If you do the math, it's pretty stark. If you worked 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, you would earn $13,624. Not a single day off. No sick days. No health care. No pension...
Here is how the political and economic system has been ripping off workers. Once upon a time, if you worked hard and were productive , that translated directly into your paycheck. Not anymore. From 2000 to roughly 2007, productivity went up 20 percent--while the median hourly wage was up 3 percent. My friend Joel Rogers,director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, made a stunning calculation not too long ago: Had wages tracked productivity as they have over the past 30 years, “median family income in the U.S. would be about $20,000 higher today than it is.” Check this out: Taking into account productivity, the minimum wage should be $19.12—which would make it almost 50 percent above today’s median wage (not to mention the pathetic $6.55).
Please do follow the link and read the entire piece.
3 comments:
The point of a minimum wage is not for people to maintain it for their lives, but to use it as a starting place and to work forward from there. To push for a living wage would have one of two effects (very likely both)- either drive labor away from the United States or cause the cost of products from jobs which require a living wage to skyrocket. A living wage is great, and frankly the minimum wage should be indexed to account for inflation and change in the CPI, but a living wage ignores the current realities of business in the United States.
The "point" of the minimum wage is really irrelevant to this discussion. The fact of the matter is many people are forced to rely on a minimum wage job beyond a simple starting place. Those people enjoy a yearly income of $13,000 if they work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year - no time off. There's no justice in that.
As for driving labor away, I'm really beyond the point of caring too much for such claims. As I've blogged about here corporations who outsourced labor to China are now leaving China as wages reach $1 an hour. Corporations will always complain about wages, even if employees are little more than indentured servants. We're not going to keep more jobs in the United States by forcing our workers into poverty. We should instead look at a living wage to combat poverty and use other policy prescriptions to try and keep jobs at home.
As for the costs of goods and services, yes they would increase. I'm again not entirely moved by an argument that fast food will cost more so we should relegate our working class to poverty. That seems to me to be a pretty amoral policy position.
You're not talking about paying 3 dollars more for a big mac meal (which is currently about 5-6 bucks) you're talking about paying 3-4x as much for it. And forget the luxury items like fast food, everything is going to be significantly more expensive, and the fact is that those at the bottom of the pay scale are just going to be right where they are now- bottom of the pay scale and everything will continue to be more expensive.
There are far better ways to combat poverty than simply increasing the minimum wage- getting people better education and better access to opportunity is a far more effective way of raising people out of the minimum wage than just increasing it and letting people end up languishing at the minimum wage.
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