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Comment by evancox100 | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of comparisons to Walmart having employees on food stamps, but I think it's worth pointing out that if you are paying federal minimum wage $7.25/hour, that is just $15,080 annually at 40 hours / week * 52 weeks. It is quite shockingly low.

Harvard's minimum pay is almost 3x that amount. If we assume a 40 hour work week, it comes out to $19.23/hour. That is well within the range for what most advocacy groups are calling a living wage. For example, this site pegs it at $18/hour for Suffolk county in Massachusetts: https://livingwageforus.org/tier-i-certification/

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The Federal minimum wage is irrelevant here, since Massachusetts law institutes a higher $15/hour rate. As you point out, even that higher wage isn’t enough to live on.

A more robust estimate suggests that the living wage is actually $22.59 in this area.

https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/14460

"The high cost of living in Boston only adds to Harvard students' struggle."

"The average rent for a Boston one-bedroom is $3,215 a month. Ljunggren said it’s not uncommon for students to be paying $2,000 a month for a studio apartment, or living with multiple roommates to cover a $4,000-a-month two-bedroom." https://www.vice.com/en/article/93kwaa/harvard-tells-grad-st...

That latter paragraph is odd. It seems that the reporter is mentioning average rent in Boston, and I wouldn’t expect the HGSU president to use that as a benchmark: Boston is an unusual place for a Harvard grad student to live.

Perfectly nice Somerville 2BR units appear to be available for a bit above $2k/mo, and they quite a bit more conveniently located to Harvard than most of Boston is.

Maybe the federal minimum wage is also wrong?

The federal minimum wage is highly politicized and the 'right'/'Republican's'/'business' have always lobbied to keep it low. To have cheap labor.

But Food-Stamps/Welfare is driven by what is the minimum to live.

In a perfect world, yes the Minimum Wage should be high enough to match what it takes to live. Then there would not be a need for Welfare (if working). Minimum Wage should match the maximum for qualifying for Welfare.

But since different groups have different goals in driving the two programs, they do not match.

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