In 2025, the federal minimum wage is officially a “poverty wage.” The annual earnings of a single adult working full-time, year-round at $7.25 an hour now fall below the poverty threshold of $15,650 (established by the Department of Health and Human Services guidelines). The limitations of how the federal government calculates poverty understate how far the minimum wage is from economic security for workers and their families.
“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
THAT was the actual reason the minimum wage was established in the first place. And businesses have been fighting against it ever since - through a combination of lobbying (bribing) politicians and propaganda designed to convince people that those who earn the minimum wage “deserve” to suffer.
Instead of replying to each comment, one big reply here.
Minimum wage works for jobs where people are underpaid because they outcompete each other and drive prices down. It’s essentially a forced union for unskilled workers which is fair because they don’t have the mental capacity to organize themselves.
But listening closely to Roosevelt, ‘any right to continue’ means that those businesses that don’t supress the wages cease to exist. This ends poverty because those people become unemployed and thus don’t count as low income anymore.
As long as there are illegal immigrants who earn less than legal residents, the minimum wage is not really the minimum wage. To be fair, illegal immigrants go to California, New York and Florida while states without own mimimum income laws are mostly southern states.
The real probelm is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour
If there were enough jobs, there would be no competition to go below the poverty line.
Additionally, the main problem must be the housing market. Create cheap housing and huge parts of the income don’t go to rent. It’s almost funny that the cheap workers who work in construction cannot build cheap housing for themselves, thanks to zoning laws.
Overall, why should minimum wage work if it would be ridiculous to do that for comfortable wages? If there were a law prohibiting any job that doesn’t pay enough to own a house with pool, we wouldn’t expect that everybody would own such a house. We would expect that the majority of people would be unemployed. Why should that be different for lowpaying jobs?
Fuck off
Yeah I stopped reading there. So condescending.
That’s part of the argument. If it is condescending to you then no minimum wage is needed because minimum wage workers could form a union.
May Day is the perfect day to educate one’s self about the history of union suppression. If you think you see a pattern, you’re right, but the reasons for the pattern have nothing to do with the workers’ abilities and everything to do with powerful people using everything in their arsenal to prevent collective action.
MLK was killed because he was trying to overcome the suppression. It is the workers’ abilities because leaders could have picked up where he was stopped. There are no leaders, which to me means, there are no abilities.
Yeah, “mental capacity” is the main hurdle for minimum wage workers to unionize… Fuck off.
What else?
Unless you’re offering me a tutoring position, I’m gonna leave it to you to figure this one out… You’ve got the internet at your fingertips. I believe in you.
You could name the main hurdle without becoming a tutor.
Of course there are reasons like no time from working two jobs or union busting behavior as seen from Starbucks or Amazon.
But that leaves enough workers who could run the union.
The main problem is convincing all minimum wage workers to join the union. Somebody has to come up with the necessary communication strategy. Whoever can do that most likely doesn’t work a minimum wage job.
Can’t tell if centrist or republican.
What’s wrong with that analysis?
Nothing, if you’re either a centrist or a republican.
And if I am not?
If not you should reexamine which political label you have chosen for yourself and see if it actually matches your contempt for all who earn wages.
It’s an analysis, not a solution. Where is the contempt? You can tell me where I am wrong but I haven’t said anything about how anybody should be treated.
You don’t have the mental capacity to see it.