After inflation, people making US minimum wage are earning less than 60 year ago | Hacker News Reader

After inflation, people making US minimum wage are earning less than 60 year ago

cnbc.com

41 pointspaulpauper13 comments

Denmark has no minimum wage. Just stop importing cheap labour and let markets work, that is how we do it.

  > Just stop importing cheap labour and let markets work

maybe i am missing something obvious, but "letting markets work" imply letting cheap labour to flow freely...?

Supply and Demand As the Supply of unskilled labour increases, the cost of that labour, their salaries, goes down

good thing no one makes minimum wage anymore. McDonalds around here is starting at $17/hr in my $7.25 minimum state. Not even a hcol area.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2020/home.htm

There's about a million people making at or below minimum wage in the US. Not nobody. That isn't counting situations like Uber and Amazon contractors whose expenses like gas and wear&tear aren't appropriately accounted for. But it is true that a smaller percentage of people are at the federal minimum wage, thanks in part to individual states with higher minima.

https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/state-min...

A majority of states set a higher minimum wage than the federal limit, and unless I missed something the only highly populated state without a higher minimum is Texas.

>There's about a million people making at or below minimum wage in the US. Not nobody.

I'm sure there are people who are working jobs with truly awful sub-minimum wage pay (under the table work, undocumented folks, etc) but I imagine the vast, vast majority of people working "below the minimum wage" are tipped workers who nominally make $2.13/hr but who simply do not report their tips.

Edit: based on the BLS tables that accounts for maybe 61% of those below minimum wage. But the data doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There are 63,000 workers in "management, professional, and related occupations" making less than minimum wage, and aside from CEOs taking $0 paychecks I can't imagine where those jobs are.

Almost all of those are tipped workers. They make at or below minimum wage and then bring in $10-20 an hour in tips on top of that.

Do you have statistics to back up that claim?

Yeah it's way higher than that in my experience in the restaurant industry.

That's not statistics.

In other news, water is wet.

Thank god we have CNBC to keep us informed.

But water freezes and gets bigger. It's inflationary!

So in real terms they're paying people less AND company exec bonuses are well beyond reasonable. Yet any argument towards a pay rise on that minimum wage is seen as inflationary.

Interesting world.

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