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The woman behind Ikea's living wage calculator
- thyroxo 12y agohttp://livingwage.mit.edu/ http://livingwage.mit.edu/ I found reading the project more interesting than the article.
- joelhaasnoot 12y agoIt's sad that such a worthwhile tool like this uses data that is four years old. I realise the publish cycle of government agencies is slow and as such is a limiting factor, but in this day and age with everything being fast moving, it can be limiting.
- cperciva 12y agoOlson says it would be too complicated to pay people different wages based on household size ... also, it would be wildly unfair, and quite likely illegal.
- GeneralMayhem 12y agoCertainly illegal. Marital status is a protected class in the United States.
- dragonwriter 12y ago"Marital status" is unrelated to "household size".
- cperciva 12y agoIn Canada we have a "disadvantaged group" rule, which basically says that discrimination is fine as long as you're discriminating in the right direction. I wasn't sure if the US had anything similar.
- archgoon 12y agoInteresting; how does "disadvantaged group" status get determined? Is there a list; or would it be left to a judge's discretion? EDIT: Is this the law in question? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_equity_(Canada) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_equity_(Canada)
- cperciva 12y agoWhich groups qualify as "disadvantaged" is generally up to judges to decide, with the caveat that since Canada has a common law system (portions of Quebec law notwithstanding) these questions have pretty much all been resolved already. I was thinking mainly of the various human rights acts, but the principle applies across a wide variety of contexts. The federal government is constitutionally barred from creating laws which discriminate against aboriginals, for example, but is allowed to create laws which discriminate in favour of aboriginals since they are considered to be a disadvantaged group.
- daurnimator 12y agowhat is "the right direction"? That sounds very flexible to the whims of the politician or populist movement at the time.
- jquery 12y agoIt's the logical conclusion of the "blank slate" theory of human development. Everyone is the same, therefore any heterogeneity of outcome is equivalent to discrimination. These laws can then be justified under this premise as correcting imbalances, rather than creating imbalances.
- forrestthewoods 12y ago
- lambda 12y agoHuh? Certainly illegal? Then how do you explain spouse and family health care benefits, the cost of which depends on the size of your family?
- learc83 12y agoBecause they are passing the cost of the insurance on to the employee. The employer isn't paying you less because you have a family, just charging you more because it costs more. Health insurance offered through your employer also costs more the older you get, but an employer can't just decided to pay you 10% less when you hit 50. Age is a protected class, but that has no impact on what an employer charges for health insurance.
- rubbingalcohol 12y agoHasn't IKEA heard of the Sharing Economy? Living wage is socialism. We're hackers, we should be figuring out ways to externalize the real costs of doing business onto a contract labor force with flexible hours and no guarantee of basic income. Keep people hungry, that's how you squeeze the most of them.
- DanBC 12y agoKind of depressing that the largest charity in the world pays just enough to live. http://www.economist.com/node/6919139 http://www.economist.com/node/6919139
- sliverstorm 12y agoWhat? A charity's purpose is to help those most in need. Every dollar a charity gives to someone beyond what they need is a dollar they can't give to someone whose needs still aren't met.
- eternauta3k 12y agoOr they could enable a smaller number of people to get an education and leave poverty.
- kiiski 12y agoOne might argue that by paying more they could attract better employees and became more efficient at helping the people in need.
- zo1 12y agoOr they could just invest that capital elsewhere and make those employees redundant via automation. I vote for that one, less workplace drama if your co-workers are robotic.
- lambda 12y agoI think you missed reading the linked to article. According to the article, IKEA is actually legally incorporated as a charity, though it's only "charitable" purpose is "innovation in the field of architectural and interior design," and the charitable foundation appears to only be a shell built to avoid taxes and funnel money to the founder (in order to maintain the facade, it donates minute amounts to the Lund Institute of Technology). So IKEA, despite being from all outward appearances a privately held for-profit enterprise, it technically categorized as a charity, and despite all of this pays many of its employees below a living wage, though has now promised to start paying them a living wage, at least according to this calculator.
- sergers 12y agoIKEA Richmond BC. Google that + strike, they have been striking for over 1 year over labor dispute. They demolished the existing one and opened a bigger one right next door. It was barely open before strike shut it down. The changes in this article do not help Canadian IKEA workers get a fair wage
- gaadd33 12y agoGiven its about Ikea in the United States, why would it help Canadian workers? Plus doesn't Canada have a much better minimum wage in the first place?
- jeffreyrogers 12y ago10.76 x 40 x 52 = $22,380.80 Pretty appalling.
- lotharbot 12y agoI have a wife and a son and we did fine on my salary of $21,000 last year. There are a lot of parts of the country where that's a perfectly viable wage.
- notduncansmith 12y agoThat seems nuts to me. I significantly more than that, and it still feels like we're scraping by. Our location doesn't have a particularly high cost of living, either.
- lotharbot 12y agoone man's "barely scraping by" is another man's "I've got everything I need". I've got a house, reliable transportation, health care, food, a great school for my kid, and lots of family nearby. My cost of living would go way up if I ate out more, bought all new furniture, or spent big money on activities for my son, and then it would seem like I needed a lot more money.
- existencebox 12y agoI think what he was saying though, which I'd agree with, is that in most places if we assume a minimum livable wage to be ~10$ (which is a generous statement, I think), one barely comes out at ~20k (napkin math) yearly. Yes, you may be able to cover the necessities, but you mentioned healthcare, if you had an unlucky year where you were responsible for the maximum of your copay, that would probably put you into savings? Or if there was an "act of god" that wasn't covered under, say, car insurance (to give an example that nailed me recently, a hailstorm), there's another few k. As some sort of point to all this, the discussion on livable wage needs to encompass the fact that there are some big holes in our financial system that people can still fall through that will hamstring you for years to come, even if the base wage is technically livable.
- SilasX 12y ago>So what would be enough to live on? That would of course depend on where someone lived, and how much that place costs. And so Glasmeier rounded up some of her best graduate students to create, basically, a giant spreadsheet. They loaded it up with the best regional data available, from government and industry surveys, on costs for housing, food, child care, medical expenses, and transportation. I don't get it: she "avoids tourist traps" (a few paragraphs up) to find the places people really shop. But when estimating cost of living, she uses detached government aggregates rather than finding how people actually make their wages work, meaning she would necessarily miss eg how grandma provides most of the daycare services. I would think that the primary question in building out a living wage figure would be to ask how people are currently pulling it off on low wages, rather than extrapolate one's own life through some categorized figures.
- nhebb 12y agoMost likely the professor is pulling together whatever information she can with the resources she has. Can you imagine how big of a ground effort it would take to collect the information you described?
- SilasX 12y agoAbsolutely! That's why I wasn't criticizing the missing country-wide tabulation of such data, but trying to reconcile its absence with the praise of the researcher at the beginning, and how she collects another kind of data on the ground. Of course, that could just be stuff getting scrambled by the PR machine. My main criticism was this: if you're going to calculate a living wage, wouldn't the number one question be "How are people currently living on their wages?" Even knowing how one family pulls it off would be tremendously informative, and from that point you could figure the cost of the missing amenities. In contrast, the researcher's approach is to assume they buy everything from some model budget (probably based indirectly on her team's own lives), but less of it.
- kome 12y agoFederal minimum wage is below the survival line (without children), as showed by Amy Glasmeier. So low, that corporations have to find what is the real lower bound for the survival of their workforce. (Not even reproduction of the workforce, just its survival) Isn't that absurd? Let rise the federal minimum wage now.
- lotharbot 12y agoThere are lots of people who work but don't need (and aren't worth) survival wages -- high school kids who still live with their parents, for example. Should they be unemployed and therefore unable to gain real-world working experience because they're not worth survival wages? There are lots of others who need, but aren't worth, survival wages -- like my autistic friend. He partly supports himself working, with the rest coming from government programs. Should he be unemployed and therefore be 100% government-supported instead of 25% government-supported? It's good that minimum wage and living wage are not the same thing. Let's stop confusing the two.
- FLUX-YOU 12y ago>There are lots of others who need, but aren't worth, survival wages That's got to be such a small (and unfortunate) pool of people that I'd happily send some taxpayer money to meet the article's living wage number. We can probably pay for it by not buying another single jet next year or something. And honestly I'm not trustworthy of corporations' judgments of low end labor worth anyway. For one thing, you can work at extremely busy stores and get paid the same as workers at the very dead stores in the next county over because they use blanket values for these positions.
- lotharbot 12y ago> "I'd happily send some taxpayer money" We already do that. Remember how some people were criticizing Wal-Mart because some of its workers were also receiving government benefits? When you set the "minimum" to be 100% of a living wage, then people have to make the jump from pure-government-funded to pure-self-funded without any intermediate stepping stones. They have to show up and be ready to produce at a level that completely supports themselves on day one. Whereas a minimum that's set at 50% (or 25% or 75%) of living wage means someone can show up and be semi-productive and earn some of their own way, and then either step up to 100%, or stay at the level they're at as long as they need to based on their own abilities.
- afafsd 12y agoThe wonderful thing about the free market is that you don't have to use magical algorithms to determine the "correct" price of things, you just set the price you're willing to buy/sell at, see how many takers there are, and then adjust the price upwards/downwards. If you need to hire twenty people, and you find twenty people willing to do the job for eight bucks an hour, and you can't find twenty people willing to do it for seven bucks fifty an hour, then eight bucks an hour is the correct price. It's not that tricky.