You need a $150k salary to _survive_ in a 2bd apartment in SF or NYC. This study is a garbage take. The reason minimum wage workers can't afford rent is not because minimum wage is too low (because in big cities it's way above $15/h and enough to pay for food+other living expenses, minus rent) but because rent is too high. And that's caused by NIMBYism (in this case of the liberal variety but it's everywhere in America), not low minimum wage. If you literally just demolished all the shitty 2-3 floor townhomes in SF and replaced them with 20 floor towers like you see in Asian countries the entire problem is solved.
Fun fact: a Berkeley professor named Robert Reich often likes to go on on Twitter about wealth inequality but he himself protested the construction of low income housing next to his home.
And what are real wages for restaurant workers and other minimum wage tier jobs? If you take a look at SF, Oakland, NYC, or even mid-west cities like Chicago, they're higher than minimum wage by 20-25%, even at large chain restaurants.
Furthermore saying anything along the lines of - “it’s not that you don’t make enough money, it’s that things are too expensive!” Is clearly pointless.
If the same number of people are chasing the same number of apartments but making more money, the natural conclusion is that the price of the apartments will go up. If the same number of people are chasing _more_ apartments, the price of the apartments will go down (ignoring induced demand, but I think this is minor for NYC/SF).
You can't just legislate a higher wage because in the long run rents will stabilize at a higher level to compensate and all you've done is make landlords richer and fuck over every small business in the city. You need to actually have more supply.
> There is no state, county or city in the country where a full-time, minimum-wage worker working 40 hours a week can afford a two-bedroom rental, a report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition showed.
That includes SF, and it includes some unfashionable place you've probably never heard of where the rent is literally the cheapest in the nation.
This probably isn't the right thread to beat the dead horse of SF NIMBYism and push fantasies of a one-size-fits all solution of densely-packed 20 story concrete apartment blocks.
I think minimum wage is supposed to enable you to move up and not a wage where you can lead a comfortable life. It's expected that a single person on minimum wage can't get a two bedroom house.
Got it. I don't know if all jobs can give such a wage. Perhaps we need to define what it would mean to live a minimal comfortable life. I think it's fair to ensure people get good opportunities.
If a job cannot afford to give its employees a livable wage then it does not deserve to exists. It’s similar to a Restaurant that cannot adhere to safety standards does not deserve to operate.
I do understand that it's hard for single mothers to live on minimum wage. We do need to consider the implications of giving minimum wage to all however. Not that I'm opposed to it but just not sure if it will help majority in the long run.
2 bedroom is absurd to expect at minimum wage, but it says the price for a 1 bedroom is at ~$20. Yeah I agree, minimum wage is the floor, but it should still be possible to live.
I'm pretty sure you could get a 2-bed home with minimum wage 70 years ago, so I suppose you're saying that it's absurd to expect societies to advance and make life easier.
From FDR, the guy responsible for establishing the wage floor:
> 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
So no, the minimum wage is supposed to be a living wage, but has fallen far from its inception.
You can argue whether it's necessary that we have a minimum wage, but not what it was conceived for.
I see, I did not know that. I thought it was a means to ensure someone who doesn't have a good job gets a minimum amount of wage till they find something stable.
Even then I don’t get the point of this. Where would one find the time to get the qualifications for a more suitable job if they’re too busy working full time minimum wage let alone two part time minimum wage jobs? What are they suppose to do in the intermediate between working the minimum wage job and landing a stable one? Starve?
So? I don’t see the point of going down such a rabbit whole as if all jobs or even all high paying jobs are morally acceptable. I’m sure a VP at Exxon does a lot to earn their bread. They’re still apart if a piece of shit company that puts all of humanity in danger with their actions and lies.
The moral value of the employer is mostly irrelevant when discussing the remuneration of the employee. I can see the case for disallowing a business from performing unethical actions like that, but so long as that business is legally allowed to exist, yes, anyone who works there for a full time work week should have a comfortable life.
Too many companies exploit workers at minimum wage and require a degree to qualify for the job in IT or something. It should pay more than minimum wage if you want the employee to have a reliable car and a good place to rest.
Is rent really a bell curve? In my experience it’s a very asymmetric shape, with the median (not average) being extremely close to the bottom of what’s available. In my experience the median rent is basically the same as the minimum rent.
Probably because those are strawman arguments that nobody makes.
How about
> I don't think teenagers, people with employed spouses, people with investments or social security or other sources of income should ever be able to take a job for less than what a person could completely support themselves on.
Minimum wage jobs are a small portion of all available jobs. There are many jobs, even so-called "unskilled" ones that pay more than minimum wage. As a free adult, it is your responsibility to figure out how to make enough money to live in a way in which you're comfortable.
For many people they are part-time jobs and the minimum wage job is not a primary source of income.
For the rest, maybe instead of asking "How can we distort the market to force employers to pay more for labor than the value it produces?" we should be asking "How can we make more higher value jobs available to more people?".
It’s funny how it’s always the people’s responsibility to get a better job, not the company’s responsibility to find a way to be profitable with reasonable wages.
When you go to the store do you offer to pay extra money for groceries so the store can make more money? Why not? Why don’t you find a way to be more profitable so you can pay reasonable prices?
People buy things, including labor, at the price others are willing to sell them.
There is a wee bit of a difference between a corporation making more money, and a human being being able to afford rent and food. That’s why I point out how fucked up it is that we are harsh towards people and treat corporations with kid gloves.
That’s why they’re not equivalent; if the store can’t charge more money (up until a point) it cuts into their profits. If a human can’t make enough money with their labor, they starve. Hopefully you can understand why these are morally dissimilar.
If the store is a small business, the profits are what the owner uses to afford rent and food. So, how is that morally dissimilar?
"Corporations" are just groups of people. They are not some amorphous, abstract thing that just preys on helpless humans.
> If a human can’t make enough money with their labor, they starve.
There is absolutely no reason a normal, healthy adult offering 40 hours per week of effort should not be able to produce far more than minimum wage levels of value. If there are not opportunities for them to do that, we should investigate why that is, and provide opportunities for them to create that value. That is better for everyone because there is more valuable work being done. Pretending that a job that only creates $7 per hour of value actually creates $15 or more is just a lie. It's spending a dime to get a nickel and it's ultimately unsustainable.
If there's an abundance of jobs paying well above minimum wage, then it doesn't matter what the minimum wage is because people will have better options and the market will determine what price people are willing to accept to do what work. We're already seeing this as people have better options and are refusing to do lower paid work.
> If the store is a small business, the profits are what the owner uses to afford rent and food. So, how is that morally dissimilar?
The store owner is hoping to turn the labor of their employees into profits for themselves, not mere subsistence. When they pay their employees less than a livable wage, they are in effect demanding that the state subsidize their business in the form of food stamps for their employees.
If a company cannot afford to break even while paying livable wages for their employees, then it isn’t a sustainable model and I would like to see it go out of business and have the owners get new jobs themselves; jobs that I would advocate for paying a living wage for.
> There is absolutely no reason a normal, healthy adult offering 40 hours per week of effort should not be able to produce far more than minimum wage levels of value.
If we agree that an adult should be able to easily make more than that, why would you allow businesses to pay less?
> If there's an abundance of jobs paying well above minimum wage, then it doesn't matter what the minimum wage is because people will have better options and the market will determine what price people are willing to accept to do what work. We're already seeing this as people have better options and are refusing to do lower paid work.
Your position is incoherent. Raising the minimum wage would hurt workers by taking away jobs, while at the same time nobody is paid the minimum wage because labor is demanding better pay. Which is it?
> If we agree that an adult should be able to easily make more than that, why would you allow businesses to pay less?
Why do you imagine it is up to us to allow or disallow what agreements two adults make between themselves? I expect people to know better than I do what level of income they require to live in a lifestyle they prefer and to figure out how to get that income for themselves. It is not for me to dictate that to them, nor is it for you.
> Your position is incoherent. Raising the minimum wage would hurt workers by taking away jobs, while at the same time nobody is paid the minimum wage because labor is demanding better pay. Which is it?
Yes, it is incoherent if you so thoroughly misunderstand it. I never said nobody is paid minimum wage. I said that we could make it so nobody was paid minimum wage, if we focused on creating jobs that do more valuable work, instead of agitating to force employers to overpay for less valuable work.
Ah, the whole “minimum wage violates the NAP” angle. Unsurprising, unpersuasive.
The idea that some people know better than us and want less money is frankly bizarre. Perhaps that argument carries water for unionization, where workers do often vote against it, but deciding to be paid less because they know better than us? Ridiculous.
Such an angle really ignores the extra leverage that large businesses have in poorer areas of America. If a Walmart in the next town drove all your mom & pop shops under because of a combination of low wages and economies of scale, what exactly are you going to do in order to get a better job?
Part of the job of the government is to step in and reduce the risk of a coercion in these situations, and the minimum wage is part of that.
> The idea that some people know better than us and want less money is frankly bizarre.
What is frankly bizarre is the belief that wages are just made up values that you can set to whatever you want, that they are completely disconnected from any notion of what value the work provides. Taking a $7 / hour job and demanding that people pay $15 per hour for it, does not magically transform it into creating $15 per hour of value, no matter how much you want it to. It will, however, transform it into a $0 per hour job, because nobody is going to pay $15 for something that is only worth $7.
Businesses that fail to make these evil, exploitative things called "profits" cease to exist, and provide no jobs for anyone.
There’s a reason why the common refrain is “but what about high school jobs!” It’s much more palatable to believe that the main people working at this wage are children that don’t need the money, even though reality is much worse.
Edit: Hah! Someone posted it at the exact same time I originally posted this. Perfect.
I thought the primary argument against it was that the alternative is unemployment. You're implying the options are to pay the same person high or low wages. I don't think this is universally accepted at all.
> I thought the primary argument against it was that the alternative is unemployment.
Which is utterly insane when you think about it. The current minimum wage is practically unlivable, and it's supposed to be a good thing for people to make even less just to box-check "employed"?
At least if you're unemployed, it's theoretically possible to put your energies into learning something to get a better job, but impossible to do that if you're burning all your energy for little more than pocket money.
The only people who'd gain from a lower minimum wage are employers, who'd have the opportunity to exploit cheaper labor.
Now you seem to be arguing for a complete set of welfare benefits comparable to whatever minimum wage is?
Because a job is obviously more than a "box check". It's an income. Otherwise, anyone could turn their nose up at those soul-sucking low-wage jobs and choose that unemployment alternative willingly.
This study makes 2 assumptions that seem suspect to me:
1. It's unaffordable to spend more than 30% of your income on rent + utilities.
Perhaps ironically I think this rule is the least true in areas with highly priced housing markets- if you're paying 40% of your post-tax income on housing, that leaves a ton of room to spend money on other things. I realize this isn't necessary true for people making minimum wage, but I wish they did a more analysis that for that. Instead they just used the ancient 30% rule of thumb.
2. You can only afford to live somewhere if 40% of the 2 bedroom homes are within your budget
I'm definitely not an economist or housing expert, but it seems unintuitive to me that we'd ever reach an equilibrum where the lowest earners can afford to the majority of homes. If everyone can afford most housing, wouldn't landlords just raise prices on luxury or above-average properties until only people who make more than average can afford them? Two-income households also have an inherent advantage if there's any sort of bidding war.
There was a time in my life where I would have made approximately minimum wage at a nominal 40 hour work week, and far below that in consideration of actual hours worked. I didn't live alone. I don't know whether you would have called my conditions "comfortable", but with some spending discipline I was able to travel to Europe several times a year.
I value my solitude to be sure, but it's not really clear why living alone is a right rather than a nice-to-have or even a policy goal. If legislators had responded to my plight by making the terms of my employment illegal and hoping for the best, gratitude would not necessarily have been my first instinct.
I think having roommates should be the default living situation for people unless/until they have a family (which are technically a form of roommate of course). Besides being wasteful of space and resources, there's the (now well-known) mental health downsides or being alone. Humans aren't really made to live that way long-term. Personally I had roommates when I was single even when I had a good job. I viewed it as a way to meet people when I moved to a new city, which it was. It is important for roommates to view it this way though. People view it as purely financial can make bad roommates.
Because increasing minimum wage is popular politics but it doesn't really solve the issue, and that is even if policymakers are capable of coming together to agree on how to make a 'livable' minimum wage (a livable wage in rural midwest is not the same as NY or SF for example), and how to keep that wage at a livable level without having to go through the political quagmire we currently are going through every 10-20 years. It isn't even clear that the minimum wage should be livable in the first place, as that also has its own costs as capital is liquid enough to go elsewhere leading to a race to the bottom.
Policymakers have shaped the economic system in a way that suppresses the value of unskilled labor, and simply forcing the increase has serious costs which most people don't appreciate, costs that are harder to bear for some compared to others, for example huge multinationals are much better equipped to deal with said costs compared to smaller, independent businesses. The appeal to emotion regarding this is especially dangerous since it often ignores the reasons why the problem persists, and when the problem is as difficult as this is, there are many potential pitfalls when creating a solution (especially a popular one), which can lead to making things even worse than before. The road to hell is paved with good intentions after all.
I think it is a little disingenuous to characterize people who are critical of concepts like a livable minimum wage the way you have, wage insecurity is a serious and complex problem that wont be solved simply by controlling the price of labor.
Ian Shapiro has a lecture about wage insecurity in his power and politics course at Yale that discusses UBI, minimum wage and other alternatives which I think provides a decent, but brief overview of the issues faced regarding policies like this. Here is a link specifically to where he starts to discuss the idea of 15$ minimum wage.
Meaningless discussion about who deserve what. For an economy to raise wage for low skill workers, the best thing to do is creating more jobs for those workers. Manufacturing Jobs!
64 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadFun fact: a Berkeley professor named Robert Reich often likes to go on on Twitter about wealth inequality but he himself protested the construction of low income housing next to his home.
Using your examples, SF is currently at $16.32/hr and NYC is at $15/hr. I don't know that I would call either of those wages "way above $15/h".
Furthermore saying anything along the lines of - “it’s not that you don’t make enough money, it’s that things are too expensive!” Is clearly pointless.
You can't just legislate a higher wage because in the long run rents will stabilize at a higher level to compensate and all you've done is make landlords richer and fuck over every small business in the city. You need to actually have more supply.
> There is no state, county or city in the country where a full-time, minimum-wage worker working 40 hours a week can afford a two-bedroom rental, a report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition showed.
That includes SF, and it includes some unfashionable place you've probably never heard of where the rent is literally the cheapest in the nation.
This probably isn't the right thread to beat the dead horse of SF NIMBYism and push fantasies of a one-size-fits all solution of densely-packed 20 story concrete apartment blocks.
> 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
So no, the minimum wage is supposed to be a living wage, but has fallen far from its inception.
You can argue whether it's necessary that we have a minimum wage, but not what it was conceived for.
I support raising minimum wage but potentially problematic comparisons may not be helpful.
Maybe someone who knows more about this kind of data can add context?
But yes, average is the wrong metric here.
"Minimum wage workers can not afford renting a two-bedroom home at fair market rent using 30% of their income"
That feels drastically different than the current headline.
> I don't think people working 40s per week deserve to live alone
> I think people who do unskilled work don't deserve to live comfortably
How about
> I don't think teenagers, people with employed spouses, people with investments or social security or other sources of income should ever be able to take a job for less than what a person could completely support themselves on.
Minimum wage jobs are a small portion of all available jobs. There are many jobs, even so-called "unskilled" ones that pay more than minimum wage. As a free adult, it is your responsibility to figure out how to make enough money to live in a way in which you're comfortable.
For the rest, maybe instead of asking "How can we distort the market to force employers to pay more for labor than the value it produces?" we should be asking "How can we make more higher value jobs available to more people?".
People buy things, including labor, at the price others are willing to sell them.
That’s why they’re not equivalent; if the store can’t charge more money (up until a point) it cuts into their profits. If a human can’t make enough money with their labor, they starve. Hopefully you can understand why these are morally dissimilar.
"Corporations" are just groups of people. They are not some amorphous, abstract thing that just preys on helpless humans.
> If a human can’t make enough money with their labor, they starve.
There is absolutely no reason a normal, healthy adult offering 40 hours per week of effort should not be able to produce far more than minimum wage levels of value. If there are not opportunities for them to do that, we should investigate why that is, and provide opportunities for them to create that value. That is better for everyone because there is more valuable work being done. Pretending that a job that only creates $7 per hour of value actually creates $15 or more is just a lie. It's spending a dime to get a nickel and it's ultimately unsustainable.
If there's an abundance of jobs paying well above minimum wage, then it doesn't matter what the minimum wage is because people will have better options and the market will determine what price people are willing to accept to do what work. We're already seeing this as people have better options and are refusing to do lower paid work.
The store owner is hoping to turn the labor of their employees into profits for themselves, not mere subsistence. When they pay their employees less than a livable wage, they are in effect demanding that the state subsidize their business in the form of food stamps for their employees.
If a company cannot afford to break even while paying livable wages for their employees, then it isn’t a sustainable model and I would like to see it go out of business and have the owners get new jobs themselves; jobs that I would advocate for paying a living wage for.
> There is absolutely no reason a normal, healthy adult offering 40 hours per week of effort should not be able to produce far more than minimum wage levels of value.
If we agree that an adult should be able to easily make more than that, why would you allow businesses to pay less?
> If there's an abundance of jobs paying well above minimum wage, then it doesn't matter what the minimum wage is because people will have better options and the market will determine what price people are willing to accept to do what work. We're already seeing this as people have better options and are refusing to do lower paid work.
Your position is incoherent. Raising the minimum wage would hurt workers by taking away jobs, while at the same time nobody is paid the minimum wage because labor is demanding better pay. Which is it?
Why do you imagine it is up to us to allow or disallow what agreements two adults make between themselves? I expect people to know better than I do what level of income they require to live in a lifestyle they prefer and to figure out how to get that income for themselves. It is not for me to dictate that to them, nor is it for you.
> Your position is incoherent. Raising the minimum wage would hurt workers by taking away jobs, while at the same time nobody is paid the minimum wage because labor is demanding better pay. Which is it?
Yes, it is incoherent if you so thoroughly misunderstand it. I never said nobody is paid minimum wage. I said that we could make it so nobody was paid minimum wage, if we focused on creating jobs that do more valuable work, instead of agitating to force employers to overpay for less valuable work.
The idea that some people know better than us and want less money is frankly bizarre. Perhaps that argument carries water for unionization, where workers do often vote against it, but deciding to be paid less because they know better than us? Ridiculous.
Such an angle really ignores the extra leverage that large businesses have in poorer areas of America. If a Walmart in the next town drove all your mom & pop shops under because of a combination of low wages and economies of scale, what exactly are you going to do in order to get a better job?
Part of the job of the government is to step in and reduce the risk of a coercion in these situations, and the minimum wage is part of that.
What is frankly bizarre is the belief that wages are just made up values that you can set to whatever you want, that they are completely disconnected from any notion of what value the work provides. Taking a $7 / hour job and demanding that people pay $15 per hour for it, does not magically transform it into creating $15 per hour of value, no matter how much you want it to. It will, however, transform it into a $0 per hour job, because nobody is going to pay $15 for something that is only worth $7.
Businesses that fail to make these evil, exploitative things called "profits" cease to exist, and provide no jobs for anyone.
Good. If businesses require the state to subsidize their workers rent and food, they deserve to go out of business.
Edit: Hah! Someone posted it at the exact same time I originally posted this. Perfect.
Which is utterly insane when you think about it. The current minimum wage is practically unlivable, and it's supposed to be a good thing for people to make even less just to box-check "employed"?
At least if you're unemployed, it's theoretically possible to put your energies into learning something to get a better job, but impossible to do that if you're burning all your energy for little more than pocket money.
The only people who'd gain from a lower minimum wage are employers, who'd have the opportunity to exploit cheaper labor.
Because a job is obviously more than a "box check". It's an income. Otherwise, anyone could turn their nose up at those soul-sucking low-wage jobs and choose that unemployment alternative willingly.
1. It's unaffordable to spend more than 30% of your income on rent + utilities.
Perhaps ironically I think this rule is the least true in areas with highly priced housing markets- if you're paying 40% of your post-tax income on housing, that leaves a ton of room to spend money on other things. I realize this isn't necessary true for people making minimum wage, but I wish they did a more analysis that for that. Instead they just used the ancient 30% rule of thumb.
2. You can only afford to live somewhere if 40% of the 2 bedroom homes are within your budget
I'm definitely not an economist or housing expert, but it seems unintuitive to me that we'd ever reach an equilibrum where the lowest earners can afford to the majority of homes. If everyone can afford most housing, wouldn't landlords just raise prices on luxury or above-average properties until only people who make more than average can afford them? Two-income households also have an inherent advantage if there's any sort of bidding war.
I value my solitude to be sure, but it's not really clear why living alone is a right rather than a nice-to-have or even a policy goal. If legislators had responded to my plight by making the terms of my employment illegal and hoping for the best, gratitude would not necessarily have been my first instinct.
Policymakers have shaped the economic system in a way that suppresses the value of unskilled labor, and simply forcing the increase has serious costs which most people don't appreciate, costs that are harder to bear for some compared to others, for example huge multinationals are much better equipped to deal with said costs compared to smaller, independent businesses. The appeal to emotion regarding this is especially dangerous since it often ignores the reasons why the problem persists, and when the problem is as difficult as this is, there are many potential pitfalls when creating a solution (especially a popular one), which can lead to making things even worse than before. The road to hell is paved with good intentions after all.
I think it is a little disingenuous to characterize people who are critical of concepts like a livable minimum wage the way you have, wage insecurity is a serious and complex problem that wont be solved simply by controlling the price of labor.
Ian Shapiro has a lecture about wage insecurity in his power and politics course at Yale that discusses UBI, minimum wage and other alternatives which I think provides a decent, but brief overview of the issues faced regarding policies like this. Here is a link specifically to where he starts to discuss the idea of 15$ minimum wage.
https://youtu.be/bldeaDRWJYc?t=2443
The minimum wage was 75 cents per hour.
Their small house was $10 per month for rent.
I think that there is no way to find such a ratio today in the U.S..