11 ms·

Minimum Wage Clock

204 points by shakna 3y ago

justrealist 3y ago
< 1% of the US is paid the federal minimum wage. Basically 0 once you discount income tax evasion and tipped employees. I don't think McDonalds starts under $12 anywhere, in practice $15 or more basically everywhere. I mean have a conversation about the wage gap sure but know that these numbers are not meaningful as it regards the US.
- Shekelphile 3y ago
  $12-15 today is effectively lower than the federal minimum was 4 years ago. It's a completely disingenuous argument to make that it's acceptable to pay people that little.
  - CrazyStat 3y ago
    Inflation over the last 4 years has been about 20%, not 50-100% as your comment would imply. Source: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=201911&year2=202311 https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=201911...
    - Shekelphile 3y ago
      Maybe for people who already owned assets and had a stable living situation before 2020. If you're renting and had to buy anything expensive like a car in the last few years then your costs have more than doubled.
      - gruez 3y ago
        >If you're renting and had to buy anything expensive like a car in the last few years then your costs have more than doubled. Source?
      - itishappy 3y ago
        My rental has gone up about 18%. Cars have gone up about 25%. https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/buying-a-car/people-spending-more-on-new-cars-but-prices-not-necessarily-rising-a3134608893/ https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/buying-a-car/people-spe...
- darklycan51 3y ago
  I guarantee you you put a $15/hr person in that site and you barely notice a difference compared to a billionaire.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  However, ~30% of all hourly, non-self-employed workers 18 and older in the U.S. are "near-minimum-wage" workers, who make more than the minimum wage in their state but less than $10.10 an hour. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/01/04/5-facts-about-the-minimum-wage/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/01/04/5-facts-a...
  - justrealist 3y ago
    This article is from 2017.
    - CharlesW 3y ago
      The percentage doesn't change much in newer data. As https://waysandmeans.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Shiloh-Kantz-Written-Testimony.pdf https://waysandmeans.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Sh... (newer but Oklahoma specific) notes: Relatively few workers actually earn minimum wage, but a substantial share of workers are classified as “near minimum wage” earners. These two groups (minimum wage workers and near-minimum wage workers) make up nearly 1 in 3 workers. The main point is that just looking at "minimum wage" workers doesn't tell the story. I don't believe you're being intentionally disingenuous, but there are many U.S. states where the minimum wage is an unlivable $7.25/hr and hasn't changed for 10 years or more.
    - mdhb 3y ago
      Ah yes, you must be referring to the economic miracle that minimum wage workers talk about all the time from around 2017 onwards. Things clearly only got much better from there and absolutely in no way went backwards.
- maerF0x0 3y ago
  I'm curious about your data behind your claims. Does it account for waitstaff paid below minimum wage? (but then bumped up by tips)
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  True, and yet there's strenuous political opposition ot any proposal to increase it. Why is that?
  - fxd123 3y ago
    Because you can just increase minimum wage at the state level
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      So why not just recalculate the federal MW as a function of the states' - lowest, median, or average? I ask because lots of things like welfare payments and estimates of poverty level involve comparisons with the MW. It's sometimes advantageous for a politician to say 'we give $X in food stamps, that's equivalent to Y hours [of federal MW], therefore people are lazy freeloaders' or 'Median rent is equal to Z hours at federal MW, therefore rental is impossible'. If we have an officially defined metric it should correlate with real conditions in some way, get updated to reflect inflation etc.
      - fxd123 3y ago
        > I ask because lots of things like welfare payments and estimates of poverty level involve comparisons with the MW Can you give an example of such a welfare program? I'm not aware of any that use the minimum wage as a baseline. Most use the federal poverty level, which is pegged to the cost of food (and is updated yearly for inflation). > It's sometimes advantageous for a politician to say... I don't really care what politicians say; I'd rather have policy be evidence-based rather than reaction-based
        anigbrowl 3y ago
        Not caring what politicians say is asinine, since its politicians who ultimately write the laws. The fact that their lines of reasoning may be bullshit doesn't alter this, because lots of policy is sold on bullshit arguments. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44667 https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44667 references some federal metrics that incorporate the MW as an input.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  > < 1% of the US is paid the federal minimum wage. Basically 0 once you discount income tax evasion and tipped employees. When I was a teenager, I worked as a fast food cook and got paid $6.51/hr. The minimum wage where I was at the time: $6.50. This was probably so they could claim that they "paid above minimum wage" in their marketing to potential employees. Based on this experience hearing that "no one is paid the federal minimum wage" is not very convincing to me.
- ziddoap 3y ago
  >< 1% of the US is paid the federal minimum wage Where did you get this data? And, out of curiosity, what percentage of people are within, say, $0.50/hr of minimum wage?
- seiferteric 3y ago
  True, but a big problem with these jobs is not giving employees enough hours consistently. I wonder how many people are getting effectively minimum wage or less because they don't even get full-time hours consistently.
robertlagrant 3y ago
This site doesn't distinguish pay and not-pay, I think. Sundar Pichai is paid about $8m/year, not $100k/hour. The rest is stock. And even that vests over 3 years[0], not one year. [0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000130817923000736/lgoog2023_def14a.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000130817923...
- selectout 3y ago
  This. I am okay showing total comp, but the numbers also seem...weird? Like Zuck makes $1/year salary. $27m/year which is mostly security expenses if I remember correctly, but has by far the largest net worth (of those listed) which is what people care about. And his stock appreciation is vastly higher than that shown.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    I think the problem with net worth is it's hard to reason about. Some people think billionaires could pay for everything if only we stole their money, when it turns out they don't have money, or not much in the grand scheme of public spending. It's just slightly too divorced from reality to make good instinctive decisions. However it does make for good shock jock value.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  That's true, but CEOs (in general) are also in a unique position to create the appearance of value for stockholders through financial engineering, acquisitions, buybacks and so forth. They're able to leverage the resources of the company in unusual ways that don't necessarily have anything to do with operations or direct revenue, including firing other workers to improve the balance sheet. And once they're retired or been forced out or moved on to another firm, they're free to divest their earned stock without much scrutiny; I've never heard of a CEO being critiqued for selling off stock in a former employer. So in that sense, money is money.
  - anonuser123456 3y ago
    So what? The principal agent people has been understood by investors since the time of Adam Smith. Everyone is already aware of this.
cedws 3y ago
I think it's appalling that the minimum wage is capped based on your age in the UK. It implies that the value provided to the employer is lower if you're younger. The minimum wage should be the same for everyone. There's plenty of 18 year olds out there doing more than their 30 year old counterparts and getting paid less for it.
- maerF0x0 3y ago
  And if someone isn't minimum wage useful by 14, then our school system is an abject failure and the bureaucracy should be fired.
  - iLoveOncall 3y ago
    It's not so much about the readiness for work as much as the reliability and productivity of a 16 years old living at home VS the one of an adult that has to care for their family. I think the difference is too big to be honest, but I do understand where it comes from. Of course this punishes ALL 16 years old when some would perform better than an older employee, but there's no perfect system.
- darklycan51 3y ago
  Why is it appalling? if you want to promote people having kids then this is one of the ways to do it. a kid can live sharing rent or with his parents, an adult cannot.
  - manuelabeledo 3y ago
    > a kid can live sharing rent or with his parents, an adult cannot. Many adults are living in this situation right now.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > The cap implies that the amount of value provided to the employer is lower if you're younger. It's not a cap, it's a minimum. This is so people can employ kids who have very little economic value and train them to have lots of it.
maerF0x0 3y ago
If we find this appalling, let's stop consuming the products of those who we feel are "overpaid" and visit the website, businessplace, or other endeavors of those we feel are "underpaid". Tim Cook gets paid a lot (and so do many AAPL employees), but I can't help but admit that my last 3 laptops I bought with my own cash were MBP, and not a system76 or framework. And I'm more likely to visit costco than a farmer's market / local vendor.
- meowtimemania 3y ago
  Ironically, Costco treats its employees much better than most any locally owned shop.
  - digging 3y ago
    That's probably true. The benefits of local business are 1) that dollars spent there generate more wealth for the local economy, as they're not extracted to offshore bank accounts; and 2) that there can be more accountability to and involvement with the community served. However, just because someone hasn't expanded their business to the state/national/international levels doesn't make them a good person, a good manager, a good CEO, or a good community member. The term "petty tyrant" is often used to refer to small business owners who abuse their employees and/or community.
    - gruez 3y ago
      >that dollars spent there generate more wealth for the local economy, as they're not extracted to offshore bank accounts This is only one side of the equation. Globalization also means the local economy is also "extracting" wealth from other economies. >2) that there can be more accountability to and involvement with the community served. Yeah, like car dealerships using their "accountability to and involvement" to forcibly insert themselves in the value chain?
      - digging 3y ago
        > This is only one side of the equation. Globalization also means the local economy is also "extracting" wealth from other economies. ... more than large corporations do? Nonsense > Yeah, like car dealerships using their "accountability to and involvement" to forcibly insert themselves in the value chain? I would suggest you reread the sentence you quoted and then go ahead and finish reading the rest of my comment, because this sounds like an argumentative retort but I don't think you understood what you're replying to.
physhster 3y ago
Compared to the others, Pichai's salary is absolutely not justifed.
npoc 3y ago
The minimum wage should be scrapped. It either a) prevents people who are happy to work for less obtain a job which is uneconomical at the minimum wage, or b) it creates an effect similar to communism, where everyone doing a job at or below a certain value gets paid the same, no matter what the value of their work is. This leads to the higher quality workers reducing their output, as they are only getting the paid the same as someone producing work of, for example, half the value of their own.
- pylua 3y ago
  c) the minimum amount required to live peacefully and with dignity.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
    This is generally why I'm in favor of a UBI. It would solve so many employment problems if an employee in a bad situation could up and leave without a near-guarantee that they lose access to their home.
    - kevincox 3y ago
      I agree with this. Adding arbitrary limits and thresholds just causes strange effects elsewhere. If you remove the absolute need to accept whatever job is available then you have the ability to properly negotiate what salary is worth it to you.
    - massysett 3y ago
      I disagree. Other people in society should not have to work hard so they can provide for others who would like to quit their jobs, sit around and do nothing, and live off the labor of others. Because the person who quits their job because of UBI is still eating, and that food isn't harvesting itself and transporting itself to market.
  - kimbernator 3y ago
    While it's repeated ad nauseam, this was the intended purpose of the minimum wage, as quoted by FDR who signed the minimum wage into law: “It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.”
slibhb 3y ago
People like to talk about inequality but absolute poverty seems like a more important target. Satya Nadella having more money than me doesn't make my life worse; I'm more concerned about the availability of jobs, food, housing, etc. That said, CEO salary does strike me as strange. Who needs 8 million per year + stock? I'd think more CEOs would voluntarily take a pay cut.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  The Spirit Level [1] makes a good argument for why more equal societies benefit everyone within them. At the very least, I think it's fair to say that "Satya Nadella having more money than me doesn't make my life worse" is not definitively true. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(book) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(book)
  - amelius 3y ago
    I'm ok with people working hard and getting paid for it. I'm not ok with those people using their money against me in any way, which is what still happens and nobody talks about.
    - digging 3y ago
      > I'm ok with people working hard and getting paid for it Is that an accurate description of CEOs worth billions of dollars though? How hard are they supposedly working? I'm probably lazier than most of them as an IC with disabilities and non-work interests... but it's not humanly possible that they get ~40,000 times as much done in a day as I do.
      - Snow_Falls 3y ago
        If hard work were accurately linked to monetary benefit, poor African substinamce farmers would be some of the richest people on earth. Clearly that isn't the case, money come from more thanjust hard work. Luck has a lot to do with it, such as not being born an African substinamce farmer.
dudeinjapan 3y ago
Next time I'm going to apply for one of those CEO jobs rather than minimum wage.
- tombert 3y ago
  I mean, you could just ask your next job if they'll match one of those CEO salaries. Who's to say that they'll say no?
  - dudeinjapan 3y ago
    True. As Wayne Gretzky said: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ilaksh 3y ago
I think it's strange that only a few of the richest countries are represented here. It would be good to include wages for something like 1) a software engineer in a less major Mexican city, 2) we can also compare with a restaurant worker in California which starting in April will be $20/hr, 3) minimum wage worker in poor country, 4) immigrant/unofficial worker in poor country not being given minimum wage, etc.
- xtracto 3y ago
  What I would love to see is a comparison between Mexicos minimum wage (about $1.5 USD per hour) and Carlos Slim (richest man in Mexico who ali was richest man in the world some years ago). The disparity in Mexico is crazy.
kurisufag 3y ago
this doesn't really have the intended effect on me, at least out of all the tools in the field of comparing-wealth-visually. by the time I finished reading the text, the US minwage clock was at 10c, and in the time it took me to get to this sentence, it's half a dollar, an amount I certainly wouldn't object to for a few minutes of effort.
jampekka 3y ago
CEOs at least in theory do some labor for their (totally obscene) pay. Stockholders get paid without doing a thing. Not to say that there's anything reasonable with the wage inequality. Rather that the situation is probably worse than you may think.
LordDragonfang 3y ago
Huh. So looking at the numbers, this comparison came to mind: In the time it takes someone working minimum wage to make enough to afford a single $0.25 gumball, Sundar Pichai makes enough to afford an Apple Vision Pro ($3500) plus tax.
dudeinjapan 3y ago
How the world works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDQXFNWuZj8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDQXFNWuZj8
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
kyrra 3y ago
As a reminder, minimum wage is not what the government sets it at, it's zero ($0). If a company doesn't feel they get enough value out of hiring someone for a position for the government mandated minimum wage, they just won't hire that person. Thomas Sowell makes this point regularly in his books. Here's some related points on minimum wage laws: https://www.aei.org/economics/thomas-sowell-on-the-cruelty-of-minimum-wage-laws/ https://www.aei.org/economics/thomas-sowell-on-the-cruelty-o...
- drawkward 3y ago
  As a reminder, no one who uses the term "minimum wage" (aside from perhaps some academics and those who like to sound superior to others) means what Mr. Sowell means.
- xpressvideoz 3y ago
  By that logic, every operating expense and capital expenditure is also zero, because if it doesn't make money, a company won't purchase anything.
  - kyrra 3y ago
    Maybe I'm missing something, but I agree? Business ideas regularly don't happen because it's to expensive to operate in a given field. Children's toys and equipment is an example. They have lots of regulation around requirements for recall procedures and product registration that add a lot of operational overhead for launching products in that space. Many businesses shy away from it because of those expenses, making it so certain ideas will never materialize there. Sometimes these kinds of regulations are good, sometimes they are not, but they are always limiting and the regulation steers the decisions private businesses will make.
- Vegenoid 3y ago
  This definition is trivial, pedantic, and I would say incorrect. If someone isn't employed, their wage isn't $0 - they simply do not have a wage. 0 != null There is an argument to made that minimum wage laws reduce employability of low-skill employees. While many people will already come into that argument with some disdain and hostility, starting the argument with "As a reminder, the minimum wage is actually $0" is a surefire way to raise hackles.
mlsu 3y ago
The most remarkable thing to me about this to me isn't necessarily the disparity between CEO and min wage (I already knew it was crazy). Instead, it's the differences between CEO compensation. Sundar is making $300 to Satya's $65? what? I know it's an estimate and the numbers are made up at that level but still!
- warner25 3y ago
  I wonder a lot about what motivates people at that level, and about how these negotiations go. As someone who has always been a W-2 employee, and who has never had much individual negotiating power, it feels impossible to wrap my head around this. On one hand, if I could get compensation in the hundreds of millions per year, it's tempting to think that I'd "work" for six months and then retire with wealth beyond my wildest dreams. On the other hand, nobody appears to do that. So maybe it's lifestyle inflation, or maybe it's just intoxicating to have that kind of power and status and everything that comes with it besides the money. The existence of government executives and military flag officers, who aren't even paid that much money and could retire whenever they want with generous pensions, seems to indicate that money isn't the primary motivation. In terms of negotiations, it's hard to imagine that the boards of Alphabet or Microsoft couldn't find someone equally qualified to take the CEO job for less than these amounts.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
    I'm assuming it's a selection bias. If the CEO can retire absurdly wealthy in six months, and the VP of whatever can "only" retire in a couple years, then the VP is probably going to retire before they reach the C-suite. The only people left to get promoted to the C-suite are the ones for whom it's a type A lifestyle or something. Likewise if Zuck had been content selling to google and retiring to an island or wherever, he probably wouldn't have become a name we all still know.
    - warner25 3y ago
      I think you're right (regarding why nobody seems to retire after six months of CEO-level compensation). I mentioned military flag officers because that's the world that I know best. Most career military officers have no interest in becoming the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs or whatever; they're perfectly content with a normal, middle-class retirement as a lieutenant colonel long before they would become any kind of powerful public figure. So the only people who remain on track competing to become generals or admirals are already kind of weird in this way.
TriangleEdge 3y ago
Given there's a number of countries competing with their economies, they are subject to the evolution and survival of the fittest. If there was a better way to do things, if would occur naturally. Clearly, given capitalism gave birth to the largest economy of the world, it won't go away anytime soon.
ensignavenger 3y ago
A few things that should be noted: US Youth Minimum Wage is only in effect for the first 90 consecutive days of employment. I don't think its use is very widespread- probably used only by some youth summer employment or training programs- almost certainly not by any of the companies whose CEOs are mentioned. It would also be interesting to show what % of the mentioned CEO's employees make minimum wage... I would wager it would be very close, if not 0. Minimum wage is usually paid by smaller, more local operations.
willwade 3y ago
neat. is there a version anywhere you can put your own pay in?
iteratethis 3y ago
Some people think billionaires should be more heavily taxed, which they call a redistribution of wealth. I think that is a bizarre take because the original distribution is conceptually absurd to begin with. Think about it. You create a thing, a useful thing. We value that at 100K and given your outsized role in bringing it into existence, you have an equity of 40%. In absolute terms, you'd have 40K at this point, which seems perfectly fine. Next, you (help to) scale this company up to a valuation of $100B. Your stake is now $40B. The percentage is the problem here. It's a wild concept to be a procentual owner of a thing of an indefinite size which can only typically be scaled up by the labor of thousands of others. It's a concept we made up. It does not exist in material reality. You did not produce the value from $40K to $40B, yet you're rewarded it anyway. You did produce some value, quite a lot even, which would justify a (very) high salary. Equity sure is a great way to get rich quickly and I know a lot of you are in the game, but it's a strange concept regardless.
toss1 3y ago
Excellent! Suggestion: Put the CEO salaries on the same row as the minimum wage, to show the contrast without scrolling down. This is one of the major things that is breaking our society.
quantum_state 3y ago
The huge discrepancy between the low and high ends is a shame of civilization.
GuB-42 3y ago
Instead of CEOs, I think it would be more interesting to compare it to, say median wage, and the first decile. We know that top CEOs make a lot of money, but it is not really relatable. But if you are a software engineer for instance, seeing how much faster your own clock ticks compared to minimum wage could be interesting. We probably all know some minimum wage, median and 1st decile workers personally. We are less familiar with top CEOs.
Nevermark 3y ago
I do believe that inequality like these clocks demonstrate, heavily reflects inequity (a lack of fairness). But the only people "harmed" by a CEO's high pay are the workers of the same company, since they are the one's with a "zero sum" split of the company's revenue. (I.e. the money split between all employees (as expenses) and shareholder profits). Lack of fairness, to me, mostly starts with inequitable health, education at an early age, and parents in survival mode. I don't think fixing the last is as easy as increasing minimum wage, given that adds even more incentives to replace workers with automation. But the planet has untapped resources, not there due to any human investment or effort, whose raw value would go a long way toward lifting many people out of poverty, if that value was shared. (And without taking anything from the value created by those who extract and transform those resources.)
vivzkestrel 3y ago
You are comparing apples and oranges, that is not how economics works The question you need to ask is how replaceable are you in a company? If you are the guy at Mc Donalds flipping burgers at 20$/hr, literally anyone and almost everyone can replace you with low efforts. Teach me how to flip burgers and I will be able to do your job in about 4 hrs max. But put me in Sundar Pichai s place and I might actually screw the company. For example, do you have any ideas how to handle a congressional hearing on privacy violation without losing 90% of the stock value? Because I certainly don't and before your say that your lawyers crafted all the responses, let me remind you that every ounce of everything you do counts in such a scenario. Your body language, your eye contact, your tone and your gesture or lackof gestures. Open. AI suddenly announces GPT-5 tomorrow that far far outweighs Bard. What will you do? Do you know how to handle such a sudden announcement without losing 50% of the stock market value? Being a CEO is not an easy job. You can hire 999000 other people in place of Sundar Pichai but it will take them 10 years to learn the craft. That is the difference and this difference is what gets reflected in compensation.
- AnonC 3y ago
  I agree with some points you make (I’m not downvoting you). But I believe Sundar is the wrong example to take. There are better CEOs within that short list on the site to use. I also don’t believe that Sundar wasn’t coached and trained and retrained and went through several rehearsals on responses, body language and other aspects from a bunch of highly paid consultants, experts and those with ties in Washington, DC.
  - vivzkestrel 3y ago
    i was expecting to get downvoted because as usual a vast majority of the world doesn't understand how economics works. They only look at the final figure "the compensation" but it is more than that. Being a CEO for one of the most cutting edge companies in the world is not an easy job by any means. Every morning you wake up to 10 lawsuits easily. Even if someone throws a shoe at your face in a public meeting, you cannot say f** you without crashing the stock price. You have to deal with accussations, congressional hearings, competitors building cutting edge stuff while you have to ensure that your existing products are doing their job correctly and efficiently and that the employees on your company s payroll are not idle while making something meaningful and not losing 90% of the stock market value every single day. Remember how Elon said "f** you" and several big advertisers left Twitter the next day? If this was Google, their share price would have tanked. You will create huge losses for investors and SEC will be all over you. We really really need to teach ECONOMICS to the masses
b3nji 3y ago
Mimium wages are a blight society. Anyone with an understanding of economics knows this. They harm employees and employers. Government couldn't negotiate themselves out of a paper bag, why let them say what can be paid?
pers0n 3y ago
She should add the minimum wage for tipped workers, I believe it’s $2.13/hr in the US

204 points by shakna 3y ago

< 1% of the US is paid the federal minimum wage. Basically 0 once you discount income tax evasion and tipped employees. I don't think McDonalds starts under $12 anywhere, in practice $15 or more basically everywhere. I mean have a conversation about the wage gap sure but know that these numbers are not meaningful as it regards the US.

Shekelphile 3y ago
$12-15 today is effectively lower than the federal minimum was 4 years ago. It's a completely disingenuous argument to make that it's acceptable to pay people that little.
- CrazyStat 3y ago
  Inflation over the last 4 years has been about 20%, not 50-100% as your comment would imply. Source: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=201911&year2=202311 https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=201911...
  - Shekelphile 3y ago
    Maybe for people who already owned assets and had a stable living situation before 2020. If you're renting and had to buy anything expensive like a car in the last few years then your costs have more than doubled.
    - gruez 3y ago
      >If you're renting and had to buy anything expensive like a car in the last few years then your costs have more than doubled. Source?
    - itishappy 3y ago
      My rental has gone up about 18%. Cars have gone up about 25%. https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/buying-a-car/people-spending-more-on-new-cars-but-prices-not-necessarily-rising-a3134608893/ https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/buying-a-car/people-spe...
darklycan51 3y ago
I guarantee you you put a $15/hr person in that site and you barely notice a difference compared to a billionaire.
CharlesW 3y ago
However, ~30% of all hourly, non-self-employed workers 18 and older in the U.S. are "near-minimum-wage" workers, who make more than the minimum wage in their state but less than $10.10 an hour. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/01/04/5-facts-about-the-minimum-wage/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/01/04/5-facts-a...
- justrealist 3y ago
  This article is from 2017.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    The percentage doesn't change much in newer data. As https://waysandmeans.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Shiloh-Kantz-Written-Testimony.pdf https://waysandmeans.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Sh... (newer but Oklahoma specific) notes: Relatively few workers actually earn minimum wage, but a substantial share of workers are classified as “near minimum wage” earners. These two groups (minimum wage workers and near-minimum wage workers) make up nearly 1 in 3 workers. The main point is that just looking at "minimum wage" workers doesn't tell the story. I don't believe you're being intentionally disingenuous, but there are many U.S. states where the minimum wage is an unlivable $7.25/hr and hasn't changed for 10 years or more.
  - mdhb 3y ago
    Ah yes, you must be referring to the economic miracle that minimum wage workers talk about all the time from around 2017 onwards. Things clearly only got much better from there and absolutely in no way went backwards.
maerF0x0 3y ago
I'm curious about your data behind your claims. Does it account for waitstaff paid below minimum wage? (but then bumped up by tips)
anigbrowl 3y ago
True, and yet there's strenuous political opposition ot any proposal to increase it. Why is that?
- fxd123 3y ago
  Because you can just increase minimum wage at the state level
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    So why not just recalculate the federal MW as a function of the states' - lowest, median, or average? I ask because lots of things like welfare payments and estimates of poverty level involve comparisons with the MW. It's sometimes advantageous for a politician to say 'we give $X in food stamps, that's equivalent to Y hours [of federal MW], therefore people are lazy freeloaders' or 'Median rent is equal to Z hours at federal MW, therefore rental is impossible'. If we have an officially defined metric it should correlate with real conditions in some way, get updated to reflect inflation etc.
    - fxd123 3y ago
      > I ask because lots of things like welfare payments and estimates of poverty level involve comparisons with the MW Can you give an example of such a welfare program? I'm not aware of any that use the minimum wage as a baseline. Most use the federal poverty level, which is pegged to the cost of food (and is updated yearly for inflation). > It's sometimes advantageous for a politician to say... I don't really care what politicians say; I'd rather have policy be evidence-based rather than reaction-based
      - anigbrowl 3y ago
        Not caring what politicians say is asinine, since its politicians who ultimately write the laws. The fact that their lines of reasoning may be bullshit doesn't alter this, because lots of policy is sold on bullshit arguments. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44667 https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44667 references some federal metrics that incorporate the MW as an input.
AlexandrB 3y ago
> < 1% of the US is paid the federal minimum wage. Basically 0 once you discount income tax evasion and tipped employees. When I was a teenager, I worked as a fast food cook and got paid $6.51/hr. The minimum wage where I was at the time: $6.50. This was probably so they could claim that they "paid above minimum wage" in their marketing to potential employees. Based on this experience hearing that "no one is paid the federal minimum wage" is not very convincing to me.
ziddoap 3y ago
>< 1% of the US is paid the federal minimum wage Where did you get this data? And, out of curiosity, what percentage of people are within, say, $0.50/hr of minimum wage?
seiferteric 3y ago
True, but a big problem with these jobs is not giving employees enough hours consistently. I wonder how many people are getting effectively minimum wage or less because they don't even get full-time hours consistently.

robertlagrant 3y ago

This site doesn't distinguish pay and not-pay, I think. Sundar Pichai is paid about $8m/year, not $100k/hour. The rest is stock. And even that vests over 3 years[0], not one year. [0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000130817923000736/lgoog2023_def14a.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000130817923...

selectout 3y ago
This. I am okay showing total comp, but the numbers also seem...weird? Like Zuck makes $1/year salary. $27m/year which is mostly security expenses if I remember correctly, but has by far the largest net worth (of those listed) which is what people care about. And his stock appreciation is vastly higher than that shown.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  I think the problem with net worth is it's hard to reason about. Some people think billionaires could pay for everything if only we stole their money, when it turns out they don't have money, or not much in the grand scheme of public spending. It's just slightly too divorced from reality to make good instinctive decisions. However it does make for good shock jock value.
anigbrowl 3y ago
That's true, but CEOs (in general) are also in a unique position to create the appearance of value for stockholders through financial engineering, acquisitions, buybacks and so forth. They're able to leverage the resources of the company in unusual ways that don't necessarily have anything to do with operations or direct revenue, including firing other workers to improve the balance sheet. And once they're retired or been forced out or moved on to another firm, they're free to divest their earned stock without much scrutiny; I've never heard of a CEO being critiqued for selling off stock in a former employer. So in that sense, money is money.
- anonuser123456 3y ago
  So what? The principal agent people has been understood by investors since the time of Adam Smith. Everyone is already aware of this.

cedws 3y ago

I think it's appalling that the minimum wage is capped based on your age in the UK. It implies that the value provided to the employer is lower if you're younger. The minimum wage should be the same for everyone. There's plenty of 18 year olds out there doing more than their 30 year old counterparts and getting paid less for it.

maerF0x0 3y ago
And if someone isn't minimum wage useful by 14, then our school system is an abject failure and the bureaucracy should be fired.
- iLoveOncall 3y ago
  It's not so much about the readiness for work as much as the reliability and productivity of a 16 years old living at home VS the one of an adult that has to care for their family. I think the difference is too big to be honest, but I do understand where it comes from. Of course this punishes ALL 16 years old when some would perform better than an older employee, but there's no perfect system.
darklycan51 3y ago
Why is it appalling? if you want to promote people having kids then this is one of the ways to do it. a kid can live sharing rent or with his parents, an adult cannot.
- manuelabeledo 3y ago
  > a kid can live sharing rent or with his parents, an adult cannot. Many adults are living in this situation right now.
robertlagrant 3y ago
> The cap implies that the amount of value provided to the employer is lower if you're younger. It's not a cap, it's a minimum. This is so people can employ kids who have very little economic value and train them to have lots of it.

maerF0x0 3y ago

If we find this appalling, let's stop consuming the products of those who we feel are "overpaid" and visit the website, businessplace, or other endeavors of those we feel are "underpaid". Tim Cook gets paid a lot (and so do many AAPL employees), but I can't help but admit that my last 3 laptops I bought with my own cash were MBP, and not a system76 or framework. And I'm more likely to visit costco than a farmer's market / local vendor.

meowtimemania 3y ago
Ironically, Costco treats its employees much better than most any locally owned shop.
- digging 3y ago
  That's probably true. The benefits of local business are 1) that dollars spent there generate more wealth for the local economy, as they're not extracted to offshore bank accounts; and 2) that there can be more accountability to and involvement with the community served. However, just because someone hasn't expanded their business to the state/national/international levels doesn't make them a good person, a good manager, a good CEO, or a good community member. The term "petty tyrant" is often used to refer to small business owners who abuse their employees and/or community.
  - gruez 3y ago
    >that dollars spent there generate more wealth for the local economy, as they're not extracted to offshore bank accounts This is only one side of the equation. Globalization also means the local economy is also "extracting" wealth from other economies. >2) that there can be more accountability to and involvement with the community served. Yeah, like car dealerships using their "accountability to and involvement" to forcibly insert themselves in the value chain?
    - digging 3y ago
      > This is only one side of the equation. Globalization also means the local economy is also "extracting" wealth from other economies. ... more than large corporations do? Nonsense > Yeah, like car dealerships using their "accountability to and involvement" to forcibly insert themselves in the value chain? I would suggest you reread the sentence you quoted and then go ahead and finish reading the rest of my comment, because this sounds like an argumentative retort but I don't think you understood what you're replying to.

physhster 3y ago

Compared to the others, Pichai's salary is absolutely not justifed.

npoc 3y ago

The minimum wage should be scrapped. It either a) prevents people who are happy to work for less obtain a job which is uneconomical at the minimum wage, or b) it creates an effect similar to communism, where everyone doing a job at or below a certain value gets paid the same, no matter what the value of their work is. This leads to the higher quality workers reducing their output, as they are only getting the paid the same as someone producing work of, for example, half the value of their own.

pylua 3y ago
c) the minimum amount required to live peacefully and with dignity.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  This is generally why I'm in favor of a UBI. It would solve so many employment problems if an employee in a bad situation could up and leave without a near-guarantee that they lose access to their home.
  - kevincox 3y ago
    I agree with this. Adding arbitrary limits and thresholds just causes strange effects elsewhere. If you remove the absolute need to accept whatever job is available then you have the ability to properly negotiate what salary is worth it to you.
  - massysett 3y ago
    I disagree. Other people in society should not have to work hard so they can provide for others who would like to quit their jobs, sit around and do nothing, and live off the labor of others. Because the person who quits their job because of UBI is still eating, and that food isn't harvesting itself and transporting itself to market.
- kimbernator 3y ago
  While it's repeated ad nauseam, this was the intended purpose of the minimum wage, as quoted by FDR who signed the minimum wage into law: “It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.”

slibhb 3y ago

People like to talk about inequality but absolute poverty seems like a more important target. Satya Nadella having more money than me doesn't make my life worse; I'm more concerned about the availability of jobs, food, housing, etc. That said, CEO salary does strike me as strange. Who needs 8 million per year + stock? I'd think more CEOs would voluntarily take a pay cut.

oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
The Spirit Level [1] makes a good argument for why more equal societies benefit everyone within them. At the very least, I think it's fair to say that "Satya Nadella having more money than me doesn't make my life worse" is not definitively true. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(book) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(book)
- amelius 3y ago
  I'm ok with people working hard and getting paid for it. I'm not ok with those people using their money against me in any way, which is what still happens and nobody talks about.
  - digging 3y ago
    > I'm ok with people working hard and getting paid for it Is that an accurate description of CEOs worth billions of dollars though? How hard are they supposedly working? I'm probably lazier than most of them as an IC with disabilities and non-work interests... but it's not humanly possible that they get ~40,000 times as much done in a day as I do.
    - Snow_Falls 3y ago
      If hard work were accurately linked to monetary benefit, poor African substinamce farmers would be some of the richest people on earth. Clearly that isn't the case, money come from more thanjust hard work. Luck has a lot to do with it, such as not being born an African substinamce farmer.

dudeinjapan 3y ago

Next time I'm going to apply for one of those CEO jobs rather than minimum wage.

tombert 3y ago
I mean, you could just ask your next job if they'll match one of those CEO salaries. Who's to say that they'll say no?
- dudeinjapan 3y ago
  True. As Wayne Gretzky said: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ilaksh 3y ago

I think it's strange that only a few of the richest countries are represented here. It would be good to include wages for something like 1) a software engineer in a less major Mexican city, 2) we can also compare with a restaurant worker in California which starting in April will be $20/hr, 3) minimum wage worker in poor country, 4) immigrant/unofficial worker in poor country not being given minimum wage, etc.

xtracto 3y ago
What I would love to see is a comparison between Mexicos minimum wage (about $1.5 USD per hour) and Carlos Slim (richest man in Mexico who ali was richest man in the world some years ago). The disparity in Mexico is crazy.

kurisufag 3y ago

this doesn't really have the intended effect on me, at least out of all the tools in the field of comparing-wealth-visually. by the time I finished reading the text, the US minwage clock was at 10c, and in the time it took me to get to this sentence, it's half a dollar, an amount I certainly wouldn't object to for a few minutes of effort.

jampekka 3y ago

CEOs at least in theory do some labor for their (totally obscene) pay. Stockholders get paid without doing a thing. Not to say that there's anything reasonable with the wage inequality. Rather that the situation is probably worse than you may think.

LordDragonfang 3y ago

Huh. So looking at the numbers, this comparison came to mind: In the time it takes someone working minimum wage to make enough to afford a single $0.25 gumball, Sundar Pichai makes enough to afford an Apple Vision Pro ($3500) plus tax.

dudeinjapan 3y ago

How the world works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDQXFNWuZj8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDQXFNWuZj8

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

kyrra 3y ago

As a reminder, minimum wage is not what the government sets it at, it's zero ($0). If a company doesn't feel they get enough value out of hiring someone for a position for the government mandated minimum wage, they just won't hire that person. Thomas Sowell makes this point regularly in his books. Here's some related points on minimum wage laws: https://www.aei.org/economics/thomas-sowell-on-the-cruelty-of-minimum-wage-laws/ https://www.aei.org/economics/thomas-sowell-on-the-cruelty-o...

drawkward 3y ago
As a reminder, no one who uses the term "minimum wage" (aside from perhaps some academics and those who like to sound superior to others) means what Mr. Sowell means.
xpressvideoz 3y ago
By that logic, every operating expense and capital expenditure is also zero, because if it doesn't make money, a company won't purchase anything.
- kyrra 3y ago
  Maybe I'm missing something, but I agree? Business ideas regularly don't happen because it's to expensive to operate in a given field. Children's toys and equipment is an example. They have lots of regulation around requirements for recall procedures and product registration that add a lot of operational overhead for launching products in that space. Many businesses shy away from it because of those expenses, making it so certain ideas will never materialize there. Sometimes these kinds of regulations are good, sometimes they are not, but they are always limiting and the regulation steers the decisions private businesses will make.
Vegenoid 3y ago
This definition is trivial, pedantic, and I would say incorrect. If someone isn't employed, their wage isn't $0 - they simply do not have a wage. 0 != null There is an argument to made that minimum wage laws reduce employability of low-skill employees. While many people will already come into that argument with some disdain and hostility, starting the argument with "As a reminder, the minimum wage is actually $0" is a surefire way to raise hackles.

mlsu 3y ago

The most remarkable thing to me about this to me isn't necessarily the disparity between CEO and min wage (I already knew it was crazy). Instead, it's the differences between CEO compensation. Sundar is making $300 to Satya's $65? what? I know it's an estimate and the numbers are made up at that level but still!

warner25 3y ago
I wonder a lot about what motivates people at that level, and about how these negotiations go. As someone who has always been a W-2 employee, and who has never had much individual negotiating power, it feels impossible to wrap my head around this. On one hand, if I could get compensation in the hundreds of millions per year, it's tempting to think that I'd "work" for six months and then retire with wealth beyond my wildest dreams. On the other hand, nobody appears to do that. So maybe it's lifestyle inflation, or maybe it's just intoxicating to have that kind of power and status and everything that comes with it besides the money. The existence of government executives and military flag officers, who aren't even paid that much money and could retire whenever they want with generous pensions, seems to indicate that money isn't the primary motivation. In terms of negotiations, it's hard to imagine that the boards of Alphabet or Microsoft couldn't find someone equally qualified to take the CEO job for less than these amounts.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
  I'm assuming it's a selection bias. If the CEO can retire absurdly wealthy in six months, and the VP of whatever can "only" retire in a couple years, then the VP is probably going to retire before they reach the C-suite. The only people left to get promoted to the C-suite are the ones for whom it's a type A lifestyle or something. Likewise if Zuck had been content selling to google and retiring to an island or wherever, he probably wouldn't have become a name we all still know.
  - warner25 3y ago
    I think you're right (regarding why nobody seems to retire after six months of CEO-level compensation). I mentioned military flag officers because that's the world that I know best. Most career military officers have no interest in becoming the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs or whatever; they're perfectly content with a normal, middle-class retirement as a lieutenant colonel long before they would become any kind of powerful public figure. So the only people who remain on track competing to become generals or admirals are already kind of weird in this way.

TriangleEdge 3y ago

Given there's a number of countries competing with their economies, they are subject to the evolution and survival of the fittest. If there was a better way to do things, if would occur naturally. Clearly, given capitalism gave birth to the largest economy of the world, it won't go away anytime soon.

ensignavenger 3y ago

A few things that should be noted: US Youth Minimum Wage is only in effect for the first 90 consecutive days of employment. I don't think its use is very widespread- probably used only by some youth summer employment or training programs- almost certainly not by any of the companies whose CEOs are mentioned. It would also be interesting to show what % of the mentioned CEO's employees make minimum wage... I would wager it would be very close, if not 0. Minimum wage is usually paid by smaller, more local operations.

willwade 3y ago

neat. is there a version anywhere you can put your own pay in?

iteratethis 3y ago

Some people think billionaires should be more heavily taxed, which they call a redistribution of wealth. I think that is a bizarre take because the original distribution is conceptually absurd to begin with. Think about it. You create a thing, a useful thing. We value that at 100K and given your outsized role in bringing it into existence, you have an equity of 40%. In absolute terms, you'd have 40K at this point, which seems perfectly fine. Next, you (help to) scale this company up to a valuation of $100B. Your stake is now $40B. The percentage is the problem here. It's a wild concept to be a procentual owner of a thing of an indefinite size which can only typically be scaled up by the labor of thousands of others. It's a concept we made up. It does not exist in material reality. You did not produce the value from $40K to $40B, yet you're rewarded it anyway. You did produce some value, quite a lot even, which would justify a (very) high salary. Equity sure is a great way to get rich quickly and I know a lot of you are in the game, but it's a strange concept regardless.

toss1 3y ago

Excellent! Suggestion: Put the CEO salaries on the same row as the minimum wage, to show the contrast without scrolling down. This is one of the major things that is breaking our society.

quantum_state 3y ago

The huge discrepancy between the low and high ends is a shame of civilization.

GuB-42 3y ago

Instead of CEOs, I think it would be more interesting to compare it to, say median wage, and the first decile. We know that top CEOs make a lot of money, but it is not really relatable. But if you are a software engineer for instance, seeing how much faster your own clock ticks compared to minimum wage could be interesting. We probably all know some minimum wage, median and 1st decile workers personally. We are less familiar with top CEOs.

Nevermark 3y ago

I do believe that inequality like these clocks demonstrate, heavily reflects inequity (a lack of fairness). But the only people "harmed" by a CEO's high pay are the workers of the same company, since they are the one's with a "zero sum" split of the company's revenue. (I.e. the money split between all employees (as expenses) and shareholder profits). Lack of fairness, to me, mostly starts with inequitable health, education at an early age, and parents in survival mode. I don't think fixing the last is as easy as increasing minimum wage, given that adds even more incentives to replace workers with automation. But the planet has untapped resources, not there due to any human investment or effort, whose raw value would go a long way toward lifting many people out of poverty, if that value was shared. (And without taking anything from the value created by those who extract and transform those resources.)

vivzkestrel 3y ago

You are comparing apples and oranges, that is not how economics works The question you need to ask is how replaceable are you in a company? If you are the guy at Mc Donalds flipping burgers at 20$/hr, literally anyone and almost everyone can replace you with low efforts. Teach me how to flip burgers and I will be able to do your job in about 4 hrs max. But put me in Sundar Pichai s place and I might actually screw the company. For example, do you have any ideas how to handle a congressional hearing on privacy violation without losing 90% of the stock value? Because I certainly don't and before your say that your lawyers crafted all the responses, let me remind you that every ounce of everything you do counts in such a scenario. Your body language, your eye contact, your tone and your gesture or lackof gestures. Open. AI suddenly announces GPT-5 tomorrow that far far outweighs Bard. What will you do? Do you know how to handle such a sudden announcement without losing 50% of the stock market value? Being a CEO is not an easy job. You can hire 999000 other people in place of Sundar Pichai but it will take them 10 years to learn the craft. That is the difference and this difference is what gets reflected in compensation.

AnonC 3y ago
I agree with some points you make (I’m not downvoting you). But I believe Sundar is the wrong example to take. There are better CEOs within that short list on the site to use. I also don’t believe that Sundar wasn’t coached and trained and retrained and went through several rehearsals on responses, body language and other aspects from a bunch of highly paid consultants, experts and those with ties in Washington, DC.
- vivzkestrel 3y ago
  i was expecting to get downvoted because as usual a vast majority of the world doesn't understand how economics works. They only look at the final figure "the compensation" but it is more than that. Being a CEO for one of the most cutting edge companies in the world is not an easy job by any means. Every morning you wake up to 10 lawsuits easily. Even if someone throws a shoe at your face in a public meeting, you cannot say f** you without crashing the stock price. You have to deal with accussations, congressional hearings, competitors building cutting edge stuff while you have to ensure that your existing products are doing their job correctly and efficiently and that the employees on your company s payroll are not idle while making something meaningful and not losing 90% of the stock market value every single day. Remember how Elon said "f** you" and several big advertisers left Twitter the next day? If this was Google, their share price would have tanked. You will create huge losses for investors and SEC will be all over you. We really really need to teach ECONOMICS to the masses

b3nji 3y ago

Mimium wages are a blight society. Anyone with an understanding of economics knows this. They harm employees and employers. Government couldn't negotiate themselves out of a paper bag, why let them say what can be paid?

pers0n 3y ago

She should add the minimum wage for tipped workers, I believe it’s $2.13/hr in the US