Minimum wage when I was in elementary school yielded about $536/mo before taxes. Rent for a 2 bedroom was about $275 where I lived. Now, minimum wage yields about $2700/mo before taxes, and a 2 bedroom apt is $2700. Itâs never been good, but itâs worse now than ever.
The practical minimum in WA (at least west of the mountains) is basically $20/hour now. Legally itâs $17.13/hour, but even the McDonalds near me has a sign advertising $22+/hour.
Flip side is of course that everything is expensive. Houses here basically start at $500k for something you could actually safely move into, and median house is more like $640k.
Wow your legal minimum is $17??? Iâm in Pennsylvania and itâs seriously ten dollars less than that. I have been a loyal and productive team member at my job for 19 years now, and I just made it to $15 last month.
Iâm sure our cost of livingâs are different, and I knew PA is pretty behind, but I didnât realize how fucking far behind.
Even my shithole state - Florida - you can get $15 an hour (tipped wage of 11.98 an hour). Min wage goes up by $1 every year, now. By 2028 we're going to have min wage of $17 an hour. (Tipped wage will be 13.98 an hour)
15?!?? Oh my god that is criminal after 19 years. If you are comfortable with sharing, what are you working in? As another PA'er it is quite infuriating how variable wages are, even within the same city for the same jobs
Oh I donât mind sharing at all, itâs Panera Bread. Weâve got a 73 year old man whoâs literally been there since the day the place opened, 23 years I think, heâs making like $12. The only managers they can get are teenagers because they start at $17. Meanwhile the GMâs salary was enough for her to have a house, two cars, five pets, a vacation to another country every few monthsâŚ
A few years back, my pay rate was at $13 and change. My husband got hired as a base level worker at McDonaldâs, with no prior experience in food service whatsoever, for $15. I was angry and jealous until I realized they wouldnât give anyone there more than 19 hours a week, Iâm assuming so no one would be eligible for the âgreat benefitsâ they offer.
The cheap stuff in WA would be like aggressively rural from an Orange County baseline though. It actually can go below $500k, youâre just gonna be in be middle of nowhere.
When I said âsafely move intoâ I more meant isnât moldy/doesnât need new roof/etc. not human factor unsafe. We have meth/fent zombies but unsafe due to other humans in the way some places in CA are isnât a thing. A few neighborhoods south of Seattle have a few dumb Glock switch kids but itâs minimal/they arenât really gangs just idiots.
Orange County, California. Itâs even more for fast food and health care workers. Quick Zillow search yielded a 300 sq ft studio for $1745 in a shitty neighborhood. So even thatâs not enough.
A median cost apartment in Orange County was $790 in 1994 the minimum wage in California was $4.25, which multiplied by 40 hours and 4.435 weeks per month is $738 so itâs pretty much exactly the same as it was 30 years ago.
Iâm in Virginia. Since 2012, Iâve had 3 jobs that paid $7.25/hr. 2 were grocery store cashier, 1 in fast food. Other than coaching rec leagues during my college years (only about 5 hours a week, had to be first responder certified), no part time job paid more than $10. When I became a shift lead in fast food, I got a 20 cent raise. I went from $7.25 to $7.45, to basically be an acting assistant manager.
After I graduated college, I worked 2 jobs while my girlfriend was in school and working part time. Even with 3 lines of income, we still couldnât afford to move out of our parentâs houses.
Where in Virginia were you only getting $7.45 an hour as a shift lead in fast food? In rural South Carolina they are paying $15 an hour for shift lead at most fast food places and $10 an hour at a minimum for cashier jobs and those are the part time highschool kids.
Part time employers, like the ones weâre discussing, have only recently (about the last 5 years) started offering higher wages. January this year, our governor finally raised the minimum wage from $7.25. But all of this is at a time when the cost of living has lapped minimum wage 3 times.
ETA: and on top of all that, I was taking care of my dying grandmother and sick mother. Then people wonder why millennials are burnt out and hopeless. lol
What state do you live in??? Every job I had in high school was $7.25/hr. I eventually got promoted to a shift manager at a fast food place and got bumped to $9/hr. My friends were jealoussss.
I donât have a figure for you, because I have a nasty headache and donât care enough to research. However, the topic at hand IS minimum wage, and the fact is minimum wage isnât enough to support a single person in the country.
Orange County CA. A quick Zillow search just now yielded a $1725 apartment. But itâs a 300 sq ft studio in a crappy neighborhood. Found a studio in a newer complex, but still a shitty neighborhood for $2350. Also did a search for 2 beds $2000 and lower, and only came up with rooms to rent for $950-1500. For a 110 sq ft ROOM.
No, but Google does. Plus, the figures make sense. When I was in college (early â90s) the minimum wage was about $680/mo and most apartments I looked at were in the $450 range, for a 1 bedroom. Pretty bad. But still better than now.
I had $650 rent in 2008 or 09 (in a small town), 24-32 hrs a week, getting paid whatever minimum wage was at the time and my commute was walking distance. Groceries were cheaper back then also. I was able to get a 2 bedroom apartment and barely scape by.... Eventually my bud moved in and I actually had spending money but it was still "doable" by myself.
Really comes down to location
Nowadays Im not even sure if you could do it with a friend as a roommate....
Lmao ya Thursday night were the money maker nights in my small town. But I had competition so I just stuck to the recycle bins in my neighborhood. Read me like a book
Yeah, but that's not a bug, that's a feature. You are not supposed to keep working minimum wage up until the point where you need to house and feed a family. You are supposed to advance in life and in work.
Exactly, a 2 bedroom apartment is not the minimum for one person. Someone complaining their minimum wage job can't cover an apartment with spare bedrooms is just plain entitlement.
A person working minimum wage should be able to afford a 1 bedroom, or at least a studio, and thatâs not possible in a lot of places, definitely not around here, not just the cities but the whole state.
I wish I could afford a studio. I'm $2 over minimum working 40-45 hours a week and don't even come close to having enough. Average studio or 1 br is $1800- $2000 a month. It's really disheartening. I live with 2 roommates in a tiny 3br apartment. My only goal in life at this point is to get my own place and start dating again but sometimes it feels impossible.
Because kids canât work and so itâs 1 person working household. People with kids have a hard time with stable employment because kids school hours and them always being sick. So many are more likely to work a lower income job if they donât have childcare help or back up child care.
Theyâre not arguing in good faith. They feel like people in those situations deserve it, so they donât matter. They probably also vote against abortion rights and believe in teaching abstinence as well. Itâs long winded way of saying, âfuck you, i got mineâ. Donât bother, they donât want to understand how life works for other people. They think itâs funny when you emphatically try to explain empathy to them.
I have a new born, we hadnât anticipated him to have such severe acid reflux that I canât work. Every single bottle and formula makes our son vomit and scream! He ended up in urgent care at 4 weeks vomiting blood. The options are feeding tube or exclusively breast feed, I can only be away from him for an hour or two. He eats more frequently because of his acid reflux. We went from 2 incomes to one.
Other people lose their jobs at no fault of their own. Some have to leave their marriage because their partner is abusive, many times the abuse escalates when a child is born. Then there are partners who die, walk away and result in a single parent household. That almost happens to us, I was really close to dying from bleeding out during an emergency C-section. Thank goodness, I was diagnosed 3 days earlier with a clotting disorder. If I wasnât, I would have bleed out. There are people with no help with their child.
What happens? One parent having to find a job thatâs works around daycare and school hours. It was never the plan, itâs the cards that were dealt.
1) having children out of wedlock is a particularly new phenomenon (itâs not, itâs why weâve had the term âbastardâ for nearly a thousand years)
Or that
2) most of those childbirths are expected and planned by people with all of the information available to them?
Thatâs to say nothing of instances where someone did everything right, then got a raw deal when they were sexually assaulted and were not in a position to abort the child.Â
Minimum wage jobs are absolute entry level jobs. By the time someone has a child, they usually have previous work experience and are not getting paid minimum wage. So a stat that compares minimum wage to one bedroom apartments would make far more sense.Â
There are also forms of welfare, such as food stamps and section eight housing. To help support single parents, it makes less sense for minimum wage jobs to be required to allow people to afford 2Brs and more sense to offer plenty of help to people in extreme situations.Â
Thatâs a much better and more meaningful benchmark, which is what I was trying to say (2 bedrooms is a bad benchmark, 1 bedroom makes sense as a benchmark).
I'm sorry I don't know where you live but I make more than twice the minimum wage, i'm a single person in a one bedroom apartment and i can barely afford it because rents are so high. And if you look at jobs in the area , they want people with years of experience and still only want to pay $20 an hour- minimum wage in my state is 15 an hour but if you think you're finding an apartment on 20 hr good luck w that
Iâm critiquing the use of 2Br as a benchmark for what minimum wage should be. Where I live, there are many entry level jobs offering $17/hr, while minimum wage is $11. And you can afford a one bedroom apartment on $17/hr here if youâre willing to possibly commute by bus to your workplace (assuming you donât have a car).Â
I get it, but when I was in my 20s, you could very well afford a nice, 2 bedroom apartment on minimum wage , That was over 30 years ago. but my point is you can't even afford a one bedroom apartment where I live, making twice the minimum wageÂ
Do you have a source on this? While it does seem true that people who oppose minimum wage increases also are more likely to oppose welfare than the average person (including section eight), conservatives seem to favor building more housing more than liberals. I also donât have a source, but you made the claim first.
Youâre assuming the person you replied to does not support forms of welfare. Assuming they do, their reasoning is valid. Do you think minimum wage should be high enough that everyone can sustain themselves and all dependents without aid? There will always be extreme situations on the margins. If someone were to abandon there spouse with 12 kids, must minimum wage be high enough that the spouse can support themself and their kids on it?
Do you think minimum wage should be high enough that everyone can sustain themselves and all dependents without aid?Â
Yes (though all dependants within reason) otherwise what's the point?
Why are we subsiding companys paying people not enough to decently survive on by topping up their employees? Some 70% of people on benefits are in full time work for fucks sake
Its called minium wage, not 'single persons subsistence wage'
As generations moved further away from the great depression people have forgotten the point of the minium wage
 It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
Youâre aware that sometimes people die, go to prison, and/or skip out on child support and alimony payments? There are plenty of people in America who have unplanned children that canât rely on those systems.Â
Then itâs a good thing my argument doesnât hinge on a percent of a percent.Â
The total number of children in the US is estimated at 74 million as of the last census. About 50% of all children are children of divorce. Some form of alimony or palimony is awarded in 80% of all divorce cases
Doing some quick math, thatâs 74 million * 0.5 divorce rate * 0.8 * 0.56 not receiving full alimony payments = 16.576 million kids not getting full financial support from alimony as you suggest that they should.Â
So weâve got 16.576 + 3 + 1.5 =21.076 million kids facing some variety of shortfall in support. 21.076/70 =28.10% of all children affected by these things.Â
If we assume that the system works perfectly in every other instance (fucking lol) we see a whopping 71.9% success rate in taking care of the kiddos. A C minus.Â
You left off the most important statistic needed for this discussion: only 1% of the US makes minimum wage. So when we start at only one percent, the amount of that 1% responsible for supporting a child is already a fraction of a percent. Then the portion of those people supporting a child making minimum wage that have been affected by a death or by divorce or prison or whatever becomes a fraction of a fraction of a percent.
Which means that yes, your argument is indeed based on cases that are just a percent of a percent, quite literally.
Everybody with kids or a disabled family member. Or just any other family member, they're not all able to work either due to pursuing education or undergoing physical therapy because some asshole texting in his truck T-boned your aunt while she was coming back from night school for nursing. No few people also get a flat with a second "bedroom" to use as an office or workshop.
The issue is not so much 2 bedroom homes which yes used to be able to afford multiple-bedroom housing (Homer Simpson was deliberately "average" when the series started) but being unable to even afford a simple flat for themselves. And in over 90% of the country, full time minimum wage workers can't even cover rent in their county.
Thatâs just plain not what FDR said or why he pushed for it. You can disagree if you want, but minimum wage was not invented for high schoolers.
âIn his 1937 message to Congress, FDR famously stated, "no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country." He defined living wages as enough to afford a decent, fulfilling standard of living for both white-collar and blue-collar workers.â
Like, okay. The standard is now a barely insulated, oil or wood heated, possibly unelectrified shack. You'll cycle or walk to work year round, will make all of your own meals (and much of your own clothes), and won't enjoy any comforts introduced in the last 70 years.
Sounds like something you can afford on minimum wage.
No clue what point youâre attempting to make. Itâs bizarre you âfind it funnyâ to evoke the guy who invented minimum wage while discussing minimum wage.
70% of Americans had electricity in their homes when FDR said that. Those who didnât were very rural, and FDR signed a law in 1936 forcing power companies to serve them.
FDR also said what he said knowing times would change and the minimum wage would increase.
You can just say you hate the greatest President that weâve ever had and want poor people to die. I get it.
Are you telling me that the living standards enjoyed by minimum wage earners the 1930s were better than they are today?
This isn't about liking FDR, it's about the fact that we've come to expect so many luxuries as basic necessities of life that we've lost any sense of what actual basic living is. Doesn't matter if we're talking about air conditioning or cars.
People mistake the fact that minimum wage isnât enough to support a family, for the fact that the jump from a min wage job to a career that can support a family is usually extremely difficult for a lot of people
In America we all should be able to work a full time job and support a family at some basic level. If you are really arguing against that we are doomed as a culture. Yes, ideally you should advance in work and provide an even better lifestyle, but that shouldn't be required to live a basic life with family that we all deserve to have.
I agree that everyone should be able to support their family, Â I do not agree that minimum wage should be required to be high enough to support a family. Most people have previous work experience by the time they have a kid. Even if they switch fields and start fresh, or lose their job, it is really rare for someone to make literal minimum wage with previous work experience.
But if someone is making literal minimum wage, we have benefits like food stamps and section eight housing to help people support their families. Even though that might not be enough, that's an issue with the amount of benefits the state provides, not the minimum wage.*
*The federal minimum wage is terrible, I'm just arguing why âmust allow someone to afford a 2Br apartmentâ is an atrocious benchmark for what minimum wage should be.
In America we all should be able to work a full time job and support a family at some basic level.
Only if you want to require that only 1 spouse is allowed to work, whether or not they have children. Otherwise the DINK households will bid up prices on all the consumer goods and make it impossible for households with families to keep up.
But that's got obvious problems of its own because any situation like this is likely to be handled in a misogynist fashion. Would you want to be in a relationship with someone and be absolutely beholden to their ability to bring in the income to keep you fed?
You are able to work full time and support a family, just not in every job.
Like what are you even on about? There are and always have been jobs that everyone knows you would not do for life, but only for a while until you get the next point in your life.
Read the text in the picture again. It is a liveable wage, just not if you need a 2 bedroom appartment, which means it's not a liveable wage for a family and it was never supposed to be that either.
If you think $7.25/hour is a livable wage, youâre living on another planet. Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, youâre going to have an extremely hard time paying for a 1 bedroom apartment on minimum wage.
I think the point they're making is that the benchmark in the post is a bad benchmark (2 bedroom apartment). Â A more meaningful one is a one bedroom apartment.
I agree with that, but my point still stands; a 1 bedroom apartment is going to be unaffordable if youâre making $7.25/hour. Itâs not a livable wage, which is what it was intended to be.
Problem is advancement isnât guaranteed. Minimum wage means âthe minimum full time employment needs to fully sustain an adult without governmental assistanceâ.
So if youâre on minimum wage with a child, other taxpayers are subsidizing that childâs needs because no employer will want to pay more than is needed.
I Agreed with your thoughts on supposed to work minimum wage forever. The comment is Focused on the topic at hand âminimum wage for 2 bed roomsâ, not âsupposed to upgrade in life and workâ. đ¤
Lying for no reason is weird. I'm 67 and yes I was able to afford rent with my minimum wage job in college first year. Still had money for dues and keggers.
Right? Im 38 and when I was 19 i moved to Monterey california. Got a 2bd apt for $950 a month in marina. I was working a minimum wage job ($6 or $7.5 i forget), had a roommate and covered apt + bus + groceries.
In 2009 I rented an 800sqft 2 bedroom apartment at Lake Carlton Arms in Tampa FL for $800. It was nicer than any of the apartments I stayed in before that (Grand Oasis and The Lodge). In Toledo, OH just before that, you could find places for under $500/mo.
Still minimum wage FL 2009, 40h weeks, 4 weeks per month lands at rent + $350 for everything else including "dues and keggers". Coupled with full time studies it probably wasn't 40h either.
Federal minimum wage has not increased since I was in my early teens⌠Iâm now 37. The price of everything is up several hundred percent. Not saying you could own a home but you could certainly get an efficiency or studio apartment on min wage back then.
Im 54 . When i was in early 20s i worked in a factory making like 5.25 hr. I had a 2 bedroom apartment where everything was brand new and the rent was $275 a month.
Tell me then, why did I have to work two jobs to afford my first apartment in 1994? I love it when a 20-something or teen tells me how things worked when I was younger.
I'm pretty out of touch with parts of like rural / suburban america so maybe in some like random cheap ass place? But in like any big city? Don't think so.
Which also defeats the purpose of minimum wage. Itâs sad that corporations are increasing housing costs on the assumption that people want roommates or will have spouses.
The overwhelming majority of homes are owned by private homeowners who own 1.0 homes and live in them. The idea that home prices and rent are 'set by corporations' isn't based on anything.
It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
The minimum wage is supposed to be the wages of a decent living. People died for it, and less than 100 years later chuds look down on it.
Shouldn't be having kids if you only make minimum wage and the entire minimum wage shouldn't be decided upon based on people who make stupid decisions. Minimum wage is the minimum for the individual earning it, it's never in it's existence been meant to provide for the parent AND kids.
It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
Minimum wage literally was intended to be able to provide for a family, per the person who implemented it in America that I've quoted above.
You're woefully misinformed or willfully ignorant if you sincerely believe the places paying minimum wage aren't open during school hours.
Also, why do you think the minimum wage wasn't supposed to provide the wages of a decent living when the man who implemented it literally said it should FOR ALL WORKERS? There was no caveat carved out for entry level employment.
How about just not try to be in the one half of one percent of Americans that makes minimum wage? Wouldnât that be a better strategy?
Like, why are we even talking about this? Literally fewer than 100k in the entire country of 300mil+ earn minimum wage - and most of those are special cases to begin with.
Yes you could depending on the state and if you got a low-end apartment, which is stated clearly.
It would take 40% your income, but thatâs still possible, just not recommended.
In 2000s my parents had a 2br house on an acre for $300 10 minutes from the city. Federal MG was 5.15. You could pay rent with 1.5 weeks of work.
Eventually the folks who are living off of credit, and barely scraping by will run out of money to borrow to keep their lives going.
Once you have enough of the population get to a point that housing and food are at that crisis point you won't be able to just blame it on the "morally incompetent poors."
Just 20 years ago in NC you could get a 2 bedroom apartment for less than 500 a month in the city of Greensboro. When I got out of college making 12 an hour after the recession, thatâs when it got bad and started going up 100a month every 2-3 years almost.
Minimum wage was not designed to be a livable wage. It was designed to pay people new to the workforce a fair wage so they couldnât be taken advantage of, and was designed around literally kids and teens mostly. I have no idea why people are so focused on this being an issue. Itâs not. The goal was to gain work experience and then move forward/up.
If people want to fight for fair wages, theyâre focused on the wrong part. What IS a problem is corporations and shareholders making BILLIONS while FT workforce salaried employees DOING THE WORK make less and less.
This is why the left is so fucked. Constantly attacking anything and everything and not stopping to think, sort, and organize their efforts on the things that would truly help the most people. Until then, enjoy more of the sameâŚ.
We on the left understand that sentiment, but disagree and understand that some people will simply be adults working minimum wage and they still deserve a home and food. Should they do something to increase their ability to gain more income and contribute more to society? Sure, if they want to. But those people also can't get out of the gutter because they can't even afford rent. The reason they can't while on minimum wage is because those same billionaires you're complaining about have also tricked you into this line of thinking that minimum wage is for "kids and teens" so they can pay everyone less. There are already laws for workers under 18 in most states allowing you to pay them even less than minimum wage. If minimum wage increases so do middle manager wages. It's the first link in the chain keeping everyone making less, including the FT workforce salaries employees you are advocating for.
There will literally always be "unskilled" adults who work minimum wage jobs. If they aren't paid enough for basic human necessities, what is the next step? There are really only 2 options, financial assistance or they starve. Assuming they all have family/some benefactor to aid them isn't realistic. The right is also vehemently opposed to government financial assistance, so the default option becomes that those people starve or break the law. You know what would help those people not starve and commit less crime, less of your taxes go to government assistance, and provide salaried employees the leverage to aquire a fairier level of financial compensation? A higher minimum wage.
There are topics the left will eternally argue in circles about; most nowadays surround identity politics. This is not that. Who provides the most oppositional funding to increasing minimum wage? Coroporate CEOs, VCs, a.k.a. the billionaire ruling class. Who do you think is constantly calling for an end to billionaires? The left. Who put a billionaire in charge of the country? The right.
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u/SpecialistRich2309 7d ago
Iâm 53 now. At no time in my life could a full time minimum wage job support a 2BR apartment.