this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
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This sounds high to most people, but if the minimum wage had kept up with its inflation-adjusted peak (1968), it'd be somewhere in the range of $31 to $32 an hour right now.
It never caught back up afterward, and has been severely harpooned in the years since, shifting unfathomable quantities of money to the wealthiest people. And it's not just minimum wage workers... when you sink the wage and salary floor, nearly everyone made less than they should have been.
This is the main roadblock to getting the issue fixed. People making more than minimum but not much more than the increased amount compared their salary and work to minimum wage jobs, never considering that their pay would be raised as a side effect. If people can get nearly the same pay for what they perceive as less work then companies would have to raise wages to keep current and hire new staff going forwards.
Yes other product prices would raise as well, people have more money to spend, but all evidence shows that those would not be the same rate as the wage increase.
It's the classic, "fuck you, I got mine", attitude so prevalent today in our society.
I have a coworker that will bring up how places like Target are starting to offer a minimum wage almost comparable to his wage as a engineering field technician. “It’s fucked up, I mean imagine if they raised it to your wage as a college grad, how would you feel? Random teenagers making as much as you!”
“It IS fucked up, but not for the reason you think. They SHOULD be making more money… but so should the rest of us!”
He usually just mutters to himself and drops it. Propaganda is a helluva drug.
Where did your values come from? I found minimum wage for 1968 at $1.60, which is about $15 an hour today. It's about 45% lower real wages today.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted, $1.60 in January of 1968 is equivalent to $14.47 in 2024. Maybe they're also accounting for the uncompensated increased efficiency of modern workers?
Regardless, it's a legitimate question and getting rebuffed for legitimate questions is a pretty Reddit thing to do. Come on everyone, we're better than this.
This thirty something an hour assertion has been going around for years. I've long since stopped bothering with the inflation calculators.
I was born in the early seventies, and witnessed that financial struggle existed even back then.
Yes, getting a house was more realistic (double digit mortgage interest rates notwithstanding). If you could snag a good job. The biggest difference I can remember is that a whole lot of blue collar jobs were good jobs.
Just about all of us in my age group remember food stamps and watered down frozen orange juice to stretch the food dollar and only getting five dollars of gas because filling the tank was way too ambitious.
The rose colored glasses of past financial wellness are heavily focused on the post war white new middle class that lasted what, twenty years?
I should note that I spent the seventies sharing a bedroom with my sister in a two bedroom rented duplex unit. Sharing a bedroom was quite common at the time. Even middle class houses were generally in the 1,100 square foot range, not the 3,000 square foot behemoths we've come to view as normal today.
... and $50 would be 60% more than that?