California Dem Barbara Lee defends call for $50 federal minimum wage: 'Just barely enough'

Comments

• morgan_423@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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