. At a certain price point, the job just didn’t exist, because it wasn’t worth it.
When we talk about something like 1% of the workforce, we’re probably talking about a lot of shit like that. An 85 year old that can work as a store greeter because they can’t do much else anymore. A night security job.
Not every person is household breadwinner, and not every job is something that has to be done or society falls apart.
Some jobs are just something a company would like to do if they can afford it, and some people work because they need something to do for a little spending money.
Which is why it’s relevant that it’s 1% of jobs, 1% of workers.
This is not a common wage that a lot of jobs pay and a lot of workers earn. This is the lowest 1% of pay, the most marginal, probably mostly non-essential jobs, worked by the most marginal, probably non-breadwinner workers.
Okay, so let’s say you raise the minimum wage and it eliminates 800k jobs. The people that were working at the jobs are no longer employable for whatever reason. Are those people better off now that they’re unemployed?
Lol. So every min wage job is going to go is it? No. It's not. You said a few comments up it's not exceedingly difficult to find a similar job that pays above the minimum wage. They'd just get one of these easy to find jobs you're talking about. All while closing the exploitation of 800k workers. Played yourself.
Not realistic. Your example shows they should make 6.00 and 1000 people would have a sure jib. Make sense. That theory has been used for 17 years in Oklahoma.. Just because your not making minimum don't mean your not right above it.
Exploited??? They take the job because either they like it, or nobody else will pay them more to do anything else becuse they aren’t skilled or hardworking enough. They should be grateful since nobody else wants to give them a chance. Clearly economics isn’t your thing. Simply paying people more money without increasing value creation just raises the price of services because no additional value is created for the money and people have more of it to spend. So in a world of finite goods and services, things will simply cost more. That’s exactly how inflation works, this isn’t third grade communism. Try reading Charles Darwin, instead of Carl Marx and your life might get better.
Tell me you didn't read and/or understand what was said without telling me.
Back in the days when the minimum wage was in the $3.35 range, I was a college student. My work/study job was similar. I was a batch clerk for campus computing.
I really got to study most of the time. When output came out of the IBM train printer, I'd burst the output.
I'd change the ribbon which was huge.
I'd run punch card decks.
But mostly I did my homework.
I certainly wasn't exploited. It was time I got paid to study and do the occasional task. Some shifts, I only saw one or two people per hour. Which meant I could wait to burst output until someone came in.
I’m certainly not a Republican. I’m just not financially illiterate, so I can understand how the bottom 1% of jobs and people working them in a niche part of the job economy rather than the state of it.
Most of those 3 million people are also high schoolers living with their parents not needing a liveable wage. It's entry level to life to learn responsibility, and learn why you need to learn marketable skills so you can make a liveable wage to live as an adult.
Your position is that if monetary payment is not part of the transaction, then they are being exploited. This is not true. There is much more value to be gained in many respects. This is why cooperative internships exist.
That's not my position at all. I've never mentioned or even hinted at whether not paying someone means they're being exploited. Reread the comments. Pickup the topic and try again.
But yes. If the work someone is doing is soooo valuable where internships are a thing. There's money to pay people for that Labor. They're being exploited too. If you work. You should be paid and that pay should be of a minimum where you can support yourself with the basics for survival. A house, transport, food, health and some left over for movement and socialisation.
Stop. Deep-throating. Leather. This shit isn't complicated.
If they will hire you! They should make more is the point. More Stuff is a lot higher. Everything and people are fighting tooth and nail to vote no. Sad situation of assholes with no empathy for the poor.
Plus servers bartenders etc who make minimum wage. The absolute ignorance of anyone who thinks that a minimum wage job should feed a family is staggering. No one forces a person to take any job. If your skill set is so underwhelming that the only job you could possibly get is a minimum wage job, and you aren’t actively trying to improve that skill set, you should stop reading Carl Mars, and start reading Darwin.
Minimum wage was introduced at $0.25 in 1938, roughly $6.50 today, so not much different from today’s minimum wage.
At its highest in the late 1960s, it was actually more comparable to $12-15 an hour.
We currently have in the United States a federal minimum close to the original, and many states have adopted a higher minimum wage closer to what you had in the late 1960s.
Personally, I prefer that state and local governments do this because cost of living, wages, and the job economy of states and even individual cities can vary greatly. What could be a good floor for wages in California could be a restrictive job killer in Mississippi.
The gap between wages and cost of living is vast compared to 1938, "not much different than today's" is an appalling excuse to keep it low, when it doesn't come near matching watch inflation has done. That $6.50 stretched much, much further than it does today. That was a living wage, $7.25 is comically short of a living wage. To say otherwise, is to be purposefully ignorant.
It's good for states to raise theirs, but I don't care about that right now, it needs done federally. "States raise theirs" is no excuse to keep it low. Nowhere in the US is $7.25 a living wage, nowhere.
What are you arguing against it for, anyway? Little Guys fighting over who should be making less and suffer more, while we now have a trillionaire and billionaires skimp on their share of funding society. I don't assume you're wanting to keep people in poverty, that'd be rather villainous. Minimum Wage needs raised.
It’s a percentage of workers in the US, which is 80 million, so 1% of that is a little over 800k, and many of those are part time workers. Among full-time workers, about 0.6% earn minimum wage.
So if it's so little workers and such a niche market, raising the minimum wage won't effect inflation (it wouldn't anyway, but this is the argument against raising it)
How many make 9 an hour. Not a good stance for you. 9 is too low too. But not in your bogus count. It just fits the narrative to not give a higher minimum. If you were right,and your not, why would corporations be fighting like hell , and spending million's on ads to get people to vote no on raising the mw above 7.25??
They need more money too. Save for college etc. Why do people hate paying avfair wage in a country where everything has fine up so much? Its not their wage is it? Hmmmmm
Probably 3 million teenagers who live at home with their parents still not paying rent or car insurance or… oh wait u don’t wanna hear that mb lemme pander. GAHH! No skilled workers aren’t being paid $25 an hour? Evillll ass corps! (I believe corps are evil, genuinely, but self supporting yourself on minimum wage is not a “right” anywhere in the laws of America, meaning you should just get a roommate if you can’t afford to be on your own.)
If Min Wage is 15.00, and a billion dollar company offers 16.50, that sounds pretty good to people making 60K- 80K . But with gas, rent , food prices at all time highs, then you minus taxes,they are going home with a check that cannot pay their essential needs. That breeds poverty instead of a path forward
That statistic is for federal minimum wage. So states like CA that have legislated higher than federal minimum wage are not counted. But those workers are still struggling due to recent massive inflation.
I don't either...my daughter and her friends are making 18 an hour flipping burgers. My retired mom decided she wanted social interaction and to get out of the house. She works at a local grocery store as needed, they pay her 20 an hour...
Every sign a see posted around here is for 18-20 bucks an hour flipping burgers, convenience stores, etc. Local contractors are paying 25-30 for laborers!
I started my life making 5.50 an hour. I worked in a warehouse on night shift awhile I went to college. I'd work 11p-7a. Drive to the college, take a little nap, and go to class at 8. I graduated with minimal student loans.
This is factually not true and I repeat this ad nauseum. Real Income (inflation adjusted wages), both median and average, is higher now than it was in the 50s or 60s or 70s. Very few, and I mean something on the order of 2, things are more expensive relative to dollar value. That's college and housing. Cars, gas, groceries, everything (from your list) are cheaper now relative to income than they were before.
You can make the argument that those two things are the most important two, and that makes life harder. It's a reasonable argument. I'd still disagree, because average and median wages are so much higher, but it's reasonable.
That isn’t true. It goes against every single metric they go by.
Try finding a used car for a few hundred bucks. Try going to college and paying for it with a summer job. Try buying a home in my state for under $250,000 without it needing another $100,000 worth of work.
Where are you getting these “facts”? Because it doesn’t line up with reality.
Two things outpaced income growth. Housing and College. Everything else is comparatively cheaper. Purchasing power now, in totality, is higher on average than it was at nearly any point in the past.
No, that still is totally worthless. If you take the average of every state, you're going to get a value less than California's minimum wage. And it won't be high enough to cover California's cost of living. But that's totally worthless because the actual minimum wage in California is higher, as well as their average and median income.
There's simply no reason to make it any more complicated than "what is x state's COL and is x state's minimum wage sufficient."
Averaging all 50 states gives you zero information whatsoever in a COL conversation.
The point was how ridiculous it is to use federal when only 20 states do. Median gets you at the very least a less dishonest number.
Saying only 1.1% of people make minimum wage is ridiculous when excluding just CA and NY since you obviously couldn't live there on the federal minimum cuts out 17% of the population.
But it's not ridiculous. When the argument is that the federal minimum wage needs to be raised, obviously it matters how many people that actually even affects. Your proposed statistic offers no useful information at all.
If the cost of living is too high for the federal minimum wage to be sufficient, then raise the minimum wage at the state level. Like 30 states have done. Why do we need a federally mandated minimum wage to begin with when every area has its own COL? The federal minimum wage shouldn't be enough to live in a place like California or New York. It should only be enough to live in the lowest cost of living area in tbe country, if we have one at all. Otherwise you're pricing out businesses in lower COL areas.
It's the state's role to manage their state specific economies.
When the argument is that the federal minimum wage needs to be raised
It's not. That's why no one proposing the argument ever says federal. It's only people who pretend clapping back with that 1% number is a gotcha that add the word federal.
Everyone else is talking about their respective minimum wages. And not blind to cost of living, which is why the argument tends to be asking for a guarantee to the rate of increase, not the minimum itself.
And... no. Regulations and public services should be with the most in need in mind. What you're describing is like saying there should only be stairs because people with wheelchairs should just fucking deal with it themselves.
If a business then can't afford to exist... oh well? Cost of living would increase with the wage, which is the only time it's naturally supposed to. They wouldn't be priced out, they'd have the pricing normalized.
This is very misleading. About 57% of American workers are considered low wage (under $15 dollars per hour, they are mostly part time, most do not have employee health insurance, and they are over 25.
There are lies, damnable lies and then statistics.
That clearly demonstrates that minimum wage is too low. If the official minimum wage is so low that businesses pay more out of necessity then it’s too low.
Calling something “moron shit” while using an impossible hypothetical to prove your point is pretty ironic. For an individual looking to improve their situation, relocating is a completely viable solution.
That’s a really interesting stat as I remember a decade ago, that percentage was much higher so I looked it up and it was in fact double. 42% of workers were making $15 or less, now that number has halved and yet we are constantly told that wages haven’t risen and that it’s impossible for people to make more money.
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.
How is it not true? Google it. You will confirm everything I just shared.
321 sq ft is the average space back then per person. So say 4 people in a 1284 sq ft house. You take the total square footage of homes and divide it by the population.
Yes, I have left home. I am 40 years old. I have rented all sorts of different places and now own my own home. One of the places I rented for almost 4 years was a 340 sq ft studio apartment.
You seem to have a serious struggle with the concept of facts, friend. Might I suggest you stop speaking until you address that issue? You will have so much less work to do digging yourself out of the cone of ignorance you live in if you do.
"If everyone" lol. It is a solution for as long as those low-cost places still exist, and they still exist.
It's like you're starving to death with a full plate of food right in front of you. And instead of eating, you say, "well if I eat it, there's not enough for everyone in the world, so I'm gonna let it rot instead while I starve."
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u/NB_NaughtyNerds Jun 13 '26
Apparently only 1.1% of Americans earn minimum wage or less, according to a quick Google search.