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D.C. Council approves ‘living wage’ bill over Wal-Mart ultimatum

22 points by thejteam 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
autodidakto 13y ago
Why stop at living wage? Everyone deserves to be comfortable, no? They should pass a 'comfortable wage' bill. Heck, it should be illegal to work for anything less than $50 an hour. What we need is politicians with the leadership necessary to outlaw poverty.
- dnautics 13y ago
  not only that, but only some employers have to pay their workers this wage. We get to pick and choose which ones must comply.
- theboss 13y ago
  I can't tell if you're being sarcastic (it's the internet)... I'm not economist but how would this work...? It seems like an awful idea
- lolwutf 13y ago
  Hopefully you're being sarcastic? If not, my response to that there should never be a 'comfortable wage'. Everyone needs that crappy job they hate - dishwasher, ditch digger - that pays nothing in order to motivate them to get out of said situation. We all (most of us) worked that crappy job when we were younger, and hated it, and one of many reasons I stay motivated to provide value now is, well, because I don't want to be a dishwasher. That's the beauty of The Market.
  - Fargren 13y ago
    That's disgusting. We should make sure people have the chance to suffer because suffering makes us better people? That's moralistic crap. If we have the resources to diminish suffering without causing harm, it is wrong not to do it. If all work could be automated, it would be wrong to have people who don't want to work working. I think there is a reason for not having a mandatory comfortable wage; some people would simply not find jobs if we raised the minimum wage to a point were it becomes unprofitable to pay it. But that's the only reason for paying less. Not some BS sanctity of hard work thing.
    - drcode 13y ago
      No, you have it all backwards... Working at a crappy job causes suffering. Not having ANY job causes MORE suffering. The solution you put forward (making crappy jobs illegal) is not somehow going to magically make poor people suffer less.
      - Fargren 13y ago
        I didn't put that solution forward, another poster did. I don't really agree with him, because I think under the current circumstances, making all crappy jobs illegal is bad, as you say. I do believe some of the crappiest jobs should be illegal (that's why I agree with minimum wages as long as the amount is well thought), because that keeps the worst abusers in check. However, I think justifying it with "the market" and "Everyone needs that crappy job they hate in order to motivate them" is wrong. The only reason for that jobs to exist is that we can't provide better ones right now.
        FreezerburnV 13y ago
        So what are the "crappiest" jobs then? What metric would you use to measure them? Should all jobs (or most) seen on the show Dirty Jobs be outlawed? How many of those being outlawed would it take before society collapses due to no garbage being collected, maintenance being done on bridges, fishing not happening, etc. And are those jobs actually crappier than working at Wal-Mart or K-Mart? Which should be outlawed, under your scenario?
  - kaonashi 13y ago
    What an incredibly privileged and myopic viewpoint. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.
  - johnrob 13y ago
    No matter where you are in life, there's always something a lot worse and something a lot better. I can imagine jobs much worse than washing dishes and much better than making 6 figures sitting in an office chair.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
footoverhand 13y ago
If 40 hours working at minimum wage is not enough to live on, shouldn't the minimum wage be raised?
- nsxwolf 13y ago
  I think we should have a maximum wage for software engineers... say, $50,000 a year... and have startups in the Valley pay the difference into a fund to augment the wages of Walmart employees. EDIT: Oh, no one here likes this idea? Imagine that!
- Zikes 13y ago
  Clearly there's a difference between minimum wage and living wage. What that difference is exactly eludes me, however.
  - codva 13y ago
    According to this living wage calculator http://livingwage.mit.edu/ http://livingwage.mit.edu/, the living wage for a family of 4 where I live (suburbs of DC) is about $50K. That sounds like a lot, but actually living here there is no way we could survive on that. They only calculate $464 a month for medical for a family of 4. I'm lucky in that my wife has ridiculous health insurance through her job. When we didn't have that our share of the premium was more than that, let alone copays, OTC drugs, etc. Also, the living wage calculation does not account for clothes, school, or about 50 other things that would come up in a family with kids. Minimum of course, is $7.25.
- drcode 13y ago
  Why are people so eager to make it harder for poor people to get jobs by forcing price controls onto employers? footoverhand: I want as many people to be able to work as possible. If you think it is too hard for people to live on the salaries that are available at their skill level, then by all means we can talk about improving the social safety net... but forcing companies to lay off people to maintain their salary budgets through salary controls is NOT a good way to help poor people.
binarymax 13y ago
I like to think of governments as old software programs. When they are first built, they are built with enthusiasm and passion to create the next new shiny thing. After a couple hundred years, they evolve into a giant pile of organic hacks for features to satisfy their users, and changes to fix existing bugs just result in regression. This is one of those patches, and it will regress.
txttran 13y ago
Why is this targeted at large retailers? If the DC minimum wage is insufficient for "living", shouldn't it be raised, instead of a somewhat arbitrary law forcing only retailers to raise their wages?
- dnautics 13y ago
  oh, it's horrible. When I lived in the DC area, I used to volunteer for this organization: http://www.foodforalldc.org/wp/ http://www.foodforalldc.org/wp/ - and I delivered food to the worst parts of the city, where people are very much unemployed and living off of far less of an income than the minimum wage. This law does nothing to help them, whatsoever. I have no particular love for walmart besides their knack for being good at delivering things efficiently (their aggressive use of eminent domain makes me angry). But laws should be fair and applied equitably. What this law is - is nothing but political posturing, demagoguery masked in the language of helping the less well off. I wonder, do the DC council members actually lift a hand to help out the people they say they care about, when a camera's not rolling?
lettergram 13y ago
I feel like I read this somewhere before... Pretty sure it was Atlas Shrugged, not the best literary work, but paints a pretty clear picture of a world where people get money they don't earn.
- mkr-hn 13y ago
  It's a good thing we don't make policy based on ideological literature. That rarely ends well.
  - lettergram 13y ago
    Yeah, like something by Thomas More or Carl Marx..
- johnrob 13y ago
  For all of its critique, Atlas Shrugged surprisingly seems to predict where our government is headed.
  - lettergram 13y ago
    I've posted something twice citing that book and it always gets down voted, on the other hand when I state some of the ideology of the book it gets up voted (strange). Just thought i'd share. Also, I agree it's where the government is heading. People need to learn that life is what they make it, not what is handed to them.
    - drcode 13y ago
      It's overall a lousy book that happened to get some obvious things right. The fact that people in her time disagreed with these obvious things does not mean Ayn Rand was particularly prescient, it just means lots of people believe obviously wrong things.
      - lettergram 13y ago
        Personally I agree, although I have had many friends who enjoyed the books romantic style, they also like Jane Eyre, Wuthering heights, Frankenstein, etc. Its just a style that I (and most) do not find enjoyable I guess. I do however enjoy her non-fiction. Her arguments are much more concise (12 page explain her entirely philosophy as opposed to 1025 or w.e Atlas Shrugged was).
JunkDNA 13y ago
This article almost willfully leaves out a pretty crucial detail: the living wage only applies to businesses that have non-union employees. So let's be clear what this is: it's an effort to give union-run stores a labor advantage and protect them from non-union competition. Safeway and Giant foods don't have to worry about competing with WalMart or Target's rock-bottom prices[1] [1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324399404578583650562822608.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732439940457858...
- stephengillie 13y ago
  Safeway and Giant (and Kroger and Supervalu etc) are forced by the UFCW to pay high wages ($18/hour in Seattle), and fully fund medical insurance for every employee working more than 20 hours per month. As a system admin, it's taken me 6 years after college to get back to the wage I made as a grocery store checker.
  - thejteam 13y ago
    The west coast stores and east coast stores must have different unions. When I worked at non-union Kmart I made more per hour than I could have made at union Safeway (east coast).
    - stephengillie 13y ago
      As far as I know, they're all the same union (UFCW), but they have regional contracts. I'm pretty sure Portland (Oregon)'s grocery workers have a lower top pay.
- thejteam 13y ago
  I had no idea union stores were exempt. And unless Safeway and Giant have upped their wages recently they pay quite a bit less than 12.50 an hour for new employees.
- dccoolgai 13y ago
  The article may not have mentioned it, but the fact that there is a recognition of unions in there is not necessarily a bad thing... Those "rock-bottom prices" are just system-gaming - the real extra cost of the goods is hidden and distributed across the communities in which they operate (in the form of reduced living conditions, health care, quality of life, etc.) - all things that unions exist to protect... What is so fundamentally wrong about a community saying "no - it's not OK to try and distribute tat burden to the backs of our citizens"?
imgabe 13y ago
This is smart and it's just DC protecting itself. When the full-time (actually 39 hour/week, so they don't get health insurance) Wal-Mart employee making $8.25/hour still needs food stamps to live, who do you think gets stuck with the bill for that? The DC government does.
- drcode 13y ago
  Fantasic! Now these potential Wal-Mart employees are back to making $0.00/hour. Oh, and they have to pay more for their groceries now, too. Congratulations on a job well done, DC Council!
  - imgabe 13y ago
    Assuming Wal-Mart actually sticks to its ultimatum. If one of the most successful businesses in history can't find a way to turn a profit in one of the most populous, affluent areas in the country while paying employees enough to live in the same area, then maybe they shouldn't be in business after all. Like the article says, Wal-Mart needs DC. DC doesn't need Wal-Mart. CostCo has no problems here and they pay around $15/hour.
    - txttran 13y ago
      CostCo and Wal-Mart have pretty different business models despite being competitors. It should be noted that CostCo's retail business, without the membership fees, is actually not profitable. It's the membership fees that put them in the black. Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/26/why-can-t-walmart-be-more-like-costco.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/26/why-can-t-w...
    - drcode 13y ago
      CostCo is the "Country Club" of grocery stores, with an up front membership requirement. Poor people do not need more Country Clubs.
  - dccoolgai 13y ago
    DC has enough people to create a market for retailers. It is not a question of if someone sells things, but whom. The idea that if these Wal-Marts don't move in, these people won't have jobs is a fallacy: They'll just have jobs working for a more responsible employer. As a resident of D.C., I'm happy with what the council has done here.

22 points by thejteam 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Why stop at living wage? Everyone deserves to be comfortable, no? They should pass a 'comfortable wage' bill. Heck, it should be illegal to work for anything less than $50 an hour. What we need is politicians with the leadership necessary to outlaw poverty.

dnautics 13y ago
not only that, but only some employers have to pay their workers this wage. We get to pick and choose which ones must comply.
theboss 13y ago
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic (it's the internet)... I'm not economist but how would this work...? It seems like an awful idea
lolwutf 13y ago
Hopefully you're being sarcastic? If not, my response to that there should never be a 'comfortable wage'. Everyone needs that crappy job they hate - dishwasher, ditch digger - that pays nothing in order to motivate them to get out of said situation. We all (most of us) worked that crappy job when we were younger, and hated it, and one of many reasons I stay motivated to provide value now is, well, because I don't want to be a dishwasher. That's the beauty of The Market.
- Fargren 13y ago
  That's disgusting. We should make sure people have the chance to suffer because suffering makes us better people? That's moralistic crap. If we have the resources to diminish suffering without causing harm, it is wrong not to do it. If all work could be automated, it would be wrong to have people who don't want to work working. I think there is a reason for not having a mandatory comfortable wage; some people would simply not find jobs if we raised the minimum wage to a point were it becomes unprofitable to pay it. But that's the only reason for paying less. Not some BS sanctity of hard work thing.
  - drcode 13y ago
    No, you have it all backwards... Working at a crappy job causes suffering. Not having ANY job causes MORE suffering. The solution you put forward (making crappy jobs illegal) is not somehow going to magically make poor people suffer less.
    - Fargren 13y ago
      I didn't put that solution forward, another poster did. I don't really agree with him, because I think under the current circumstances, making all crappy jobs illegal is bad, as you say. I do believe some of the crappiest jobs should be illegal (that's why I agree with minimum wages as long as the amount is well thought), because that keeps the worst abusers in check. However, I think justifying it with "the market" and "Everyone needs that crappy job they hate in order to motivate them" is wrong. The only reason for that jobs to exist is that we can't provide better ones right now.
      - FreezerburnV 13y ago
        So what are the "crappiest" jobs then? What metric would you use to measure them? Should all jobs (or most) seen on the show Dirty Jobs be outlawed? How many of those being outlawed would it take before society collapses due to no garbage being collected, maintenance being done on bridges, fishing not happening, etc. And are those jobs actually crappier than working at Wal-Mart or K-Mart? Which should be outlawed, under your scenario?
- kaonashi 13y ago
  What an incredibly privileged and myopic viewpoint. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.
- johnrob 13y ago
  No matter where you are in life, there's always something a lot worse and something a lot better. I can imagine jobs much worse than washing dishes and much better than making 6 figures sitting in an office chair.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

footoverhand 13y ago

If 40 hours working at minimum wage is not enough to live on, shouldn't the minimum wage be raised?

nsxwolf 13y ago
I think we should have a maximum wage for software engineers... say, $50,000 a year... and have startups in the Valley pay the difference into a fund to augment the wages of Walmart employees. EDIT: Oh, no one here likes this idea? Imagine that!
Zikes 13y ago
Clearly there's a difference between minimum wage and living wage. What that difference is exactly eludes me, however.
- codva 13y ago
  According to this living wage calculator http://livingwage.mit.edu/ http://livingwage.mit.edu/, the living wage for a family of 4 where I live (suburbs of DC) is about $50K. That sounds like a lot, but actually living here there is no way we could survive on that. They only calculate $464 a month for medical for a family of 4. I'm lucky in that my wife has ridiculous health insurance through her job. When we didn't have that our share of the premium was more than that, let alone copays, OTC drugs, etc. Also, the living wage calculation does not account for clothes, school, or about 50 other things that would come up in a family with kids. Minimum of course, is $7.25.
drcode 13y ago
Why are people so eager to make it harder for poor people to get jobs by forcing price controls onto employers? footoverhand: I want as many people to be able to work as possible. If you think it is too hard for people to live on the salaries that are available at their skill level, then by all means we can talk about improving the social safety net... but forcing companies to lay off people to maintain their salary budgets through salary controls is NOT a good way to help poor people.

binarymax 13y ago

I like to think of governments as old software programs. When they are first built, they are built with enthusiasm and passion to create the next new shiny thing. After a couple hundred years, they evolve into a giant pile of organic hacks for features to satisfy their users, and changes to fix existing bugs just result in regression. This is one of those patches, and it will regress.

txttran 13y ago

Why is this targeted at large retailers? If the DC minimum wage is insufficient for "living", shouldn't it be raised, instead of a somewhat arbitrary law forcing only retailers to raise their wages?

dnautics 13y ago
oh, it's horrible. When I lived in the DC area, I used to volunteer for this organization: http://www.foodforalldc.org/wp/ http://www.foodforalldc.org/wp/ - and I delivered food to the worst parts of the city, where people are very much unemployed and living off of far less of an income than the minimum wage. This law does nothing to help them, whatsoever. I have no particular love for walmart besides their knack for being good at delivering things efficiently (their aggressive use of eminent domain makes me angry). But laws should be fair and applied equitably. What this law is - is nothing but political posturing, demagoguery masked in the language of helping the less well off. I wonder, do the DC council members actually lift a hand to help out the people they say they care about, when a camera's not rolling?

lettergram 13y ago

I feel like I read this somewhere before... Pretty sure it was Atlas Shrugged, not the best literary work, but paints a pretty clear picture of a world where people get money they don't earn.

mkr-hn 13y ago
It's a good thing we don't make policy based on ideological literature. That rarely ends well.
- lettergram 13y ago
  Yeah, like something by Thomas More or Carl Marx..
johnrob 13y ago
For all of its critique, Atlas Shrugged surprisingly seems to predict where our government is headed.
- lettergram 13y ago
  I've posted something twice citing that book and it always gets down voted, on the other hand when I state some of the ideology of the book it gets up voted (strange). Just thought i'd share. Also, I agree it's where the government is heading. People need to learn that life is what they make it, not what is handed to them.
  - drcode 13y ago
    It's overall a lousy book that happened to get some obvious things right. The fact that people in her time disagreed with these obvious things does not mean Ayn Rand was particularly prescient, it just means lots of people believe obviously wrong things.
    - lettergram 13y ago
      Personally I agree, although I have had many friends who enjoyed the books romantic style, they also like Jane Eyre, Wuthering heights, Frankenstein, etc. Its just a style that I (and most) do not find enjoyable I guess. I do however enjoy her non-fiction. Her arguments are much more concise (12 page explain her entirely philosophy as opposed to 1025 or w.e Atlas Shrugged was).

JunkDNA 13y ago

This article almost willfully leaves out a pretty crucial detail: the living wage only applies to businesses that have non-union employees. So let's be clear what this is: it's an effort to give union-run stores a labor advantage and protect them from non-union competition. Safeway and Giant foods don't have to worry about competing with WalMart or Target's rock-bottom prices[1] [1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324399404578583650562822608.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732439940457858...

stephengillie 13y ago
Safeway and Giant (and Kroger and Supervalu etc) are forced by the UFCW to pay high wages ($18/hour in Seattle), and fully fund medical insurance for every employee working more than 20 hours per month. As a system admin, it's taken me 6 years after college to get back to the wage I made as a grocery store checker.
- thejteam 13y ago
  The west coast stores and east coast stores must have different unions. When I worked at non-union Kmart I made more per hour than I could have made at union Safeway (east coast).
  - stephengillie 13y ago
    As far as I know, they're all the same union (UFCW), but they have regional contracts. I'm pretty sure Portland (Oregon)'s grocery workers have a lower top pay.
thejteam 13y ago
I had no idea union stores were exempt. And unless Safeway and Giant have upped their wages recently they pay quite a bit less than 12.50 an hour for new employees.
dccoolgai 13y ago
The article may not have mentioned it, but the fact that there is a recognition of unions in there is not necessarily a bad thing... Those "rock-bottom prices" are just system-gaming - the real extra cost of the goods is hidden and distributed across the communities in which they operate (in the form of reduced living conditions, health care, quality of life, etc.) - all things that unions exist to protect... What is so fundamentally wrong about a community saying "no - it's not OK to try and distribute tat burden to the backs of our citizens"?

imgabe 13y ago

This is smart and it's just DC protecting itself. When the full-time (actually 39 hour/week, so they don't get health insurance) Wal-Mart employee making $8.25/hour still needs food stamps to live, who do you think gets stuck with the bill for that? The DC government does.

drcode 13y ago
Fantasic! Now these potential Wal-Mart employees are back to making $0.00/hour. Oh, and they have to pay more for their groceries now, too. Congratulations on a job well done, DC Council!
- imgabe 13y ago
  Assuming Wal-Mart actually sticks to its ultimatum. If one of the most successful businesses in history can't find a way to turn a profit in one of the most populous, affluent areas in the country while paying employees enough to live in the same area, then maybe they shouldn't be in business after all. Like the article says, Wal-Mart needs DC. DC doesn't need Wal-Mart. CostCo has no problems here and they pay around $15/hour.
  - txttran 13y ago
    CostCo and Wal-Mart have pretty different business models despite being competitors. It should be noted that CostCo's retail business, without the membership fees, is actually not profitable. It's the membership fees that put them in the black. Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/26/why-can-t-walmart-be-more-like-costco.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/26/why-can-t-w...
  - drcode 13y ago
    CostCo is the "Country Club" of grocery stores, with an up front membership requirement. Poor people do not need more Country Clubs.
- dccoolgai 13y ago
  DC has enough people to create a market for retailers. It is not a question of if someone sells things, but whom. The idea that if these Wal-Marts don't move in, these people won't have jobs is a fallacy: They'll just have jobs working for a more responsible employer. As a resident of D.C., I'm happy with what the council has done here.