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Seattle Approves $15 Per Hour Minimum Wage
An anonymous reader writes "The Seattle City Council announced on Monday that it has unanimously approved a $15 per hour minimum wage mandate. The new rate will go into effect starting April 1, 2015 in a tiered, gradual manner that depends on employer size. In the first year of implementation, hourly minimum wage will be raised to either $10 or $11 according to the employer size category. By 2021, hourly minimum wage across the board should be at or above $15. Seattle is the first city to implement a living wage for its lowest earners."
$15 will be the new $7.50
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
In Sweden we have no minimum wage. We're said to be one of the richest countries in the world, but there is a dark underground that very few speak about, and that is about all those people who work for LESS than the US call "minimum wage". It may sound like a joke to you (especially if you read the numbers), but I can assure you - it is not. When I was new to Sweden, I had to work for LESS than minimum wage as a substitute teacher in some small city. Substitute teachers have no rights, receive only what they can negotiate (which is usually very little, and we compete with foreigners and FAS3...gov. unemployed activity candidates) for the scraps.
The same thing with burger flippers, and now also train-personnel (they're currently on STRIKE in Sweden right now, for the rights to work full-time instead of being paid by the hour and shared amongst many desperate job seekers).
This seems to be the net outcome of the society we've chosen today, to let the few have 80% of our assets, and the rest just work as slaves for the 10-20% rich elite. I must stress that I am not a socialist or communist by a long shot, but there is something wrong with a society that can't pay their workers a proper wage.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
They've just promised that some other group of politicians will raise it years from now?
This seems to be the way so many new laws work: they're delayed until after the next election, so today's politicos can take the praise for passing the law, and the new bunch will be the ones in power when the problems become apparent.
Still further there is the even more ignorant people that believe that not only should there be a minimum, but that it should be a "living wage" -- because all work that must be done must also be worth enough to afford a nice cozy life.
Whoa, back the horse up. A living wage is not about a "nice cozy life". It is about not having to choose between eating and paying the rent. Believe it or not, there are some people in this country that have to make that decision. Why should anyone have to work 2-3 jobs just to survive when corporate profits are at an all time high?
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Back in the 1990s, i was making $12-14 an hour rolling buritos for a restaurant chain. My wages changed if i went to a different store which is why there is a wage wiindow. Minimum wage went from 3.35 to around 5.25 or so. I only worked at minimum wage once and that was because it increased before i recieved raises.
Anyways, that was only possible because unemployment was low. We hired in kids with no work experience at $1-1.50 an hour above minimum wage just to get people in the door. With raises every 6 months, if you actually put some effort into the job, you could increase that in no time. Skilled people were hired in at even more.
The answer is not raising a minimum wage but lowering unemployment. That was the key to Clinton's "its the economy stupid". Anyone who wanted a job could get one and in most places, they could get one that paid somewhat better than minimum wage.
Minimum wage is not supposed yo be a living wage. It is not supposed to be a career goal. It is supposed to be a minimum for people with no work history so they can prove thenselves. It is a sad sign when our economy and people in it have resigned themselves to accepting the minimum and are relying on the state in order to better their careers. The answer is to lower unemployment. The people will go to whomever is paying the most and companies will have to pay more on their own out of profits in order to get and keep people. Prices don't jump either because they need to stay competitive with other companies.
What the actual fuck? In the worst case, if your company somehow has 100% of their costs being labor, a 5% increase in wages would be a 5% increase in costs. It is mathematically impossible for what you say to happen.
this is what makes me angry about people bitching about minimum wage increases. there are *so* many countries with much higher minimum wages that you could quite easily look at to see the result of said changes.
here's a hint, the worse off are much less so.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
A 5% increase in the minimum wage could easily be 20% increase in costs.
This is mathematically nonsense. Even if a business's costs come 100% from employee wages (a mythical business that pays no rent, has no equipment, no licenses, no worker training, etc.), a 5% increase in wages is... a 5% increase in costs.
That is the worst-case scenario. You are correct that small businesses don't have the level of efficiency of Walmart - payroll is probably going to be a higher fraction of total cost. The healthcare and the service industry tends to have the worst fraction, with about 50% of costs being payroll. That includes benefits, but if we ignore that for the moment and assume it's all wages, and wages get increased 5% you're still looking at a worst-case increase in costs of 2.5%.
What we really need is a maximum wage; a maximum amount of annual income -- from any source -- that a person can make. This maximum amount should be tied to the median income or some such so that if the rich and powerful want to increase their earning limit, they have to do things that will benefit all of society instead of hurting all of society.
Too much of the economy's lifeblood (i.e. money) is sequestered in the bank accounts of the ultra-wealthy, which a) stalls the economy, and b) gives a disproportionate amount of socio-political power to those individuals. The current vast difference in wealth is as damaging to the human race as things like racism, homophobia, nationalism, etc. (if not more so), and people really need to realize this.
There is an entire class of people that most of society never sees, but which has a profound impact on their lives...and our current economic setup promotes sociopaths and psychopaths into this class. These people have the economic power and the self-centered focus to literally destroy the planet. This situation has to be rectified.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
The story was later corrected... the math is off and is incredibly misleading.
That won't stop anyone from using it.
OK so some businesses will not be able to either give up some profit or raise prices to accommodate the higher wages... they go belly up. But then whatever services they provided will be unavailable & someone will jump in & fill that gap. It's hard to believe the claims of job losses tied to the minimum wage.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
Keep in mind that a family would qualify for SNAP and rent support also.
Translation: the employer can only get away with paying only $7.50 because the government makes up the difference between that and a realistic wage. Benefits without minimum living wage == state subsidy of industry. Still, don't worry, if you look around enough you'll be able to find someone faking disability to parade in front of the media, and prevent people asking awkward questions about how much taxpayers money goes to allowing working people to survive on unliveable wages.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Right. Loads of people live without ANY wages, so the minimum wage really should reflect that and be zero. Why are we cutting off the lowest rungs on the ladder to success? We have record real unemployment, but we are going to make it harder to hire people? Absolute insanity. If you have a problem with you wages not buying enough, take it up with the Federal Reserve. They are the ones printing money to stuff into bankers pockets, who are in turn spending that money into the economy and driving up prices.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Nor do any number of leftists.
Americans NEVER seem to look at other countries. No matter what you're discussing, health care, gun laws, wages, whatever, they always speculate wildly about what might happen if. Never mind that much of the rest of the world has already tried it and found it works pretty well.
$15/hour is approximately $30,000 per year. If you can't figure out how to live on $30,000 per year then you are utterly clueless and/or spoiled.
It's truly sad how many of this sort of ignorant comments a story like this brings out.
The main thing to take note of is that many people who work for minimum wage don't work full-time. So, you can't just extrapolate from an hourly wage to an annual salary. And most part-time workers are subject to the whims of their employer in terms of work schedule. If you're not getting enough hours from one job, it's often difficult to add on another part-time job, because many employers demand flexibility in your schedule. You can't come in a few times? Fine -- they'll start calling someone else.
No it won't be a posh lifestyle but it's certainly enough to get by and it will be in 6.5 years too baring economic catastrophe.
If you're (1) a single person (2) with no kids (3) in good health (4) with no dependents (5) in an area where rents and cost of living aren't outrageous, yeah, it's almost "certainly enough to get by." You might even be able to live reasonably well, if you are budget-conscious. If any of those is not true, it can be harder. If you have a number of these "conditions," even assuming a full-time job and a $30,000 income, it may not be easy.
Broken or not, poverty safety nets are generally a crime offset. We'll have to replace what we remove.