It seems that minimum wage is not, in fact, supposed to support a person 100%, not especially a family.
People should not aim to remain at minimum wage long, but use it as an entry point for somewhere better.
One solution gaining some attention is UBI. What are your thoughts on it?
Keep in mind that minimum wage jobs often make it hard to actually get 40 hours. You'll be lucky to get even 20 a week. And they rotate the schedules so that your hours are different every week, which makes it incredibly hard to get a second job.
[0] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
In the US, minimum wage is defined as “the least you can pay anybody for any reason” with an exception for people who receive tips. As I understand it, some countries allow some people to make less than minimum wage.
I’m not entirely sure what the current point of the minimum wage is. The original idea was that it didn’t apply to everybody and was meant to make businesses less likely to hire people who were covered.
The minimum wage is not, and never has been, defined as “what an average worker should get for average effort.”
I agree that the average worker should have enough to live on, but I don’t see any connection between that and the minimum wage. People here are complaining about using “edge cases” to keep the minimum wage low, but by definition (“minimum”), the minimum wage is an edge case.
What if a 60 year old is feeling lonely and wants to be a greeter or lecter or something, more than they need money, but it is definitely not worth minimum wage for 99% of places to have such a job? Right now, these old folk and businesses are out of luck.
Why do you think money is the only operative thing here, or the only one ever possible, for all possible jobs for all possible people?
The sheer amount of work you exclude when you require all jobs to be livable is huge. Not everyone is trying to strike it out on their own. Some people want to help in small ways and are fine with commensurate pay. Why force these jobs out of existence? Are you sure doing so is solving the problem you want to solve, while creating no others?
And if their parents haven't kicked them out of the house already because they got pregnant too early.
Or have a sexual orientation that their parents don't agree with.
Or..
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
what makes you think this is the typical minimum wage earner?
Minimum wage is the least you can pay anyone for any reason. It is, by definition, an edge case.
bls: https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2018/pdf/home....
> Although workers under age 25 represented only about one-fifth of hourly paid workers, they made up just under half of those paid the federal minimum wage or less.
that means just over 50% of minimum wage earners are older than 25 (well outside the typical age where you're still living with your parents or just entering the workforce)
>It is, by definition, an edge case.
it is de-facto not an edge case.
And making minimum wage over the age of 25 is also outside of the typical pay, so it would make sense that they might be in the atypical situation of, say, still living with their parents. Only 2.7% of ALL workers are even making minimum wage to begin with [1], so you're talking about maybe 1.4% of workers over 25. Of those, some may be retired and have other sources of income. Some may have a spouse who makes much more and the are not dependent on the minimum wage income. So the remaining workers who are actually dependent on one minimum wage job to support themselves or their families are very much an edge case, since we're talking about probably less than 1% of all workers.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2016/home.htm
>since we're talking about probably less than 1% of all workers.
cool. congrats on proving it's an edge case. A+ case analysis.
so what? it's cool with you that 1.3 million people can't afford housing? even if it were 0.1% of workers? why should literally anyone be unable to afford housing? we're not talking iphones and gucci bags here - we're talking about the bare minimum needed to stay off the street.
Because it costs money? It takes time and effort from other humans to create and they need to be compensated for that? Anything that costs any amount of money will have someone that is unable to afford it. The article is not even talking about being able to afford any housing, they are talking about 2-bedroom apartments. There are smaller apartments. There are rooms in shared houses. There are other forms of housing.
Again, we're talking about the majority of the people earning minimum wage probably not depending on the job to pay for their housing. Maybe they are getting something else out of it. It's cool with you to eliminate a lot of their jobs by raising the minimum wage?
If the problem is some people can't afford housing, we can fix that by providing housing vouchers to those people, or changing zoning laws so more housing can be built to bring down the price, or nationalize the housing industry and just have the government build housing for everyone and we all get assigned a government issue apartment to live in, comrade.
Either way, we address the problem of housing by dealing with housing, not by manipulating the labor market which is only tangentially related to housing.
the question was "should" not can't. your answer is therefore normative rather than descriptive. let's agree to disagree that market forces shouldn't interfere with people's abilities to survive (healthcare, housing, justice system).
>Maybe they are getting something else out of it. It's cool with you to eliminate a lot of their jobs by raising the minimum wage?
you wrongly believe that raising the minimum wage will lead to mass lay offs. ny raised minimum wage in 2016 and 2018 and the only sector that cut jobs was food service.
> we can fix that by providing housing vouchers to those people, or changing zoning laws so more housing can be built to bring down the price, or nationalize the housing industry and just have the government build housing for everyone and we all get assigned a government issue apartment to live in, comrade
facetious nonsense. not a single one of those things is a current policy practice (section 8 is not a housing voucher).
>Either way, we address the problem of housing by dealing with housing, not by manipulating the labor market which is only tangentially related to housing.
like i told the other guy: go ahead and build housing at cost. until then i'll vote for minimum wage increases.
Fair enough. I mean, market forces do interfere with people's ability to survive whether we care to agree with it or not, at least until we can develop a post-scarcity economy.
The only way a market goes away is if the supply of something is so high that it is effectively worthless, because everyone can freely access all they could ever want. For instance, there is no market for breathable air. We can all breathe as much air as we want without impacting the ability of anyone else to do so. Hence, there is no reason for anyone to try to sell air to anyone else (for now, anyway...).
my ultimate point is therefore that you have almost no other policy levers than the minimum wage.
I acknowledge that there’s a serious problem if millions of experienced workers are unable to get more than minimum wage, but I would prefer we fix that by helping those workers become more valuable, not by putting a “you must be this tall to ride” sign on entry level jobs.
And you know exactly the point I was trying to make.
We could leave minimum wage to children, and charity workers.
As it stands, it used to pay better but has slowly slid to being subsistence living.
Not everyone has the opportunity to move on to a better paying job.
However, stating that it was never intended to support a person 100% is just flat out ignorant. The history of minimum wage is easily read up on.
What it should and should not do is a subjective matter.