Transcript
A tweet saying "100k a year to take someone's order at Taco Bell . Totally makes sense.". It has a reply saying "Where the hell did you get that number? If someone's working enough hours to make that on $15 an hour, they deserve it. $15 an hour, a person working 40 a week makes $31,200 a year." the reply has 2 likes.
Apparently
$100k a year at 40 hours a week is $48.08 an hour, which might be even easier to see how far off of reality they are.
I'd vote for that as min wage
Generally everyone has two weeks off so I use $/h * 2000 to get earnings pre tax, or 15(50*40). There are also ~~sick days~~ mental health days and bank holidays, so it could be better, but 2,000 is such a nice number
I wouldn't go quite that high right off the bat, but...
Just peg a full time, min wage, locally (metro area locally), to ~~1/3~~ 3x (EDIT, whoops, mathed backwards) the median price of renting a studio apartment.
Would this be an economically perfect policy?
Fuuuuck no.
Would this actually enable, at least theoretically, an 18 yo kicked out of the family house upon high school graduation, as is the cultural norm in most of America, to actually be at least theoretically capable of providing for themselves and starting their own life?
Again, assuming jobs actually exist, yes.
This would be the bare minimum needed to make the insanely out off touch asshole boomer logic even mildly line up with reality.
...
For my next policy:
All those with student loan debt, where those students were goaded into that student debt by their parents saying they'd never have a good paying career without a college education, where those students have also been underemployed (a job or jobs not actually crtitically reliant on their degree) for a period of 5 years or more...
Congrats students! That debt is now dischargable in a bankruptcy, and it becomes the responsibility of said parents, for whom it is not dischargeable in bankruptcy.
Unrealistic?
Yes.
Fundamentally legally impossible?
Also probably yes.
... Morally correct, in spirit?
Oh, oh hell yes, yes.
...
For my third policy:
Graduated municipal landlord taxes based on how much a landlord charges a rental tenant for rent, in addition to existing property taxes.
If you are renting out a property for say, double area median rent for comparable sq ft, num bedrooms, etc? Well, now the landlord pays additional tax on that exorbitant rent.
Doesn't totally murder the profit motive, but highly disincentivizes putting high value homes and condos on the market for rent (and would thus incentivize putting them on the market actually for sale, at a reasonable price), incentivizes building modest new apartment buildings instead of only 'luxury' apartments.
All the proceeds of this tax of course go into funding housing subsidies for the poor, or directly building new, municipally operated, non profit apartment complexes.
... Just play the uno reverse card on the landlords, tax their rent extraction.
I assume you mean 3 times the cost of a studio apartment, not 1/3, unless you think every minimum wage worker should be sharing their studio apartment with 5 other roommates.
Ah, yes, it was near midnight when I made that post, I may have gotten the 'rent should be 1/3rd your income' rule backwards or inverted, or otherwise phrased clumsily!
This is the crux of the answer if you want to solve housing prices, it doesn't really matter how you pay for it...but I like your way of paying for it
If you don't get paid time off do you have to take it? Up here in Canada most full time jobs (at least all the ones I've had) have two weeks paid vacation after the first year. Here's an Indeed article being way more clear than I could be.
Min wage hourly doesn't come with guaranteed time off, but I think the pay gets added to each paycheck? Don't quote me, it's been ages since I was an hourly guy.
In the US, functionally, basically no min wage jobs get any vacation or sick days.
Nearly all these jobs have managers who will only allow you to schedule vacation in weird little blocks when its convenient for them, and then either right before you go on vacation, they cancel it, or you do go on vacation, and they claim you never scheduled it... you are fired if you do not abadon your vacation for work.
With sick days, if you take one, you aren't a team player, if you take two, your next minor infraction or dumb petty bullshit a coworker makes up about you... you are fired.
Wooo! America.
And that is on top of: Basically all min wage jobs will min max your weekly hours so you just barely don't actually pass the threshold for qualifying for any real health benefits and/or vacation/sick day accrual.
Oh and you are basically always on call, because you need to come fill some other shift that isn't filled for some reason having to do with the manager being incompetent at managing, but they'll gaslight the fuck out of everyone and say its everyone else fault.
I was briefly a minimum wage worker at a grocery store and that was my experience. I was a college student just making extra spending money and trying to be responsible. I didn't need the job at all. I put in time off for my vacation and my manager was weird saying I couldn't do that. And I didn't really say it directly but it's like, the vacation is already planned. I'm going. The system approved it, too. You can't make me not go. If you're going to reprimand me, you can. If you're going to fire me, you can, but I'm going.
I can't imagine how fucking awful that environment would be like if that's your primary method of supporting your family.
Yep.
Basically all min wage job managers are petty tyrants, little baby fascists.
As Jello Biafra put it: Take this job and shove it.
How about the recent trend (past decade or so) of managers requiring their employees to find their own call-out coverage? To all the young people who've never known anything else: that is not normal. Finding coverage is part of the "managing" that your manager gets paid to do. Outside of the hyper abusive retail and service jobs, management doesn't make you do that.
When one of my former managers attempted to implement that shit in a nursing home during the height of Covid, HR was appalled and nipped it in the bud. It's absurd and manipulative to expect a sick employee to call around/beg their coworkers to give up their day off, just because management failed to manage a full roster of coverage that accounts for potential call-outs.
Also, it's absolutely reasonable to not want to share your contact information with all your coworkers. If you don't actually know someone, you don't have to exchange phone numbers with them. You have a right to protect your privacy.
This has been the norm my entire life, and my first min wage job was in the mid 00's, mid 2000's.
I guess I just also assumed people knew this was and has been the norm basically forever, this is what I meant by 'managers not actually managing and gaslighting you into doing their job for them.'
All your points and details are correct though.
I guess we can also tack on the nonsense American workplace cultural norm of:
Your boss can basically fire you on a whim, in many common scenarios...
But you as an employee are expected to give two weeks notice before you quit.
This is more widespread and isn't unique to min wage service/retail jobs... but this also literally makes no fucking sense and every European I've explained this to has been appalled by the concept.
Fucking hell. Mine, my SO's and all our restaurant/holel/ retail fam. ... and then the rest of the fuckers only hire through staffing services, which are usually a crock of shit on multiple fronts.
After some moving around over the years we were surprised to learn that Arizona of all places, gives paid sick time, accrued based on how many hours you've worked, up to 40 a year. Part or full, so it seemed like less incentive to keep employees riding just under.
Still gonna need 2 jobs or more, like fucking everywhere anymore. Oh, and wait staff gets paid more than this $1-$2 bullshit that's still so popular.
Sorry. Part of my memories got riled up. Really, just wanted to point out the oddity we found.
Apologies for inadvertently triggering you, sincerely.
I've... just myself gotten out of roughly two years of homelessness, and uh yep, I have PTSD now, can't actually handle reading well written, gonzo type depictions of what its like.
I myself have only worked a couple min wage type jobs, but have always known people who either did or still are and... yeah, seems to me its just a universal experience that they are shitty in every way possible, in addition to being shitty in ways that, prior to experiencing them, you would think are impossible.
Oh, you're good. Even old, I still get a little high strung on some topics. I've worked various forms of service jobs and, yeah, they all sucked. Food has to be one of the absolute worst, retail next. All are still varied degrees of suck. Sales is it's own separate hell hole. Trades people I've been close too don't have it much better, unless they get to a union type gig. Trying to claw out on a new degree, if ...this... is all here by the end of it, haha.
Good to hear things turned up for you, hopefully it'll keep getting better too! No one deserves to experience homelessness. I've lived in trailer parks, uptown, suburban tacky, downtown, nomadic camper, bad side of town... and my homeless stint wasn't long thankfully, compared to the rest of my life, but left the deepest hardest memory. Running closing dish on a mother's day, half staffed shift, covering for fry and bussers, would've been 100x preferred.
The real ratio is 2087.04h/year if you're paid for 40h, 1956.6h/y if you're paid 37.5h (40h - 30min breaks), that averages things out for the number of work days that can vary year to year.
After m'roads?