The woman behind Ikea's living wage calculator
marketplace.org
marketplace.org
I found reading the project more interesting than the article.
... also, it would be wildly unfair, and quite likely illegal.
EDIT: Is this the law in question?
I was thinking mainly of the various human rights acts, but the principle applies across a wide variety of contexts. The federal government is constitutionally barred from creating laws which discriminate against aboriginals, for example, but is allowed to create laws which discriminate in favour of aboriginals since they are considered to be a disadvantaged group.
Race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, pregnancy, citizenship, family, disability, veteran, genetics.
Technically speaking discrimination is not illegal. Only discrimination along certain axes, such as those listed above, is. States may have additional protected groups on top of that list.
If an employer wanted to pay veterans $1/hour more than non-veterans doing identical work, would that be allowed?
I believe that protected classes in the US aren't identifying things such as, "You can't discriminate against a woman". Rather, what they say is, "You can't discriminate based on anything related to gender". There may be some exceptions, like veterans as mentioned above, but they would be the exception.
Oh, okay... So affirmative-action programs to empower women and other groups are not discriminating against men due to their gender? Interesting double-standard they have there.
It's actual quite hypocritical, if you think about it. Putting a double-standard in place to fix a previous double-standard. But, I suppose, with the "power" of the state, most people think they can play social-architect and fix all the world's ills...from their armchair. Standards being only one "weapon" in their arsenal.
That sounds very flexible to the whims of the politician or populist movement at the time.
Health insurance offered through your employer also costs more the older you get, but an employer can't just decided to pay you 10% less when you hit 50. Age is a protected class, but that has no impact on what an employer charges for health insurance.
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I don't get it: she "avoids tourist traps" (a few paragraphs up) to find the places people really shop. But when estimating cost of living, she uses detached government aggregates rather than finding how people actually make their wages work, meaning she would necessarily miss eg how grandma provides most of the daycare services.
I would think that the primary question in building out a living wage figure would be to ask how people are currently pulling it off on low wages, rather than extrapolate one's own life through some categorized figures.
Of course, that could just be stuff getting scrambled by the PR machine.
My main criticism was this: if you're going to calculate a living wage, wouldn't the number one question be "How are people currently living on their wages?" Even knowing how one family pulls it off would be tremendously informative, and from that point you could figure the cost of the missing amenities. In contrast, the researcher's approach is to assume they buy everything from some model budget (probably based indirectly on her team's own lives), but less of it.
If you need to hire twenty people, and you find twenty people willing to do the job for eight bucks an hour, and you can't find twenty people willing to do it for seven bucks fifty an hour, then eight bucks an hour is the correct price. It's not that tricky.
They demolished the existing one and opened a bigger one right next door. It was barely open before strike shut it down.
The changes in this article do not help Canadian IKEA workers get a fair wage
So IKEA, despite being from all outward appearances a privately held for-profit enterprise, it technically categorized as a charity, and despite all of this pays many of its employees below a living wage, though has now promised to start paying them a living wage, at least according to this calculator.
Pretty appalling.
There are a lot of parts of the country where that's a perfectly viable wage.
I've got a house, reliable transportation, health care, food, a great school for my kid, and lots of family nearby. My cost of living would go way up if I ate out more, bought all new furniture, or spent big money on activities for my son, and then it would seem like I needed a lot more money.
As some sort of point to all this, the discussion on livable wage needs to encompass the fact that there are some big holes in our financial system that people can still fall through that will hamstring you for years to come, even if the base wage is technically livable.
Let rise the federal minimum wage now.
There are lots of others who need, but aren't worth, survival wages -- like my autistic friend. He partly supports himself working, with the rest coming from government programs. Should he be unemployed and therefore be 100% government-supported instead of 25% government-supported?
It's good that minimum wage and living wage are not the same thing. Let's stop confusing the two.
That's got to be such a small (and unfortunate) pool of people that I'd happily send some taxpayer money to meet the article's living wage number. We can probably pay for it by not buying another single jet next year or something.
And honestly I'm not trustworthy of corporations' judgments of low end labor worth anyway. For one thing, you can work at extremely busy stores and get paid the same as workers at the very dead stores in the next county over because they use blanket values for these positions.
We already do that. Remember how some people were criticizing Wal-Mart because some of its workers were also receiving government benefits?
When you set the "minimum" to be 100% of a living wage, then people have to make the jump from pure-government-funded to pure-self-funded without any intermediate stepping stones. They have to show up and be ready to produce at a level that completely supports themselves on day one. Whereas a minimum that's set at 50% (or 25% or 75%) of living wage means someone can show up and be semi-productive and earn some of their own way, and then either step up to 100%, or stay at the level they're at as long as they need to based on their own abilities.