An hour spent commuting is 1/16th of your daily life, and that hour is by far the biggest risk to your life every day. You should be getting triple pay to ameliorate the hazard risk it represents.

  • foggy@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    95
    arrow-down
    14
    ·
    2 days ago

    When they started pushing for $15 federal minimum, it should have been $50.

    Today, it should be about $150.

    At $150/hr, you could afford to buy a an average home with a years pay.

    People don’t realize how insanely bad it’s been getting.

    I disagree that we should be paid triple to travel. We should just be paid appropriately. That’s all.

    • spongebue@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      44
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      2 days ago

      Ok, so we have a lot effed up in our system right now and I’m not trying to discount that. But this is like high school economics level stuff when I ask…

      At $150/hr, you could afford to buy a an average home with a years pay.

      Between the lowered supply of creating houses (in that it becomes more expensive to produce a house because everyone is getting paid a hell of a lot more) and the increased demand for housing because everyone has a bigger number in their bank account… Do you really expect that housing prices would just… Stay the same?

      I’m also curious when any society at any point in history has been able to sustain decent housing with about a year’s worth of wages?

      • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        2 days ago

        Maybe not one year, but it looks like a median home in the US in 1965 cost around 6 years of a median income.

        In the 1854 book Walden by Thoreau, he gives a pessimistic account of how long it would take to afford a property in a town, that is still less than today:

        An average house in this neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years of the laborer’s life, even if he is not encumbered with a family- estimating the pecuniary value of every man’s labor at one dollar a day, for if some receive more, others receive less

        Although he goes on to describe building his own more remote cabin for $28.

        Something is very, very wrong with incomes and housing prices currently that wasn’t as bad a problem in the past.

      • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        20
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        2 days ago

        Agreed. My wife and I are doing pretty well and we don’t even make anywhere near $150/hr combined. Maybe in the Bay and NYC that wage would make sense but not most places. Making that the minimum wage would just cause a ton of inflation and put most people back at square one.

    • HubertManne@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 day ago

      thats a bit out there but in terms of eggs I estimate minimum wage if it was the same when I was young would be somewhere between $45 and $75 per hour. It still amazes me how much money I was paid back then as a high school student.

    • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      10
      ·
      edit-2
      2 days ago

      You’re out of your mind if you think a $300k salary for every working citizen is feasible. Paying that out would require $53 trillion, which is more than our GDP.

      • Whostosay@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        19
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        2 days ago

        That’s the thing though, the number doesn’t matter.

        We have people starving and then we have people traveling to the other side of the planet to throw a wedding that could feed millions of people.

        Fuck a number, fuck money, eat the rich then we can all eat and live wherever we want.

        Sometimes I think about trying to buy a tiny home or a single wide, and then 5 seconds later, I realize that its just not going to fucking happen. That’s an insane thought. If we don’t start hitting the streets soon, we’re all going to lose.

      • bstix@feddit.dk
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 day ago

        The company is probably going to charge their customers even more for the work you do in your working time.

        Someone already pays that money. The workers just don’t receive it.

        If everybody was self-employed, those are the prices that would be paid.

        • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 day ago

          I agree up to the extent of the numbers. I think $50/hr is feasible if we make drastic changes to our economy. $150/hr simply cannot work with the country’s current number of workers and overall productivity.

    • flueterflam@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      16
      ·
      2 days ago

      $150 per hour? I’m in salaried software engineering and barely making a third of that after a promotion.

      If what you propose happens, all the prices of everything would skyrocket… It seems good on paper, but it ignores all the greed of capitalism…

      For better or worse, (the latter for rich folks…) there “needs” to be tiers of incomes (in Capitalism). Bumping the minimum just bumps the prices. We’ve already experience it with minimum wage bumps in the US. We don’t have an actual solution that works at the moment in the US because minimum wage increases automatically lead to greedier CEOs.

      • HubertManne@piefed.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 day ago

        You have to admit that what you are getting paid is to low though considering what it takes to do what you do. Even doctors and lawyers are not making what they should as the issue is at the extreme top.

      • spongebue@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        2 days ago

        I mean, I agree with a lot of what you said but also we haven’t had any federal minimum wage bumps in a decade and a half. States that follow federal minimum wage haven’t exactly kept their cost of living frozen.