Upon inception it was set at $0.25. It is now $7.25.
inflation-adusted, the federal minimum wage peaked way tf back in february 1968 at $1.60 an hour (equal to $13.46 in ‘2022 dollars’).
Might as well use the latest numbers for this comparison. Yes, inflation is still absolutely sucking us all dry.
This is if you actually believe CPI is a legitimate measure, despite the cost of all the big ticket expenses like housing, education, and healthcare increasing 5x or more above inflation.
That’s why they’re conveniently not part of the inflation equation.
That’s true, though I can’t say for the US, in the UK, inflation is still ridiculously calculated.
about it, because staples like pasta and rice weren’t included, but champagne was.
I love how its just flipped the numbers around.
inflation is still absolutely sucking us all dry.
However, as a side note, inflation is absolutely essential to keep the economy healthy. Most developed countries around the world have a goal of 2 percent inflation. US inflation is currently 3.7 percent before seasonal adjustments.
Edit: Wow. Lots of people here who need to retake Econ 101.
Inflation is important because it punishes the hoarding of wealth and encourages spending. When investments grow greater than inflation but wages grow slower, it’s problematic because the investing class is rewarded for having money while the working class is punished.
well no, the econ 101 guys are the ones calling for getting rid of inflation, you actually need to get a bit further down into the mud to get to “inflation is super important and one of few reasons for investment instead of dragon hordes”
Most lemmings have never taken econ 101, because they are in middle school
Just when boomers were young (8-23 yrs old) … totally tracks!
Looking at the linked graph, there’s a relatively clear plateau from ‘56 to ‘80 … basically from oldest boomers being age 11 to youngest boomers being age 20. I’m a little astonished at how well it lines up with the whole fucking generation. Literally all of them, from the beginning of their teens to the end of their teens (at least), enjoyed the best minimum wage of the modern age.
It also, interestingly, justifies the seperate categorisation of the Jones generation (born 1960-1966) who were the first to see the steady decline.
explain jones gen. never heard this term before.
The
article explains it pretty concisely. Basically the generation between boomers and gen x that tends to get overlooked.
There are lies, damn lies, and then there’s statistics.
Im not here to say the minimum wage doesnt need to be raised, because it does, but another way of putting that is
“The minimim wage has increased 1500% in 85 years.”
That sounds a lot better even though its the same thing.
Meanwhile the cost of living has increased 2077% in 85 years.
CYBERPUNK REFERENCE??!??!
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that actually makes it worse because housework still needs to be done.
Wow! That’s almost as much as a CEO increases in 3 months!
Thanks for making me chuckle.
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7.25 / 0.25 is indeed 29, therefore a 2800% increase is correct.
Thus, another dishonest way of stating this number is that it has increased almost 33% for each year since it was first implemented. (Not per year)
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When I turned 14, I started working for $3.75 an hour. Minimum wage was $3.25 and I felt damn lucky.
I’m 40
I’m 40 and min wage where I was was $5.25/hr if I recall. (Non-tipped job, tipped jobs were lower.) A 1 bedroom in my area at the time was about $700. I remembering being SO damn confused as to why someone working 40 hours on min wage wouldn’t even pay for a 1 bedroom after taxes, much less utilities, car, food, etc. I redid the math over and over again, thinking I must be doing something wrong because school talked all about budgets and stuff…
…but no, school had just failed to tell me that min wage wouldn’t actually cover a real-world apartment in my area.
It was all particularly stressful to me because I was in foster care in a group home as a teen, and I did work and school at the same time and they were prepping for us to go live on our own…and no matter how I did the math, I couldn’t afford a real apartment on my own EVEN IF someone had been willing to rent to me w/out a co-signer.
If you lived in the US, your numbers (and your memory) are absolutely incorrect.
Editing to add info:
Assuming the previous commenter is actually 40 years old and lived in the US, the minimum wage would have either been $4.75 or $5.15 when they were 14 (not $3.25)…
In fact, minimum wage in the US has never been $3.25.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart
State minimums can be different for certain jobs, and certain jobs are exempt from minimum wage and have a lower set wage. Tipped workers are the ones everyone knows about, but farm workers and others are also exempt.
That in no way contradicts anything I said.
The person I was replying to never said they were exempt from minimum wage… They said what they misremembered the minimum wage to have been.
My point is they may have been remembering the minimum as it was relevant to the work they did at the time, not necessarily the federal minimum.
It is illegal for a company in any state to pay lower than federal minimum wage regardless whether or not the state’s minimum wage is set lower.
Full stop.
Jobs that are considered exempt from federal minimum wage can still have a different set state exempt minimum wage that is higher than the mandated exempt federal wage.
For example, say the exempt wage is $2.75, a state can mandate $3.00 instead.
Yes. Which again is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
Thanks.
I understand this to be true as well.
federal Minimum wage when you were 14, was 5.15 an hour, assuming you are actually 40. It was 2.13 an hour if you were in a tipped position. But it was not 3.25.
Jesus. I’m your age, but my starting minimum wage was $6.50. I thought I was ballin a few years later when I was making $9
I’m almost 50. It was 3.25 when i started to work at 15.
In about 6 months i was 4.25
I’m about the same age as you and both of you guys are remembering incorrectly.
See my previous comment linked below…
Off by a dime.
Minimum wage also didn’t go up to $4.25 for you “in 6 months” then if you started at the $3.35…
I got a pay raise. I never said minimum wage went up.
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Minimum wage here where I am is going to $15.30 oct 1st (Canuck bucks) and I don’t think it’s enough considering how expensive things are nowadays.
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I don’t see how someone on minimum wage can even make ends meet in a lot of places. I live in the boonies and rent in my area is stupid, never mind what they’re asking in the city.
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When I first moved out on my own, I rented a three bedroom two story house for $300 a month, but you could find places for less. Now in the same general area the cheapest I’ve seen is around $1500 for a shithole and is typically much higher than that ($2000-2500 and up) if you don’t want something held together with duct tape and wishful thinking… and you still have to factor in the drive to work, considering I’m about a half hour from the nearest city.
They don’t you cannot rent a 1 bedroom apartment on minimum wage in most if not all of America G Z is getting ducked harder than millennials with no end in sight. If you can afford rent you can’t afford luxuries such as healthier foods or decent health care (which ends up costing more in the fire when things go wrong). The inequality of wealth disbursement is the in the US “In the first quarter of 2023, 69 percent of the total wealth in the United States was owned by the top 10 percent of earners. In comparison, the lowest 50 percent of earners only owned 2.4 percent of the total wealth.Jul 17, 2023”. I’m very ecstatic that unions are coming back with force and people are fighting back, but it won’t be won overnight and the 1% are going to kick and claw and fight anyways they can ( look at Amazon using the Pinkertons to union bust). I think things can change, but it’s going to take a massive push on voting for people who actually represent the people and holding our politicians to a higher standard than we are now. Changing legislation such as, putting a limit on campaign donations and having a public ledger of where and who the donations came from (see you matter dark money!), repealing citizens united, getting rid of corporate welfare, extending voting rights (making it a national holiday to force businesses to make sure there is time off for their workers to vote while being compensated, and making sure employers no longer have a say in your healthcare (through universal healthcare) and end the privatization of the whole system, fixing the unchecked police system here would go a long way to making sure that those protesting would not be killed or beaten for exercising their first amendment right and would help us get in the right track to help mitigate climate change instead of the misinformation factory that is the oil and gas industry not to mention the disinformation machine that is alt right driven hate speech (looking at you Fox News for giving a breeding ground for that shit for bowers and Rudolf Murdock that with his media empire has done more to fuck humanity over than anyone is history). I do believe in gen z helping to change things for the better, but they can’t do it alone and it seems like the generations before them have given into apathy and and frozen into inaction by just straight death session and despair about the future.
Just realized I went on a long ass rant, my bad and did not mean to word vomit on you O agree with everything you said . I’ll delete if it gets into the negatives.
Lol no problem, I know what you’re saying. It’s like the entire world revolves around nickel and diming people to death. I’m thankful it’s not as bad in my area as it is in some places but nowhere is safe. I think something has to break sooner or later, and it’s not going to be pretty when it does.
Thanks so much my friend! I don’t know why but I just really needed to get that out in writing for some reason, ya know? Exactly it’s gotten so extreme that in my experience even the people who vote against their own interest and feel they have more in common with billionaires than the homeless on the street are starting to feel the pinch and waking up and wondering what’s going on. Glad to hear your area isn’t as bad and I completely agree that there is no escaping this situation anywhere it’s just “a little less shitty, and a tad bit less exploitative than other places”. I totally agree that it’s going to be real bad if there isn’t change I just hope if it does come down to that we’ll see a drastic shift in the way America operates or it will all be for nothing and just a short reprieve before the machine starts to grind away at the general public once again.
i live in the boonies, too. rent used to be reasonable for what i got (a shitty little walk up). it has now more than doubled in three years. all by a new building owner. over the twenty years previous (and three other owners), it went up a whole one time for about 10%.
rents used to be reasonable and stable in this little town, but not anymore. buildings like this are even being pulled off the residential market completely and turned into short-term rentals (they can charge more for a single 3-day weekend rental than they can for a whole month on a residential lease).
If you do the comparisons in normalized dollars and compare to productivity, minimum wage (if it tracked to the same purchasing power as it did in the 1950s) would be somewhere around $26 in today’s dollars. If you do the same but track to inflation, it would be about $22.
When the wage doesn’t keep track to inflation, it’s not ‘increasing’, it’s a pay cut. When it doesn’t track to productivity, it’s a pay cut out of labor’s part of any growth.
When workers earning suppressed wages compete to buy things like housing, they’re bidding against the class of people that received the share of productivity they didn’t- and when the folks making more bid up prices of those things, it’s a double-whammy of foregone wage + increased cost-of-living.
Do you have a source on that nationally? Because that is very very high in many areas.
Well,
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If it kept line with productivity Minimum wage would be $26 an hour if it had grown in line with productivity
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If it kept up with inflation Advocates say minimum wage needs to be higher before it’s indexed to inflation or https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/21/politics/minimum-wage-inflation-productivity/index.html
These sources disagree among themselves if the right number is $21.45 or $26 or $20, they seem to base their analysis on productivity or inflation
Yeah, these numbers sound like a lot in some places, but those places where it ‘sounds like a lot’ tend to be really fucking poorer than necessary. It would hurt them not at all to have the minimum keep up with where it was in 1968 instead of being the output of both major parties in congress agreeing to fuck the working poor
Oh I see my confusion now I thought you were saying PPP against inflation, rather than PPP against productivity. But my point about nationally is that PPP differs based on area a lot, especially in housing. I don’t think comparing to productivity is fair because a lot of the money going to labor from US companies is going to offshoring or into automating jobs away.
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Minimum wage is simply the lowest full time salary a company can legally get away with paying. Nothing more, nothing less.
I’m primarily talking about large corporations that make millions and billions, yet claim they can’t afford to pay more than minimum wage.
I’ve worked for a number of different companies since I was a teenager and first got a job. Without a doubt, the cheapest motherfuckers on the planet with the most squalid working conditions are the biggest companies I’ve worked for. I think part of the key to being a top corporation is being stingy as fuck.
Saving $50 per employee when you have 5 employees is $250. It’s nice, but not a game changer. 50 employees: $2,500, 500 employees: $25,000. When you have more employees squeezing pennies out of your workers becomes a relevant boon to the company.
Weirdly that’s been the opposite of my experience, got paid a lot(in local terms) for doing barely anything in an internship. Paid not well for a small business where I knew the owners, but I know why, which is that they basically recruited people who wouldn’t bother negotiating.
You dont get rich by spending money
Or something to that effect
You don’t get rich without exploiting the labour of others*
Can you name one? I don’t know a single person who actually makes minimum wage. Legit question.
I’m kind of shocked at this, you must be really wealthy and/or out of touch. I make minimum wage at my current job which is 13.65 an hour in the state of Colorado. I make less now than I ever have before at any other job and I spent thousands on a technical degree. Many people all over the country only make minimum wage. Bartenders and jobs like that come to mind, they are often paid $2 or less an hour with “tips” that add up to minimum wage.
Not wealthy nor in a wealthy area but I live in a pretty densely populated state so I just don’t see it. Even convenience store jobs pay $18-20/hr here.
I’ve been working since 14 and that may have been the only year I made the minimum wage too. I don’t generally look at this sort of data so thank you for sharing your anecdotes!
Just means you’re not poor. I know loads, and they’re all in the poorest part of the country.
Dollar General, McDonald’s, Krogers, 7-11 just to name a few that you’d recognize. Used to be Walmart but they upped pay a couple of years ago.
yup, I made minimum wage at a Krogers back in 2010 and the folks working there now are making the same $7.25 I was back then.
Maybe it’s a regional thing then, those types of jobs in my area all earn more than the federal minimum wage and even the stage minimum which is $15/hr now.
That said, aside from DG, those other companies are franchise operations. Still, thank you for honestly answering and not just resorting to name calling.
Well I mean of course. Wages are lower in low cost of living areas. In the poorest areas, wages are lowest
Understandable, I was mainly curious about the “large corporations” but it seems there are a few good examples provided. Thanks!
Np
I no longer work there but in the last year I worked for a “leading global source for education materials” according to Forbes, worth 2.8 billion and I was paid minimum wage as a retail employee.
Yikes, hope things are better now! Thanks for sharing!
Federal min wage, many state minimum wages are more than that
Many are over double this… it’s honestly a fucking joke at the federal level
While I am very pro-minimum wage, it does need to be more regionally based than nationally. The minimum required to get by in LA, New York, and so forth is going to be different than some podunk middle of no where towns in rural America.
I’m not pro minimum wage. Not at all. It’s a symptom of a larger disease. The fact that we need laws to specify the minimum wage someone can make, is ridiculous. It’s 2023 and we have more than enough resources for everyone. Wages should be a thing of the past already. I’d take a basic income allowance or a system that removes money completely somehow tbh.
Completely removing money is forever impossible, as long as we are here. Some people will always be trading. It’s just our human nature, and money is very useful for trading. That means, even if the state of any country discontinues their fiat currency, the trading people that were agreeing upon using that currency, will just switch to any other fiat currency still in existence, or any crypto currency, or gold or whatever else they agree upon.
Teenager take
Isn’t that why it’s so low? It would also be hard anywhere in the US to live on $7.25 an hour.
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And many municipalities even higher than many of those high state minimum wages.
Then you have NC. NC’s state gov does everything it can to restrict local govs. It is even banning cities from regulating single use plastic bags.
Sounds like big government overreach to me
It’s the GOP punishing cities for being Blue. NC has no local/home rule unless general assembly delegates it through specific legislation. GOP has had lock on general assembly since 2 years into Obama’s first term.
Then you get Texas. We’ve got a law that just went into effect that basically takes away huge swaths of law making powers from the cities. They have made no attempt to hide that it was entirely for the benefit of businesses at the expense of locals and their desires.
Additionally just because that is the minimum wage doesn’t mean people are getting payed that. I live in a state where we just used the fed minimum, and see McDonald’s advertising $17/hr. That’s still a pretty humble rate but the labor market dictates wages not the government.
It should be noted that this is the federal minimum wage. Many states set a higher minimum wage than that. For example, California’s minimum wage will be $16/hr starting January 1st, Virginia is $12/hr, and New York is $14.20/hr.
Pennsylvania is $7.25 lol.
California’s is actually even weirder, because they recently passed legislation that raises the minimum wage but specifically on franchised businesses
I think that got held up in lobbyists appealing to the court.
Berkeley’s minimum wage is $18.07
Could be worse. 25 cents in 1938 is still only worth $5.44 today.
2 dollars of progress for 85 years… How much has productivity risen during that time?
People working for minimal wage don’t produce more value. Considering advancements in mechanisation and automation over these years, their productivity has actually decreased.
Minimum Wage workers/general laborers are the literal backbone of any work force. Their value is literally instrumental to any and all industries. These industries would simply collapse if minimum wage workers are taken out of the equation. And that’s without pointing out that wage isn’t indicative of how important someone is to a workplace.
And automation doesn’t mean much when you still need an entire force to upkeep all of those machines. And I’d bet my right arm and left leg that if wage pricing is left to corporations that they’ll place said workers at minimum wage if they can get away with it.
Nope. These jobs are a waste of time and money.
Essential workers from the pandemic looking at this shit take like
Lol right? I thought we all learned this lesson like 3 years ago.
What essential workers? Ocado is fully automated.
Yeah this isn’t true. While automation has made machines more effective than humans in many cases, they haven’t made human labor less effective. Not sure why you would think that. Advances in tools and software have made every sector of the workforce more productive. There’s a million little things.
They have flattops at fast food places that cook the top and the bottom of the burger patty at the same time. So one worker can do more. Roofers have faster and lighter nail guns letting them work for longer. Hell, when I did lawn care as a teen you’d see another crew with some fancy new mower every month, and the improvements were usually worth the costs.
Roofers are not minimal wage workers. Minimal wage workers are redundant.
Listen here you little shit we’re here for class solidarity and memes not mathematics
Meanwhile in Canada minimum wage is at $16.55 starting Oct 1st.
Though I don’t understand how the tipping culter is essential the same between the US and Canada
To be fair that’s like 12 USD which would still require tipping. Also not sure if Canada has the same minimum wage exception for tip workers where they’re allowed to be paid significantly less than minimum wage so long as tips make up the difference. In the US it’s very typical for tip workers to only be paid 2-3 dollars an hour.
Going up to $14.00 on 1 October in Saskatchewan. Like the USA we have different labour laws in each province. We also get 3 weeks vacation to start, unlike the 2 weeks BC and Ontario get.
I agree it needs to be raised but that’s a terrible and misleading way to present the data.
I strongly agree with this comment.
You could as easily say it’s increased by 2800% (correct me if I’m wrong) since then, which sends the opposite message, but neither are good ways of showing what’s really going on…
Why do people even live in the US?
You write that as if moving to a new country is just that easy.
If you’re in Europe and have never visited, you might be surprised at just how huge the US is. That, plus having only two adjacent countries, makes leaving very difficult.
Oh yeah, plus you have to get into another country, most of which aren’t super welcoming to immigrants, either.
Their instance implies they’re Australian which is similar in size to the US, and also further away from most other countries.
You are right that it’s difficult for many people to move country though.
You can leave to any country that’s not adjacent to the US. I’m really not getting what point you’re trying to make with that statement?
The rest is still valid, but this part is a bit of a moot point. Most countries are welcoming of sufficiently skilled immigrants as well - though the US education system with its ridiculous pricing might be a deterrent here.
Practically no one making minimum wage is “sufficiently skilled” lol what a load of ridiculous privilege rofl
“Just move to Europe” is like “just get a loan from your parents” level of out of touch
“Let them eat cake”
Where exactly did I say Europe? Plenty of well paying jobs elsewhere. Lived in both Africa and Asia (still there, actually) for 2 decades and the money you can make there beats Europe by a wide margin. Educational requirements are low to nonexistent, depending on the region.
And you managed to get even MORE out of touch.
You can earn more money in Africa as an unskilled laborer than Europe? What a ridiculous statement.
Minimum wage =/= unskilled. Plenty of educated people struggle to find employment and might be better off elsewhere.
No, but minimum wage ≈ unskilled
Very few skills are sufficient to make up for being disabled
Which sucks, agree. Though I thought this thread was about regularly abled people, or did I miss something?
You have to have a bachelors degree to even be considered for citizenship in many countries. South Korea for example
Why bother with citizenship? Work permit is all that’s needed.
because am born in the u.s.
💀
Difficult to escape.
It’s a pretty nice country, it’s got a little bit of everything. It has flaws, and as Americans we complain about them and try to get them fixed to constantly improve it.
I think a lot of the images of America being so bad comes from our overwhelming volume online.
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I really like the choice of “more perfect union” in the preamble because it does really reinforce that we will always have flaws. To me, it reminds us of our flaws, not to deride us but so that we might seek to improve upon them and never rest on our own laurels.
Criticizing your country because you wish for it to improve is amung the most patriotic things a person can do.
The immigration system is kinda broken that some people had to emigrate to Canada instead.
Canada thought you were shit long before the internet
It’s a big reason for our historical loyalty to the crown
as if nationalism for the crown & the city is something to be proud of… how embarrassing
Proud of?
I was saying it exists just because it is believed to make us less American
As an American I have a positive image of Canada, they’re the closest thing we have to a sibling in my mind. And if the providences ever wanted state hood I’d support them joining, but I’m sure a lot of Canadians would take exception to that.
Our state is Canada, if we were to join then it would be one state
Just like how your states joined, the German states joined together to form Germany, and the European states joined the EU
Also most of the loyalists in the colonies fled to Canada during and immediately after the American Revolution, for obvious reasons.
They don’t make it easy to get out.
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Two people decided to fuck in 1991.
Wasn’t my idea.
Stuck… who would want us? Every country I’d like to live in would require me to be very rich or have a usable skill set. While I have the latter it also needs to be provable which is difficult.
I should have bolted when I was younger but i just didn’t have the knowledge.
Also remember the student loan crisis in the US, so going to a college, university, or trade school is simply not a viable option for many of the most vulnerable and neediest of folks in the US, especially when they are already working during HS to help support their family.
The working classes in the USA really do have the deck actively stacked against them, and something needs to change or we as a nation are completely fucked.
I think it’s far worse than you make it sound. When I entered the workforce (while also paying to go to a trade school that was a scam) min wage was $6. While I was able to rise through the ranks pretty fast it was a long time of scraping by just to eat and pay bills so i could keep working.
Nearly 30 years later federal minimum wage is $1.25 more than were i started. Adjusted for inflation that’s impossible to live on, I didn’t have it easy by any means but at least I could survive. I’d never have had a chance with things as they are now. I feel bad for the youth of this country that don’t happen to have the right hookups and connections or, sometimes, luck.
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Well obviously it’s very difficult for the poor to leave and if you aren’t poor it’s actually a pretty nice place to live.
It’s where I keep the bodies
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Which country bro?
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I can save enough to leave!
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I think a more alarming stat is that, due to inflation, minimum wage workers have received a pay cut every year for the last fourteen years.
Was going to ask, did op include inflation?
