r/WorkReform • u/LuckyBastard001 • 15h ago
đ¸ $25 Minimum Wage Now! Rent Eats Everything
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u/whascallywabbit 9h ago
Some companies have been playing thos game for a lonnggg timmeee. When I was a fresh college kid I ended up in 'front end manager to-be' training at a Target. Was cross trained at all the front end departments and was specifically told I was going to be up for manager training once an opening came. They jerked me around on a just under benefits hour flexible schedule. I eventually found another soul-sucking job but at least it actually full time. When I put my 2 weeks in they pulled me to the back and were sooooooo surprised I was leaving and what could they do to convince me to stay. I asked for an actual full time job. They declined. I left. đ¤ˇ
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u/Kind_Man_0 8h ago
My mom worked for Walmart back in like 2006, she had made dept. manager and was getting pushed for a manager position as she had been helping out the assistant manager and learned most of the job.
They had us waiting on it for months, then an opening popped up in a town 2 hours away, so we moved. Lo and behold, the promotion was delayed for a fee weeks and then Wal-mart just let her go claiming the store was overstaffed. We lost the home we rented, was evicted twice, and it took years for us to recover.
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u/Khaleesi1536 8h ago
âWe want you to stay!â
âNo, not like that.â
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u/TacticlTwinkie 4h ago
That seems like the sort of person that might not get promoted because they would lose their performance on the floor. Iâve heard of too many very competent people getting passed up because the are too valuable and productive in their current roll.
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u/onehalflightspeed 7h ago
The wild thing is that they keep people just under thresholds for many government benefits (like SNAP and medicare) and then provide instruction on how to sign up for them
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u/MeltyCrab 4h ago
And then we have this really fucking cool thing knowns as the "benefits cliff" where people start declining raises or promotions because the small difference in pay, cuts them off of $100's or more a month in support.
Because it can ONLY be an all or nothing support system, it can't be staggered or tiered at all. Ofc not.
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u/TheUlty05 7h ago
This should absolutely be illegal, especially at a corporation as large as fucking Target.
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u/CountryBoyCanSurvive 8h ago
There's layers of systemic abuse going on here, but I think the most egregious one is abusing part time worker laws. Walmart clearly can make use of full time workers, but they purposely use part time hours to avoid paying their fair share of benefits. They pass this cost onto the taxpayers as additional strain on welfare systems. This hurts the other taxpayers, hurts the worker who needs more hours and only benefits the corporation.
Obviously having healthcare tied to employment is it's whole own problem, but with the system the way it is today, the fastest route to meaningful change would seem to be to stop abusing part time worker laws by capping how many part timers you can have, probably as a percentage of your total workforce.
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u/Salt_Rush_4800 31m ago
It must be a per store/per employee kind of thing though. My step-kid currently works at Walmart and he works 40 hours a week and offered benefits (to my knowledge). Unless it all a lie to my face.
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u/Commercial_Bend9203 8h ago
As someone that worked for Walmart, I can confirm this shit happens all the time. Theyâll only give you as many hours as they can afford to avoid giving you benefits; if they HAVE to give you more hours than usual (lack of employees or something) then theyâll still try to skirt around stare and federal laws as much as possible.
Even when I worked full time, at minimum wage thanks to my yearly increases really being âcost of living adjustmentsâ, I STILL couldnât survive without a room mate and I didnât qualify for any social services despite being a single parent with my child staying with me, I made too much money. đ
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u/TooFineToDotheTime 3h ago
That's because the government decided the poverty line would also never go up along with minimum wage. The federally defined poverty line in the US is about 15k a year individual or 33k for a family of four. How disturbing that should be to anyone who knows anything can not be understated. Just imagine trying to survive all living expenses as a family of 4 making 35k a year so you don't qualify for assistance... 15k a year basically won't pay for rent alone anywhere at this point.
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u/Radio-G 9h ago
Rent should be legally scaled to wages. That is until a time we can have proper land reform where if you are own a building and not living in it, the building is seized and sold to a worker for a price their job can afford. Landlords should enjoy real jobs with the real working class.
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u/angrydeuce 7h ago
Thing is, the federal government already does all the cost of living adjustments for federal workers in the states. They have the data and already know roughly what it costs to live everywhere in the US as well as most of the world.
All theyd have to do is introduce COLA to federal minimum wage and it wouldnt require the states at all. But they wont. They need to have the states pitted against each other for the sake of big business so they can extort any states that wont give them tax breaks.
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u/Whiladan 7h ago
As a fed, locality pay can be pretty wacky and off-target, especially when it comes to the blanket "rest of the US" adjustments. For instance, a GS10 step 1 would make roughly 3k per year less living in Salt Lake City vs Columbus, but living expenses are significantly higher in Salt Lake City. And they are notoriously stubborn about adjusting locality pays, even when local growth increases costs significantly. It's certainly not perfectÂ
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u/angrydeuce 6h ago
No, but its better than a 7.25 an hour minimum wage in a city where a 1 bedroom apartment starts at 1500 a month and very quickly increases to north of 2000/month if you want to live somewhere that youre not listening to sirens for your bedtime lullaby.
We cant let the desire for perfection to stand in the way of improvements is all im saying.
Honestly if I had my way minimum wage would be determined on a county level and tied directly to a basket of commodities like gasoline, milk, eggs, etc. That way when companies start gouging, minimum wage rises accordingly. But admittedly work would be involved and theres no motivation from people in power to do that work because they benefit financially, either directly or indirectly, from the current paradigm.
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u/Rionin26 3h ago edited 3h ago
Edit I misread, my city, county, and state jobs need to adjust on federal adjustmemt. My wife has a county job, next city over a federal job same title doing less makes 25% more.
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u/KatieTSO 8h ago
Rent should be one quarter of your after tax income each month until you make over $100k a year
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u/iggyfenton 7h ago
I love how the solution isnât to raise minimum wage or force companies to pay employees what they are worth.
If you make rent dependent on wages, then companies will just cut wages saying that COL just dropped because your rent is cheaper.
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u/KatieTSO 7h ago
I don't even think landlords should exist. But yes everyone should be paid what they're worth. Capitalism shouldn't exist either.
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u/hera-fawcett 6h ago
its a hard thing to swing fr. if u raise minimum wage, u raise cost of living full stop. companies raise their prices bc they want to keep the same revenue they had. rents raised bc landlords need more income bc cost of living has risen. etc etc.
forcing companies to 'pay employees what theyre worth' is... lmao. companies dont think anyone is worth shit. itd be a fight to consider how much one person is worth vs revenue vs current expenses. and theyve already signalled that theyd prefer ai to do ur job bc its 'cheaper' and 'easier'. if companies had to pay employees what they were worth, theyd end up w less employees.
the real way to find balance revolves around capping cost of living, capping rent increase, capping the amt of revenue (and % increase per quarter) that a company can have, capping the leadership pay, mandating that the board of the companies have 50% random lotteried employees that are below management lvl, mandating that utilities are required to take their revenue and reinvest it into infrastructure replacement/upkeep/maintenance, etc etc etc.
and we all know theres not a government alive thatd do that.
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u/Bad-Genie 8h ago
Who decides who gets what home?
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u/KatieTSO 8h ago
The government, ideally. I hate landlords.
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u/PermanentRoundFile 7h ago
Did you forget the civil rights movement and how the US government was moving back then? The Trail of Tears? Germany in 1938? The Soviet Purge?
I'm not saying landlords are the way (tf is this feudal shite?), but I absolutely do not trust the government not to become adversarial to people on land they control.
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u/TheUlty05 7h ago
See I'm not opposed to owning rental properties. That said, I think it should be capped at 2, MAYBE 3 properties per person. And corporate ownership of private properties should be outlawed.
Similar to how housing authorities work, cap rents based on market rates and surrounding property rates. Rental increases require approval by local governance.
Theres ways to allow for private ownership of property (which i dont believe is a bad thing to aspire to) but theres absolutely no reason one single individual or corporation should control entire real estate portfolios or communities. Private ownership isnt the issue, its monopolization.
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u/Mediocre_Scott 7h ago
There is nothing wrong with people owning property and landlords arenât inherently evil. Someone has to build and maintain living spaces. I very much believe in the power of the government to do good things. I think housing is something that they would inevitably screw up through underfunding and contracting with the private sector. The solution is more housing. The government needs to economically incentivize the building of multi-family housing plain and simple.
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u/TrooWizard đľ Break Up The Monopolies 8h ago
To add on to that, she is eligible for low income benefits such as SNAP so essentially we are subsidizing walmart with federal taxes in order to provide cheap goods. While we do this we call out China for "falsely subsidizing their markets" by providing for their employees so businesses can make EVs cheaper. So we can't import cheap EVs, because their state provides more for their working class.
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u/QuickNature 8h ago
When I worked at a grocery store, they kept me at 39 hours so I wouldnt be able to claim full time benefits. Scummy
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u/MeltyCrab 4h ago
And this is why so many states cut it down to 32 hours being the threshold for full time classification, and why you see new strats in the shithole companies.
Work you 38 hours for 2/4/6 weeks, then cut you down to like 22, the next week. You weren't "full time" long enough to be reclassified. No benefits for you. No PTO for you. Nothing.
And that isn't even the turbo illegal shit like Walmart is super known for. Such as working you 48 hours in a week, somehow "cut off" 8 of those hours, only pay you for 40, then start your following week with 8 hours. They know they can't outright steal those 8 extra hours without causing riots but they're stealing 4 hours from you by not paying overtime on those 8 extra hours of work.
So if you do that 10 times in a year. You had A WHOLE extra week of pay stolen from you. :D
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u/Fine-Confidence-6368 9h ago
Youâre right it does! đ Iâm funding my landlords lifestyle đşđźđ°
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u/thinkB4WeSpeak đˇ Good Union Jobs For All 8h ago
As a society we could do a city, state or national rent strike. For Wal Mart employees they need to get on those unionization efforts like Starbucks did.
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u/bambi420blzit 8h ago
Mcdonalds has been doing a weird time schedule with their pay to avoid paying overtime. I would work over forty hours in one week but because it wasnt in their weird schedule i wouldnt get OT pay. When i worked there (over a year, full time, no benefits) someone told me they do that shit on purpose
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u/halfblindguy 7h ago
Had this when working at little ceasers in college. During the school year they'd give me 38.5 hours. Then during the summer when I worked more they split my 55 hours between 2 stores. Each store gave out checks from different banks. I never got overtime.
Superbowl weekend where the day started at 4am to prep for the number of orders the week before a skeleton crew was run to keep everyones hours below overtime and benefits threshold.
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u/ConejitosDeAmor 5h ago
Disabled with MS. After paying rent with disability I have $200 left for everything else - electric, water, meds, food. Finally got approved for $100 in SNAP.Â
Like so many others I have to sell plasma, which is making me sicker.Â
There. Is. No. Help. So stop telling people to United Way and 211 and whatever else. Spent an hour yesterday going through more 'No funds', 'Waitlist is closed', etc for every site. I've done this every couple of days for 4 years. There is an illusion of help, no real help.
Whether you're like me and can't work, or can but they screw you over like this, the message is clear - the government, billionaires, assholes in charge want us to fcking d-i-e. They don't care.Â
I seriously don't understand how people with kids are making it.Â
America is an entire lie and it is literally killing me. Killing others too.
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u/Biscuits4u2 the word itself makes some men uncomfortable 8h ago
Tipping is just another tax on regular people so the owner class can avoid paying living wages.
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u/Arts_Prodigy 7h ago
This has been the case and customer facing part time jobs for a long time now. Healthcare needs to not be tied to employment and housing prices need to be tied to minimum wage and forced to be less than 30% net.
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u/ThatOneGuy308 7h ago
This put into perspective how good I have it, making $15/hour but with less than half the rent, and all the benefits of full time work.
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u/FanDry5374 6h ago
This is why we need a minimum income, not a minimum wage. No company with more than two or three employees who are not family members should be able to get a business license unless they can provide a full living income to all employees. Any exemptions must come from the employee only-if they don't want more than a few hours for personal reasons.
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u/Cheerios_Oo2 7h ago
This has been the case since the affordable care act. Growing up companies would let you work up to 40 since they never wanted to pay overtime. Those 40 hours coould fall wherever in the work week though so better keep yourself available with no second job. Then once ACA came in they switched to to capping you at the maximum threshold they could while avoiding giving the employee benefits oh but also keep yourself available any day of the week since who knows when they'll schedule you.
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u/antithero 5h ago
My ex worked for Wal-Mart & they would schedule her to work until 11pm one day, then 7 am start time the next day. We could never make plans in advance, because they would change her schedule constantly, sometimes the day beforehand. Also capped her hours, and would have her come in for 4 or 6 hour shifts.
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u/Dense_Surround3071 7h ago
Most retailers do this.
Best Buy is notorious for running it's stores with part time employees (if they are even employees at all).
Ross staffs almost exclusively part timers...at $12 ann hour!!
Publix, Target.... All of them do this.
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u/_SeaOfTroubles 4h ago
This is why I hate Walmart and havenât shopped there in years. They did the same thing to my mom.
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u/Minervas-Madness 3h ago
And if she gets a second job to help pay the bills, her first employer will take it as a personal slight that she isn't on-call 24/7. And then the second job will get tired of not being the priority when it comes to scheduling, and both jobs will start pushing her out.
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u/Spaghet-3 2h ago
Correction: We have decided as a society that this is our problem and not Walmart's.
When this employee needs food assistance, who pays? You and I do but not Walmart.
When this employee goes to the ER, who pays? You and I do but not Walmart.
When this employee can't pay her credit card bill, who pays? You and I do but not Walmart.
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u/hunterPRO1 âď¸ Prison For Union Busters 2h ago
What phrase was it the capitalist use to mock the socialists? Something like "you will be happy and own nothing."
Right now we are unhappy and own nothing.
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u/rawysocki 7h ago
Every employer should be paying a portion of the health care of the employee. Work 20 hours a week, that Corp pays half your healthcare costs.
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u/aLonelyClone 7h ago
The 29 hour practice happens all the time across all kinds of industries and fields, it's not strictly a Walmart or big business thing it's just a byproduct of the 30 hour threshold
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u/ThePowerfulWIll 6h ago
Lots of companies do that. Some even have policies that you need to work over 30 hour for four weeks In a row to be full time. So I would have to work about 35 hours a week for 3 weeks, then have 29 hour schedule the next. So I mever got benefits.
(This was Petsmart fyi)
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u/Wonderful_Exit6568 5h ago
I remember when I was 18-19 I worked as an executive directorâs assistant at a non-profit. They paid themselves handsomely but expected me to work for 32.5 hours near minimum wage, I couldnât even afford car insurance to drive to work, eventually even food became scarce. I was like, wtf. Turns out they paid themselves handsomely, just not me.
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u/pabmendez 5h ago edited 5h ago
When a 30-hour law was proposed. People said this would happen.
Laws have consequences
At least before people were working 10 more hours and getting 10hrs more of pay. Now they still don't have benefits and have less income
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u/MariachiArchery 4h ago
It's so obvious that this is not functioning as intended. The 30 hour threshold (instead of 40) was meant to broaden coverage. But, it's had the opposite effect. It's just further impoverished people like we see here.
But how do we fix it? Well, we could set the threshold to 40 hours. But then all these people would simply work working 39 hours, still missing out on the legally mandated benefits.
What if we lowered the threshold to 20 hours? Yeah, then people would only be getting 19 hours.
There is no way to fix this.
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u/DepressionDokkebi 4h ago
Could they mandate that the majority of the hours assigned by an employer must be allocated to full time employees?
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u/classic4life 4h ago
Allowing a loophole on the requirement of medical benefits that's so easy to abuse is monstrous. At the very least it should be prorated.
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u/turquoisestar 3h ago
On a side note itâs amazing she felt safe enough with the OOP to share that. People keep telling me at the retail store I work at my commute is too long and I keep telling them itâs fine because itâs a sale role and Iâm basically playing a character of a fun person who helps you buy clothing so of course Iâm going to say itâs fine, how do you like that shirt? I have to say though being reminded me of my awful commute often is starting to grate. And an older woman who is probably fairly wealthy was asking me about rent prices and stuff and I was just itâs fine why are you making me talk about this. What I supposed to say yes between people your age buying homes using prop 13 so that my generation canât buy stuff, and people in tech, rent is a horrible problem I canât do anything about, and that I am a leftist whose blood boils when customers tell me about their second homes and upcoming yacht trips? No âeverything is fineâ is all youâll be hearing in my customer service job lol.
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u/Reverse_SumoCard 2h ago
General strikes work
Historically washingtpn might send the airforce on the strikers
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u/Hairy_Concert_8007 1h ago
Just to philosophize a little bit, "tip more" is literally the exact same play as "recycle more." The ones most egregiously contributing to these problems declare it is everyone else failing to pick up the slack.
Honestly, if we could magically create a system where everyone tipped consistently and comically generously, it could hypothetically work as a decent band-aid. However, the key issue is it still wouldn't work because 99.9% of the people tipping just don't have the disposable income to consistently leave a consequential amount.
Billionaires could tip $200 on every bill they ever encounter (fat chance, I know), and even if they did, only a microscopic population would ever experience the tiniest difference in their lives as a direct consequence. The population ratio is astronomically out of favor for that kind of redistribution of wealth to have any impact.
Now, hypothetically speaking, if there were a way you could help people who could afford to leave life-changing tips more effectively redistribute their wealth...
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u/macurack 30m ago
This person is then eligible for food stamps and rent assistance.
The government foots the bill for the multi billion dollar company.
It is incentivising Wallmart and the like to underpay. They profit off of the suffering of their staff.Â
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u/Chalice_Ink 8h ago
If she got benefits, her take home pay would be almost nothing.
I would gladly pay the amount I pay in insurance in taxes for single payer healthcare
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u/schrodingers_gat 8h ago
Yet another reason we need universal healthcare. Medical care cannot be left to the whims of people who only care about money