8 ms·

If the full time wage can't result in a decent living (housing, food, medical expenses, clothes, feed and clothe a kid or two, and put away a little on the side

by Y-bar 2y ago

If the full time wage can't result in a decent living (housing, food, medical expenses, clothes, feed and clothe a kid or two, and put away a little on the side) then it clearly is too little. Edit: Check out https://livingwage.mit.edu/ https://livingwage.mit.edu/ for examples based on real-world data.

didgetmaster 2y ago
If the job is unskilled (i.e. you can train the next person to do it in less than one hour) and you have several people standing in line to take it if the person doing it, quits; then the current wage is clearly enough. It is just like the price of the meal. If it costs more than people are willing to pay, then it is too expensive; regardless of what you personally think it should cost.
- callmeal 2y ago
  >if the person doing it, quits If the person doing it (and the role can make or break the business) quits on short notice, then the current wage is clearly not enough.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  There will always be people desperate enough to race to the bottom, but that doesn't make it a good thing for society at scale.
  - cvwright 2y ago
    Especially when we import millions of low-skill / no-skill people every year to compete with the poor people who were born here. Works great for the upper classes - keeps the price down for those fancy Michelin dinners.
    - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
      Our immigrant ancestors were almost all unskilled. I’d rather the government not tell me where I can or cannot live, as a matter of basic human freedom.
    - astrange 2y ago
      Immigrants do not compete with native workers because they have complementary skills (like different native languages). The evidence is very very strong that immigration does not decrease wages. It generally increases them because it provides new demand, though that's not guaranteed.
      - carlosjobim 2y ago
        Demand is limitless and makes no benefit. Only production is beneficial.
        astrange 2y ago
        That's certainly what Xi Jinping thinks.
- dopylitty 2y ago
  It doesn’t matter how easy a job is to learn. What matters is how many people are willing to do it and how important it is to society. Trash collection may be mostly driving trucks and throwing bags in the back but very few people are willing to do it and society grinds to a halt without it so those folks should be making way more than some Facebook coder who adjusts ad pixels all day. The problem is the US economic system is so backwards it values the ad pixel pusher more than the trash collector. At least until there’s a communicable disease going around and suddenly the trash collector is recognized as an essential worker and forced to come to work while the ad pixel pusher “works” from home.
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    > so those folks should be making way more I heard rumours that trash collectors in the US earn pretty good money, in part due to being unionized. I've experienced what happens if binmen go on strike firsthand and / or seen it on the news, it's not pretty. Whereas industries where there's plenty of supply, like the service industry, cannot get a union off the ground because for every unionized employee, there's plenty of un-unionized people waiting to get a job that doesn't pay them enough, but it's a job and that's good enough.
- romwell 2y ago
  >If the job is unskilled (i.e. you can train the next person to do it in less than one hour) and you have several people standing in line to take it if the person doing it, quits; then the current wage is clearly enough. Enough for whom and for what? For a society with slavery, absolutely. Also for a GULAG. If that's the environment you want to live in, North Korea is the best country! Everyone is getting wages that are enough. >It is just like the price of the meal. If it costs more than people are willing to pay, then it is too expensive; regardless of what you personally think it should cost Yes, meals that people can't afford are too expensive regardless of what you personally think it should cost. And wages that don't support living are too low regardless of what you personally think is enough.
- atoav 2y ago
  Sure, divide and conquer is the prerequisite to allow the non-working-class to exploit actual labor. I say human dignity is non-negotiable. So there should be a legal minimum wage which is automatically adjusted to the living prices of wherever the person you hire is expected to work. If you are unable (or worse: unwilling) to pay people enough to survive of your work, you are irresponsible and a leech on society that should be out of business anyways. I understand that some have been brain-washed into believing that leveraging your education, inherited wealth or position of power to exploit others is a sign of being smart or some sort other conclusion that coincidentally justifies the desirable outcome — but that doesn't change the self serving nature of anybody discussing for that kind of exploitation. And as markets have shown to suck at respecting any externalities, be it nature, culture, the rights of future generations or human dignity, they have to be regulated to do so. If your business is unable to survive that, it wasn't for the benefit of society anyways.
  - throwaway199129 2y ago
    This makes the assumption that all workers require a living wage. When I worked as a teenager and throughout college, I didn't need to make a living wage since I either lived with my parents or with roommates (admittedly funded by a combination of work and student loans). During that phase of my life, I didn't require a living wage. I just needed some extra money, and so I was willing to accept lower paying jobs that wouldn't necessarily support every expense. Someone who required a living wage couldn't have worked those jobs, but they were perfect for me, so I was glad they existed at the time.
    - atoav 2y ago
      It doesn't matter if you require the living wage or not — there will always be people who don't strictly need it in any society. Just like there will be people on the beach who won't ever need a life guard. Everybody needing a thing is not a precondition for it making sense to exist. If we want a society without exploitation the simple fix is to lift the minimum wage beyond any value that could be considered exploitation within the given context. Not being able to live off your full time job is certainly exploitation. If you don't need that much e.g. because you have the luck of having your parents support, don't work the full job then. Easy. Less hours worked, more time to study.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  I’m under the impression that this isn’t the case; restaurants always seem to be hiring, and service is quite poor nowadays due, I guess(?) to understaffing.
- nkrisc 2y ago
  That’s like saying because slaves do as they’re told, they don’t mind doing it. After all, if they didn’t want to do it, they would refuse. Those people are lining up to take a job that doesn’t pay enough because it’s better than no job or whatever worse job they currently have. We could restructure society so that $5/hour is “enough” for some people and then the rest of could enjoy even cheaper meals. /s
FredPret 2y ago
While I agree with your sentiment, that logic doesn't hold. If the wage for a job is too low to afford life, then we can say either the job is underpaid or the job is fairly compensated but simply not worth doing. If dishwashers quit in numbers for other jobs, dishwasher pay would have to rise if restaurants can afford it, or the restaurant industry would wither, and from an economic point of view, deservedly so. Of course, this theory works best in a dynamic economy where people and capital can move around with a minimum amount of friction.
- romwell 2y ago
  The parent comment said nothing about the job, they commented on a full-time wage. Their point stands.
- piva00 2y ago
  > Of course, this theory works best in a dynamic economy where people and capital can move around with a minimum amount of friction. This assumption is akin to a spherical cow, frictionless surface, etc. In the real world capital and people won't ever move around with a minimum amount of friction, nor will people retrain for other jobs easily.
  - FredPret 2y ago
    Dishwashers can easily move to other low-wage jobs if they exist
  - dfxm12 2y ago
    Spherical cows are more or less a natural impossibility. The economic system in the US is designed to add friction for people like those in these types of situations to switch jobs, retrain, etc. That's an important distinction.
- bumby 2y ago
  >wage for a job is too low to afford life This also simplifies the scenario to assume that wages are the only income. It would be like building a mental model around people who live at home with their parents and concluding whatever money they make is obviously sufficient to 'afford life'. It ignores all the extraneous ways their life is being subsidized by others. Whether or not those external subsidies are desirable or sustainable are intrinsically related to this problem.
brainwad 2y ago
What standard of housing, food, etc? The linked MIT project uses a bunch of median- or near-median costs; it's obviously not reasonable to call 40th-percentile housing costs the basic standard of living, when 40% of the population in fact manage to get by paying less. There are similar objections for other components of their index, such as transportation costs and "civic participation", which appear to take median expenditure in these categories.
- matthewaveryusa 2y ago
  This is pretty spot-on for where I live (suffolk MA.) Note that there's no saving category, so the 190k/year with 3 kids dual income is to get by comfortably but never retire. Food is based off https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/low-moderate-liberal-food-plans-2007 https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/low-moderate-liberal-food-plan... Housing 40th percentile is a pretty good metric for living wage. What would your metric be, 20th percentile, 10th percentile, something else? Transportation is the true cost of mobility, including insurance, gas, motor oil, basic maintenance of vehicle. Civic Engagement category isn't what you think it is and the methodology spells it out: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey, Table 1400 (Entertainment: fees and admissions; Audio and visual equipment and services; Pets; Toys, hobbies, and playground equipment; Entertainment: other supplies, equip., & services; Reading; and Education) I mean sure, cross that category out completely, but humans can't live on bread alone and this is exactly what this is measuring: living wage, not depression wage. You can argue about whether median is a good measure, but the fact that this living wage allocates 0 dollars towards retirement and holidays, for me, is still not truly living wage. Any adjustment to the categories you take umbrage to is washed out by a basic savings plan for retirement.
antisthenes 2y ago
> If the full time wage can't result in a decent living (housing, food, medical expenses, clothes, feed and clothe a kid or two, and put away a little on the side) then it clearly is too little. I have seen this meme repeated a lot, e.g. any full time job should automatically provide for a LOT of shit that used to require 2 incomes, or a stay-at-home mom to take care of it. Now the goalposts have moved to provide for food and housing and for "a kid or two". Do you have any evidence that our societal productivity has advanced so far that we can simply pay this "living wage" to everyone working 2000 hours a year, regardless of their profession?
- eldaisfish 2y ago
  is your alternative that someone washing dishes is not entitled to have and support kids? I would ask you - do you have evidence to show that lowering wages benefits anyone other than the employer? Look at the Nordic countries. Paying everyone a minimum wage and creating a societal safety where education is free and everyone has access to the tools to better themselves results in staggeringly good outcomes.
  - bivargen 2y ago
    While I agree with your sentiments, I must correct you in that Sweden doesn't have a minimum wage, never had! Our societal safety also isn't all that it was, but to be sure it's much stronger than the US. For the other nordic countries I can't tell, though I seem to remember that Denmark has a minimum wage and Norway doesn't. As for Finland I have no idea.
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      Finland has none either. It is all done by employee unions negotiating with employer unions. The safety net from social security does ensure that it is pretty hard to starve and not have at least some accommodation.
  - listenallyall 2y ago
    Public K-12 education is free in the United States. Any thoughts on why the outcomes aren't "staggeringly good?"
trilbyglens 2y ago
The real answer is that we are super over indexed on service jobs. The only work our economy provides at a scale sufficient to support a population with various levels of skill and ability is service work, and businesses in that space are famously difficult to run profitably.
IncreasePosts 2y ago
Why would anyone take the job then, if it didn't provide those things? Also, I have an employee Al who lives with his parents, so he doesn't need to pay anything for housing. Bob is single but has to pay for his own apartment. Carol is a single mom of 4 who needs to pay for her housing and everything for her kids. So should I pay Carol the most, Bob the 2nd most, and then Al the least, even though they're all doing the same job?
- verall 2y ago
  > Why would anyone take the job then, if it didn't provide those things? Because they are afraid of being homeless?
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    Most landlords don't accept partial rent if your salary isn't earning you enough.
    - CrispyKerosene 2y ago
      I can tell which side of the track you grew up on. It's called surviving and we do it because the other outcome is death.
    - verall 2y ago
      I'm not sure what your point is - most people will go extreme distances to avoid becoming homeless: - commuting from a lower cost area >60m away - using food banks or not paying less critical bills (like utilities you usually have a few months before they start shutting things off) - begging or selling themselves on the internet - negotiating with their landlord who is often happy to have less money than an onerous eviction None of these are positive things - they all have nasty negative externalities. Jobs that give money but not enough at all to live on leave desperate people in a terrible limbo.
      - klabb3 2y ago
golergka 2y ago
That's a very weird assumption. Living on your own is not cheat, and having a kid, let alone two, certainly shouldn't be cheap. Why would you expect a person who works the easiest manual labour possible to be able to afford this?
no_wizard 2y ago
Dang, this was a humbling experience. I was kinda upset today that my raise I just found out I was getting will barely beat inflation, but according to this MIT site, I make enough, by myself, to support another adult and 3 children, based on where I live. Thats a very different perspective for me today.
tick_tock_tick 2y ago
What if a person isn't capable or willing to do work that justifies such a wage? I'd rather see the answer on the other end closer to a UBI then making basic jobs uneconomical by making a "minimum wage" higher then the value of the labor.

by Y-bar 2y ago

didgetmaster 2y ago

If the job is unskilled (i.e. you can train the next person to do it in less than one hour) and you have several people standing in line to take it if the person doing it, quits; then the current wage is clearly enough. It is just like the price of the meal. If it costs more than people are willing to pay, then it is too expensive; regardless of what you personally think it should cost.

callmeal 2y ago
>if the person doing it, quits If the person doing it (and the role can make or break the business) quits on short notice, then the current wage is clearly not enough.
ceejayoz 2y ago
There will always be people desperate enough to race to the bottom, but that doesn't make it a good thing for society at scale.
- cvwright 2y ago
  Especially when we import millions of low-skill / no-skill people every year to compete with the poor people who were born here. Works great for the upper classes - keeps the price down for those fancy Michelin dinners.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    Our immigrant ancestors were almost all unskilled. I’d rather the government not tell me where I can or cannot live, as a matter of basic human freedom.
  - astrange 2y ago
    Immigrants do not compete with native workers because they have complementary skills (like different native languages). The evidence is very very strong that immigration does not decrease wages. It generally increases them because it provides new demand, though that's not guaranteed.
    - carlosjobim 2y ago
      Demand is limitless and makes no benefit. Only production is beneficial.
      - astrange 2y ago
        That's certainly what Xi Jinping thinks.
dopylitty 2y ago
It doesn’t matter how easy a job is to learn. What matters is how many people are willing to do it and how important it is to society. Trash collection may be mostly driving trucks and throwing bags in the back but very few people are willing to do it and society grinds to a halt without it so those folks should be making way more than some Facebook coder who adjusts ad pixels all day. The problem is the US economic system is so backwards it values the ad pixel pusher more than the trash collector. At least until there’s a communicable disease going around and suddenly the trash collector is recognized as an essential worker and forced to come to work while the ad pixel pusher “works” from home.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  > so those folks should be making way more I heard rumours that trash collectors in the US earn pretty good money, in part due to being unionized. I've experienced what happens if binmen go on strike firsthand and / or seen it on the news, it's not pretty. Whereas industries where there's plenty of supply, like the service industry, cannot get a union off the ground because for every unionized employee, there's plenty of un-unionized people waiting to get a job that doesn't pay them enough, but it's a job and that's good enough.
romwell 2y ago
>If the job is unskilled (i.e. you can train the next person to do it in less than one hour) and you have several people standing in line to take it if the person doing it, quits; then the current wage is clearly enough. Enough for whom and for what? For a society with slavery, absolutely. Also for a GULAG. If that's the environment you want to live in, North Korea is the best country! Everyone is getting wages that are enough. >It is just like the price of the meal. If it costs more than people are willing to pay, then it is too expensive; regardless of what you personally think it should cost Yes, meals that people can't afford are too expensive regardless of what you personally think it should cost. And wages that don't support living are too low regardless of what you personally think is enough.
atoav 2y ago
Sure, divide and conquer is the prerequisite to allow the non-working-class to exploit actual labor. I say human dignity is non-negotiable. So there should be a legal minimum wage which is automatically adjusted to the living prices of wherever the person you hire is expected to work. If you are unable (or worse: unwilling) to pay people enough to survive of your work, you are irresponsible and a leech on society that should be out of business anyways. I understand that some have been brain-washed into believing that leveraging your education, inherited wealth or position of power to exploit others is a sign of being smart or some sort other conclusion that coincidentally justifies the desirable outcome — but that doesn't change the self serving nature of anybody discussing for that kind of exploitation. And as markets have shown to suck at respecting any externalities, be it nature, culture, the rights of future generations or human dignity, they have to be regulated to do so. If your business is unable to survive that, it wasn't for the benefit of society anyways.
- throwaway199129 2y ago
  This makes the assumption that all workers require a living wage. When I worked as a teenager and throughout college, I didn't need to make a living wage since I either lived with my parents or with roommates (admittedly funded by a combination of work and student loans). During that phase of my life, I didn't require a living wage. I just needed some extra money, and so I was willing to accept lower paying jobs that wouldn't necessarily support every expense. Someone who required a living wage couldn't have worked those jobs, but they were perfect for me, so I was glad they existed at the time.
  - atoav 2y ago
    It doesn't matter if you require the living wage or not — there will always be people who don't strictly need it in any society. Just like there will be people on the beach who won't ever need a life guard. Everybody needing a thing is not a precondition for it making sense to exist. If we want a society without exploitation the simple fix is to lift the minimum wage beyond any value that could be considered exploitation within the given context. Not being able to live off your full time job is certainly exploitation. If you don't need that much e.g. because you have the luck of having your parents support, don't work the full job then. Easy. Less hours worked, more time to study.
bee_rider 2y ago
I’m under the impression that this isn’t the case; restaurants always seem to be hiring, and service is quite poor nowadays due, I guess(?) to understaffing.
nkrisc 2y ago
That’s like saying because slaves do as they’re told, they don’t mind doing it. After all, if they didn’t want to do it, they would refuse. Those people are lining up to take a job that doesn’t pay enough because it’s better than no job or whatever worse job they currently have. We could restructure society so that $5/hour is “enough” for some people and then the rest of could enjoy even cheaper meals. /s

FredPret 2y ago

While I agree with your sentiment, that logic doesn't hold. If the wage for a job is too low to afford life, then we can say either the job is underpaid or the job is fairly compensated but simply not worth doing. If dishwashers quit in numbers for other jobs, dishwasher pay would have to rise if restaurants can afford it, or the restaurant industry would wither, and from an economic point of view, deservedly so. Of course, this theory works best in a dynamic economy where people and capital can move around with a minimum amount of friction.

romwell 2y ago
The parent comment said nothing about the job, they commented on a full-time wage. Their point stands.
piva00 2y ago
> Of course, this theory works best in a dynamic economy where people and capital can move around with a minimum amount of friction. This assumption is akin to a spherical cow, frictionless surface, etc. In the real world capital and people won't ever move around with a minimum amount of friction, nor will people retrain for other jobs easily.
- FredPret 2y ago
  Dishwashers can easily move to other low-wage jobs if they exist
- dfxm12 2y ago
  Spherical cows are more or less a natural impossibility. The economic system in the US is designed to add friction for people like those in these types of situations to switch jobs, retrain, etc. That's an important distinction.
bumby 2y ago
>wage for a job is too low to afford life This also simplifies the scenario to assume that wages are the only income. It would be like building a mental model around people who live at home with their parents and concluding whatever money they make is obviously sufficient to 'afford life'. It ignores all the extraneous ways their life is being subsidized by others. Whether or not those external subsidies are desirable or sustainable are intrinsically related to this problem.

brainwad 2y ago

What standard of housing, food, etc? The linked MIT project uses a bunch of median- or near-median costs; it's obviously not reasonable to call 40th-percentile housing costs the basic standard of living, when 40% of the population in fact manage to get by paying less. There are similar objections for other components of their index, such as transportation costs and "civic participation", which appear to take median expenditure in these categories.

matthewaveryusa 2y ago
This is pretty spot-on for where I live (suffolk MA.) Note that there's no saving category, so the 190k/year with 3 kids dual income is to get by comfortably but never retire. Food is based off https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/low-moderate-liberal-food-plans-2007 https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/low-moderate-liberal-food-plan... Housing 40th percentile is a pretty good metric for living wage. What would your metric be, 20th percentile, 10th percentile, something else? Transportation is the true cost of mobility, including insurance, gas, motor oil, basic maintenance of vehicle. Civic Engagement category isn't what you think it is and the methodology spells it out: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey, Table 1400 (Entertainment: fees and admissions; Audio and visual equipment and services; Pets; Toys, hobbies, and playground equipment; Entertainment: other supplies, equip., & services; Reading; and Education) I mean sure, cross that category out completely, but humans can't live on bread alone and this is exactly what this is measuring: living wage, not depression wage. You can argue about whether median is a good measure, but the fact that this living wage allocates 0 dollars towards retirement and holidays, for me, is still not truly living wage. Any adjustment to the categories you take umbrage to is washed out by a basic savings plan for retirement.

antisthenes 2y ago

> If the full time wage can't result in a decent living (housing, food, medical expenses, clothes, feed and clothe a kid or two, and put away a little on the side) then it clearly is too little. I have seen this meme repeated a lot, e.g. any full time job should automatically provide for a LOT of shit that used to require 2 incomes, or a stay-at-home mom to take care of it. Now the goalposts have moved to provide for food and housing and for "a kid or two". Do you have any evidence that our societal productivity has advanced so far that we can simply pay this "living wage" to everyone working 2000 hours a year, regardless of their profession?

eldaisfish 2y ago
is your alternative that someone washing dishes is not entitled to have and support kids? I would ask you - do you have evidence to show that lowering wages benefits anyone other than the employer? Look at the Nordic countries. Paying everyone a minimum wage and creating a societal safety where education is free and everyone has access to the tools to better themselves results in staggeringly good outcomes.
- bivargen 2y ago
  While I agree with your sentiments, I must correct you in that Sweden doesn't have a minimum wage, never had! Our societal safety also isn't all that it was, but to be sure it's much stronger than the US. For the other nordic countries I can't tell, though I seem to remember that Denmark has a minimum wage and Norway doesn't. As for Finland I have no idea.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    Finland has none either. It is all done by employee unions negotiating with employer unions. The safety net from social security does ensure that it is pretty hard to starve and not have at least some accommodation.
- listenallyall 2y ago
  Public K-12 education is free in the United States. Any thoughts on why the outcomes aren't "staggeringly good?"

trilbyglens 2y ago

The real answer is that we are super over indexed on service jobs. The only work our economy provides at a scale sufficient to support a population with various levels of skill and ability is service work, and businesses in that space are famously difficult to run profitably.

IncreasePosts 2y ago

Why would anyone take the job then, if it didn't provide those things? Also, I have an employee Al who lives with his parents, so he doesn't need to pay anything for housing. Bob is single but has to pay for his own apartment. Carol is a single mom of 4 who needs to pay for her housing and everything for her kids. So should I pay Carol the most, Bob the 2nd most, and then Al the least, even though they're all doing the same job?

verall 2y ago
> Why would anyone take the job then, if it didn't provide those things? Because they are afraid of being homeless?
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  Most landlords don't accept partial rent if your salary isn't earning you enough.
  - CrispyKerosene 2y ago
    I can tell which side of the track you grew up on. It's called surviving and we do it because the other outcome is death.
  - verall 2y ago
    I'm not sure what your point is - most people will go extreme distances to avoid becoming homeless: - commuting from a lower cost area >60m away - using food banks or not paying less critical bills (like utilities you usually have a few months before they start shutting things off) - begging or selling themselves on the internet - negotiating with their landlord who is often happy to have less money than an onerous eviction None of these are positive things - they all have nasty negative externalities. Jobs that give money but not enough at all to live on leave desperate people in a terrible limbo.
    - klabb3 2y ago

golergka 2y ago

That's a very weird assumption. Living on your own is not cheat, and having a kid, let alone two, certainly shouldn't be cheap. Why would you expect a person who works the easiest manual labour possible to be able to afford this?

no_wizard 2y ago

Dang, this was a humbling experience. I was kinda upset today that my raise I just found out I was getting will barely beat inflation, but according to this MIT site, I make enough, by myself, to support another adult and 3 children, based on where I live. Thats a very different perspective for me today.

tick_tock_tick 2y ago

What if a person isn't capable or willing to do work that justifies such a wage? I'd rather see the answer on the other end closer to a UBI then making basic jobs uneconomical by making a "minimum wage" higher then the value of the labor.