The classic definition is the wage needed to cover the basic needs of the family including things like rent, childcare, transportation, etc. I would go one further and say that the family needs to not be living paycheque to paycheque. They should be able to save for the future, go out once in a while, educate their children, save and pay for university, and advance themselves. They should be able to live.
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damnedfurry@lemmy.world 2 months agoThere should be no profits, no bonuses, and no dividends until every worker (not employee, it doesn’t matter what your relationship with the company is if they benefit from your labour) is making at least a living wage with full benefits.
To get anywhere, you must define “living wage” concretely. You can use variables of course, but without at least a ‘formula’, “living wage” is just a meaningless, unachievable talking point. You at least have to know what you’re aiming at, to have any hope of achieving it–you’ll never get anywhere just saying “living wage”, because ‘enough to live on’ does not nearly have the same definition for everyone. So, what’s the baseline, in your view?
Example: ‘the living wage should be enough money to afford [list of things] with $X leftover for discretionary spending/saving.’
MapleEngineer@lemmy.world 2 months ago
damnedfurry@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The classic definition is the wage needed to cover the basic needs of the family including things like rent
Rent where? Rent costs vary wildly.
childcare
What sort of childcare, and how many children is it meant to support? Or do you get $X per child? And if so, is there a maximum number of children, where having more won’t get you more money?
transportation
Over what distance? And how, owned vehicle or public transportation? If owned vehicle, what kind of vehicle? Used/new? Price ranges for vehicles also vary wildly.
I would go one further and say that the family needs to not be living paycheque to paycheque.
That entails what amount of extra money? And what do you do about people who willfully choose to spend it instead of saving it? Are you aware that in the US, 1 in 4 of people earning $150k or more live paycheck to paycheck? Just because one has money to save doesn’t mean they’re going to do it.
go out once in a while
Again, far too vague. How often? And how much money does ‘going out’ cost? You’d have to figure both of those out, and multiply them by each other, to ensure this goal is met.
educate their children
Taxpayer-funded public school already covers this. Unless you feel everyone should be entitled to the cost of private schooling?
save and pay for university
University tuition is another massive variable, so you’d need to decide how much is given for tuition. Also, if someone does not go to college, do they not get that part of the money?
and advance themselves.
The vaguest criterion yet. It’s pretty much impossible to say if a given minimum wage satisfies ‘everyone can advance themselves’.
As anyone can see, this “classic” definition is still full of major holes, and not nearly complete enough to even conceptualize a goal such that progress toward it can even be measured. Just saying “living wage” over and over will never get anyone anywhere.
Disgracefulone@discuss.online 2 months ago
Okay, but the point is - more bro.
You can argue til you’re blue in the face and you’re not wrong but it’s besides the point, until they actually fucking agree to move the posts in the right direction.
Then work out all the details you want homie.
damnedfurry@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Okay, but the point is - more bro.
And my point is that without even being able to say how much more, not only do you know when you’ve reached the goal, but to opponents you come off as greedy and entitled with “I don’t know, just gimme more bro”.
That shit is just not going to work, ever.
MapleEngineer@lemmy.world 2 months ago
K
Pika@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
the definition of living wage is already defined by MIT
They actually have a pretty decent website that calculates it for you here
damnedfurry@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.
Assuming 1 childless worker, got a list of things here (would like to know more about how these numbers were arrived at, but I’ll take them at their word).
Food, medical, housing, transportation, civic (apparently this is recreation etc.) Internet/mobile, and “other” (saving?)
I looked up an area near me. They give annual values, but I, like most Americans I imagine, can relate more easily to monthly costs, so divided everything by 12. So here’s what MIT says a “living wage” should pay for, per month:
Food: $406. That seems like a LOT for a single adult. My roommate and I spend less than this for the both of us and we buy groceries together, so I know how much our combined cost is.
Medical: $276. Can’t really comment in either direction about this, fact is that medical costs vary SO much from person to person, and even for the same person at different stages of life, that I’ll just give the benefit of the doubt that that’s the correct cost on average.
Housing: $1615. My rent is less than this, even if you don’t consider that it’s half of what it would be if I lived alone. I could see this being more or less accurate for my area for someone just moving in someplace.
Transportation: $897. What the fuck? If you have shitty credit AND you financed an expensive car for a shitty rate, then maybe, but NOBODY should be paying anything close to this a month for a car, even if you get gas weekly.
Civic: $251. That’s significant, $60+ every week? Doing what?
Internet/mobile: $117. That sounds fine, assuming middle of the road Internet and standard mobile plan.
Other: $368. What can you really say about “other”?
So, other than a few of those categories being WAY out of proportion imo, the biggest issue I see here is that MIT is giving different, separate “living wages” for 3 categories of people (1 alone, 2 with 1 working, and 2 with both working (why isn’t this just the first category doubled?)), and for 0 to 3 children. So, some issues I’m seeing:
It’s one thing to force a company to pay a worker more if they have a kid(s), and/or live with someone who doesn’t work, but you can’t force a company to hire these people. Considering that the value of the labor itself does not increase, this seems like it’d obviously create massive incentive against hiring anyone other than single childless individuals.
Typically an employer is not even entitled to know such personal details about a worker/applicant in the first place. But if we put these into effect, they would have to, in order to know which category you fall into, which leads back into 1 above
There is a LOT of work that does not generate nearly that amount of value (in the case above, around $27/hour assuming 40hr work week) for the business, but are things the business can’t function without. It’s easy to say “if you can’t afford to pay every single one of these positions this living wage, then you can’t afford to be in business”, but the fact is that this would place huge obstacles in the way of a small business getting up and running to any real degree. Megacorporations have pockets deep enough to eat the cost though, and so they’ll become even better at driving small business to extinction than they already are, and hasten us toward a society where they’re the only real game in town. And I shouldn’t have to list the reasons that an ‘employer monopoly’ is a REALLY bad state of affairs for the working population.
“Just increase the minimum wage to a living wage” is not the ‘duh, just do it’ solution many claim it to be.
BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world 2 months ago
You make good points, but I have to disagree with #3. If a business cannot exist without a certain type of labor, then that labor is responsible for 100% of the business’s produced value. Yes, this might result in a $45 burger and fries, but we’ve been coasting on exploitation for decades and have been sheltered from the true cost of goods and services.
Plus, there are a plethora of jobs that are overdue for being replaced by robots, but haven’t yet because exploiting humans is cheaper. If someone who mops the floor gets a $35/hr wage, we might finally get a commercial-grade mopping robot that doesn’t get the damn mop head caught on every chair leg and fridge wheel.
Pika@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I’m mobile so I can’t check those numbers, but they leave the sources they got for the calculations they provided, by category here
I know the numbers are pretty on point for for poverty vs living wage for my area, but like any actual research studies YMMV, but they do have sources of why they have the numbers they do, and they are by verified/reliable sources