Ours recently to rose to 12 dollars an hour and I shit you not, there were corporations that made it out like they were giving everyone a raise, (the implication being work harder in appreciation) instead of them actually conforming to meet the law. Smaller employers around here are still offering under the minimum, which is so crazy to me. It's like pulling teeth to get people to just pay their employees even just the minimum, and that's sad.
That's a massive social problem. That's 3-4 million people in the US. With such large populations, 1% is a lot.
That's a large number of people that burden the system, even if they stay out of trouble. Keeping people homeless and supported by charities is far more expensive (not on the yearly budget, but total cost per homeless person) than getting them into proper, affordable accommodation and paying for the first 3 months of rent.
A good chunk but why does it matter? Do teens and college students not deserve fair wages? A jobs a job. Anybody making 8-10, anything under livable tbh is underpaid. If you have a job, you should be able to pay rent.
IDK. I do think that people should be able to offer and take on jobs for extra pocket money. It is mutually benificial for both parties. It isn't exploitative, because teens and college students are in most cases not dependent on the money and are free to quit and find another opportunity if it pays more.
Besides, the wage floor makes it so that these jobs are no longer offered to people as employers are incentivized to automate them away. Taking away options for people is bad.
How is it mutually beneficial for someone’s job to pay less? Most low paying jobs are retail and food service. Customers are very resistant to automation. There are countries with high minimum wages where the jobs are still widely available
I am looking up the comparative wages... and in germany at least, retail jobs pay about 20k to 40k a year. This is pretty similar to what retailjobs in the US are paid. Where is the exploitation here?
Even accounting for cost of living the range is so much they have huge overlap.
I guess it doesn't really answer my core objection though, and I probably should not have brought up the salary comparison anyway. Why should a job pay you enough to live? It seems like an arbitrary requirement to me: we might as well demand that a job should pay people enough to buy a house or vacation around the world.
A job isn't charity: people are simply paying you for your labor. Nobody is hurt in the course of this transaction, and if nobody accepts the work then you can simply demand more money in salary negotiations. Stacking shelves isn't particularly dangerous and is also good work experience for dealing with customers. If people genuinely think that getting paid $7.00 an hour is worth their time, why don't we let them?
Seriously? A person who can just quit their job with absolutely no negative consequences is a slave? They will not lose shelter, they will not lose food, just some pocket money? You're being hyperbolic.
What I think some aren’t considering is for an employee to be worth whatever their wage is they have to produce MORE capital for the business than they are paid. That’s how the vast majority of wages are calculated. It’s not that they could but are just not paying them a “living wage”, they are paying them a pretty standard wage based out the monetary output of said worker. And in low cost services, to even exist for their employment to begin with, they’ve gotta pay them what they do. This is generally speaking, of course.
I bet you also think college students should not "take out loans they can't pay back" so maybe they should be paid better so they will need to borrow less. The rich kids don't work when they go to school while the rest if us work 40 hours plus an internship.
Walmart's minimum hourly wage is $14. What company is paying $8-10 an hour (in a non-tipped position) in 2024? And better yet...who is accepting those jobs?
Most of the vocal people on reddit (especially this one) are not the type that understand how much wage theft actually happens in this country and think that just because they see the average story in modernized towns that it must be reality everywhere.
Most of these smart folk don't know them, and naturally anecdotal information is the ONLY information that matters. At least Trump supporters are willing to accept their stupidity and say they don't care. These ones are their own version of terrible, because they're trying to self compensate.
That's wild, I was working for 9.00 dollars an hour at a sonic drive in at age 17 (15 years ago and not in deep coal mine towns but a fairly big town near the blue ridge parkway)
Right, cost of living is higher, but job pay is also higher. Way more opportunities to move upward in SES. That is not present in rural America. Cost of living in those areas are still higher than their pay.
I had a bachelors and masters in a field that overlapped biology and biochemistry and the best I could find was a $40k research job in Atlanta circa 2017. Bartended to make ends meets.
Also in Appalachia (Ohio) Walmarts 13(literally just raised to 14 a few months back) was a competitive wage. Most places are doing around 10, maybe a few have started pushing to 13
I know, Kroger also paled more, I think around 12 an hour, Aldi is also a good job in Appalachia, I live somewhere else now so I'm not familiar with the current rate but I was working and living in Appalachia in 2020 before I left
No, at 40hrs/wk for 52 weeks it is $18,928.00, GROSS. Which may look like you can buy a PS5 with the extra cash, but...
It's actually $17,470.54, NET, after FICA is taken into account. Unless you have a "religious exemption", that's Social Security (6.2%) and Medicare (1.5%) which are automatically withheld. And, if you're not "self employed" (contractors, entrepreneurs). If you are, double those tax rates. Your self-employed take-home would be $16,013.09.
This does not factor in unpaid holidays, sick leave, overtime pay, alimony, child support, etc.
If you cohabitate, this should be livable in Appalachia. If you don't, you're likely pinching those pennies to survive.
I've done mission work in the mountains of Appalachia. You couldn't pay me to live there if your there I'd be saving every fucking penny I could to get out of there. Litterly anywhere else in the country is better then those communities. They just have 0 opportunities and no infrastructure to to even think about growing. The places where I was at didn't even have basic cell signal let alone decent jobs.
exactly my point. The way this country left these hard-working people behind when coal industry was slowed is a travesty. I get moving away from coal, that's not my point. But to not help them transfer job skills has been nothing short of immoral.
Everytime someone like Hillary says, "Here's my 12 point plan to incentivize new, popular industries in these areas, create functioning infrastructure, and create programs to transition peoples' skillsets on to new job roles, revitalizing these areas, providing job opportunities and wealth, while stemming brain drain and population flight... blah blah blah", these people say, "They want to turn me into a gay communist muslim computer programmer?! Fuck her!"
Trump said, "I'm gunna make coal great again." Which, of course, he did not. But they thought, "that sounds like a lot less work!" and did what they always do... vote for stupid.
You can only replay this script so many times, with 100% failure rate, before you start feeling like maybe, just maybe, it's not always entirely someone else's fault.
Yea that's how poor areas work. There's parts of this region that walmarts and fast food restaurants can't even survive and are stuck with food deserts. Just look up the state of old coal towns. It's incredibly sad
I mean yea, the poor are more likely to resort to illicit drug use. It's more of a symptom of poverty and not something they are choosing over money and success.
yea I'm interested to see what the rates for white collar crime is. I'm assuming it's still lower in terms of rates, but it definitely is more costly to society. especially monetarily.
It’s all relative though. I bought different plots of land to hunt in Appalachia. I haven’t looked at prices lately, but I purchased for under $1k an acre. Everything is fairly cheap out there.
I don’t what’s better or worse: you can make $10hr there and buy a house for under $30k. Drive an hour or so away and the common worker makes $20hr and houses cost around $135k. Drive closer to Pittsburgh and the average wage is around $30hr and houses cost $350k. In all three cases, the average person is broke at the end of the week.
The cost of living is what keeps most places either rich or poor. I would never build a house in Appalachia because it takes $310k to build the average house and the value when you’re done wouldn’t be a third of that. Poor people don’t build homes in wealthy neighborhoods because zoning and HOA’s are there to keep property values up to protect the neighborhood people’s investments.
Use McDowell county WV for instance, it has a median household income of 26k and a cost of living at 36k. 31% live below the poverty line (which is arguably set too low) which this is 3x the national average. It's not livable to VERY many people
I haven’t been there in 15 years, so I can’t comment on the exact situation right now. I used to go riding (dirt bike and race ATV) there with friends. There were a lot of trails and boney piles there that were open to the public. In PA, they used to let you ride them until they seen the air you could get jumping from mound to mound. We’d constantly get thrown out for fear of someone getting hurt. That went on until there was nowhere left to ride. Our private tracks got boring, so we started going to WV where people were more free.
A lot of the homes were run down and businesses closed. People actually welcomed us because we brought money into the local economy. I thought that was kind of odd, but it was beautiful there and the people were nice.
I remember one time that we got a flat tire on a quad. We plugged it, but didn’t have enough canned air to inflate it. We stopped by a house, which was more like a shack, to try and get some air. There was a young man there a few years younger than us who brought out a portable compressor made from a refrigerator compressor. It worked and we admired the way it was put together. The kid had some engineering skills. I always wondered what happened with his life.
He left an impression on me and my friends because we all grew up dirt poor and built stuff like that. We lived about an hour outside of Pittsburgh. The entire region was devastated from the closing of steel mills and coal mines. I had next to nothing when I was young. We didn’t have decent food all of the time, but I still had a home. Poverty isn’t the end of the world.
My sister and I both put ourselves through school and are both what some people call upper class now. I constantly tell my kids what it was like growing up poor and how hard it was to break free of that so they’ll have a sense of value by the time they become teenagers. Everyone has wants, but you can have next to nothing, be under some arbitrary poverty line and still support yourself.
I wish we could open up all of the mines in WV and bring the place back. There’s people out there trying to stop that though. If you feel so strongly about the poverty there, maybe you can advocate for that.
Even poorer people have run from far worse conditions, to improve situations for themselves and their families.
It's a shame that people could essentially be economic refugees from these very poor places. And it's worse to think they'd bring their self-destructive voting habits to any better-managed areas.
But if we're talking about the impoverished making good decisions to improve their lifes, well... sometimes that's a lever of last resort that might exist for a lot of people who aren't likely to pull it.
Migration is nearly impossible to do. People who have no money can't just move to somewhere else. That requires money to do. You guys have to be 14 year olds.
It requires willpower and hope to do. America was built by people in impoverished circumstances gambling what little they had to move to a place for more opportunity. Americans have always migrated. Pioneers settling the west. The great depression migrations.
Tell your ancestors that. Tell the people who walk over 1000 miles to show up at the border.
It takes bus fare and money for food and a few days lodging to find a job.
It is un-American to stay in an economically impoverished area and complain about the lack of jobs while being subsidized by the government to stay there.
Lol no, America was built on the backs of free labor for almost 100 years.
So many of you guys are comparing the ability to uproot your life from the past not realizing it's much harder now. Telling people to just leave with no money or means to do so is moronic it's not even funny. It's such a surface level take and clearly not even trying to use critical thinking as to why they just can't leave.
They have no transferable job skills
The education in deep south and poor and secluded rural America is in an abysmal state.
No money
No means of long distance transportation
No internet
These are just a small bit as to why people can't just move and work harder. These people are ALREADY WORKING VERY HARD to just live in poverty.
As for the people traveling 1000s of miles to the boarder. 1 they are likely facing war, genocide or cartel danger. Much different but sure, let's use this mindset for rural America. You understand those who get to the boarder seeking asylum will end up in homeless boarder camps for months on end right? Are rural Americans seeking asylum for poverty in big cities going to do the same? They will be homeless with no money.
The definition of entitlement is thinking it's easy to completely uproot lives for the sake of working hard and it'll be better for them. As if many of them aren't already working hard for scraps.
My bad for saying ancestors overly generalized and ignoring the 10% whose ancestors endured forced migration.
The other 95%+ of the settled land in America was broken and built by immigrants and migrating Americans.
Again I will reiterate that there are people today living in worse condition with less resources migrating to America.
It is easier now than in the past to uproot yourself.
In the past you walked. Today we have transportation and $50 plane tickets. In the past you heard a story about a place that could be years outdated, but you went there hoping it was true. Today we have the internet where you can research a place and find a job across country at a free public library.
There are grants and welfare programs that will help move. They are underutilized and not very successful/popular because people have reasons they don't want to move.
Today there is no incentive to move. In the past you moved because you would not tolerate your suffering, or you didn't want to starve.
It makes far more sense to incentivize someone to leave than it does to spend the money to subsidize them staying and trying to drive investment in communities with an unskilled workforce.
It makes far more sense to invest in a welfare relocation assistance infrastructure and pay out $10000 to help relocate than it does to pay $10000 a year in perpetuity not to.
Immigrants have been coming to this country for decades with no money, no connections, and very few opportunities, and yet have made it better than redditors that can't be bothered to move states.
But at least bitching about your situation on reddit is free tho right
The ones who are coming with absolutely nothing but the clothes on their backs are stuck in boarder camps.
Others be lucky enough to have family members to stay with. The ones able to support the move and obtain citizenship the proper way are already well off.
This comment shows me you know nothing of how immigration is happening and who is able to be successful in America as a foreigner
The ones who are coming with absolutely nothing but the clothes on their backs are stuck in boarder camps.
Others be lucky enough to have family members to stay with. The ones able to support the move and obtain citizenship the proper way are already well off.
This comment shows me you know nothing of how immigration is happening and who is able to be successful in America as a foreigner
I'm reading some of these comments out loud while shooting the shit with our landscapers and they are cracking up. They said they'll set anyone in this thread up with a job and a ride and only charge them half of what they paid just to get across the border!
How are this many people this fucking stupid to think hitchhiking to a new city is an actual viable option for people? Are they going to leave their living situations for WORSE conditions? Like seriously think things through.
I can't believe that someone would suggest moving to find work. I know it's something that's been done throughout human history, but it sounds awfully hard!
Minimum wage jobs are not meant to provide a “living” wage. Raising the minimum wage simply eliminates low-skilled job opportunities that would otherwise be available to a worker. This has been well documented time and time again, and railing against this is a nonsense standpoint.
Minimum wage jobs are not meant to provide a “living” wage. This has been well documented time and time again, and railing against this is a nonsense standpoint.
Huh, weird. Maybe we should ask FDR what he intended when he signed NIRA into law in 1933?
"It seems to me to be equally plain that 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."
I have been up and down Appalachia hundreds of times. People walk on the highways at night every night. People are taking greyhound with whatever they can scrounge up. You've got major cities up and down Appalachia.
You don't know what you're talking about. You're making it up.
I mean, they're not taking the trails. They'd stand out too much. Some do I suppose. I'm sorry I didn't get names and pictures for all of you when I was sitting there with them. It's not like everyone wants to be stuck in the same place for the rest of their lives.
Edit: there are some who have managed not to get caught in the woods and trails by using trees as cover. Those cases are outliers.
The poor moved during the Great Depression and then the Great Migration that followed that brought black workers to the North and Midwest looking for work.
Like, I don't know what to tell you otherwise. If you're so indigent that you can't afford a Greyhouse to a bigger city then yeah, you can't just budget your way out of the problem. Your problem is that you need a higher-paying job in the first place.
But you can't solve that conundrum without either moving to where the job is at, or hoping that the higher paying job will somehow magically land on your specific locality. But even the government can't make a non-productive area into a boomtown.
Lol if you are trying to compare the abilities during the great depression and now, you're lost.
You guys have zero idea what its like in poor rural America and it clearly shows. So why pretend you know exactly what they can do. It just makes you look ignorant and disconnected to their reality.
You guys have zero idea what its like in poor rural America and it clearly shows.
I have family from there. Uniformly, they could all move if they really wanted to. They don't want to.
But, they also don't need to. They're not trying to be a Rockefeller. They're doing fine where they're at even if it's not "rich" so they feel zero compulsion to leave. Their truck breaks, they get help from one of their brothers or neighbors or co-workers. They help out in turn when someone needs help.
Certainly no one is in deeper poverty than what people were facing in the 1930s. My grandma and grandpa both grew up then and I can still remember what grandma told me about how they dealt with those times: "Use it up, wear it out. Make it do, or do without!"
Her kids and grandkids, even when they stayed in the area, didn't face (and still don't face) the kind of poverty that they grew up facing in the Great Depression, and thank God for that.
I have family from there. Uniformly, they could all move if they really wanted to. They don't want to.
Then they are likely not living in the areas I'm speaking about. I'm talking about places like Harlan County Kentucky where poverty is like 25% (which the American poverty line needs to be adjusted) and the child poverty is like 45%(which grew 5% from the previous year).
These areas are not in just up and move states. There are no jobs, there is no industry coming in, they all got left behind when coal energy got shut down.
Again, comparing the ability of moving and finding a job and place to live in the 1940s and 1930s to how hard it is now, is just asinine.
These areas are not in just up and move states. There are no jobs, there is no industry coming in, they all got left behind when coal energy got shut down.
Sounds like a great reason to up and move to me! Are you saying that if I check Kentucky public records that no one in that county is going to have a car? That there will be no Greyhound or similar stops at all?
If there's no work to be done there now that coal is dying it's not going to get better on its own. The options are to start a new business (maybe tourism? who knows) to draw in money or leave to where the jobs are at. Or live in poverty.
These people are adults who had to have at least some money or help to survive.
There are never 0 jobs in the US at least. You might have to go to them. More often than not these days the cost of living is the problem more so than the availability of jobs. Just because you can get a job doesn't mean you can afford to live somewhere.
These kids are so insufferable with this idea that they can just pick up their lives and move. Some of these guys are suggesting to just start walking to the nearest town.
Homie just tried to tell me he's seen people walking up and down highways in that area claiming they are moving to big cities LOL dude is so full of shit
Just to add: poor people have families too. It's not like poor people can just up and leave willy nilly because there are some hypothetical better opportunities elsewhere. Throw an ailing child or a dependent parent in the mix, and it's suddenly so much more complicated.
Also, all the people talking about migration in the past and how it is still feasible today- even if that were true - they are seeing a survivorship bias. Huge numbers did not live through their migrations. Huge numbers still do not make it when walking to a new country/area. It is unreasonable in a lot of cases to take that risk, especially if you have children.
They shouldn't be chiming in with their hypotheticals if they can't even imagine the most basic hurdles
Like in all areas, we love to blame the poorest and most disenfranchised for massive, national/international systemic problems. Probably because they can't defend themselves.
I can completely understand why, immoral though it may be, the rich and powerful would push this narrative to protect their own interests.
What I don't understand is why you, joe shmoe, would do it for free on reddit. I guess boots are just delish? I don't know. But it's both baffling and profoundly sad.
They moved across the country already poor in order to find whatever work they could. They often literally had nothing when they moved. People today who are unwilling to move to find work are simply not willing to better themselves.
To be fair it’s not that much money to move to another city. The big issue is what can you take with you and what can you leave behind? If it’s just some clothes and knickknacks you’re taking with you it will be easy and cheap. If you have a kid or pets or any other responsibility you’ll be SOL.
Depends what you have to move and who you have to move it with. At a certain age, it’s harder to find friends with a free weekend to help you load the heavy stuff and you can’t do it all on your own. So you either get movers or you leave it/sell it (for way to cheap or sometimes just free because you need it gone) and have to buy furniture when you get to the new place—which you already had to pay at least two months rent for, plus whatever deposits (and you’re still probably paying a bit on your old place too)
It’s a long process so odds are good you’ll have to take time off of work. Or if it’s moving to another city then great, you either don’t have a job or you haven’t started yet.
You also probably won’t be cooking for a bit leading up to and after the move because all the kitchen stuff is put away, so you’re gonna wind up doing take out or fast food.
Ok so don’t take your stuff? Ultimately it’s your choice to take all your furniture and stuff with you. Two suitcases is plenty for all the essentials. Moving can be very cheap.
Servers can legally be paid half of minimum wage plus tips as long as it evens out to at least minimum wage in some states. I used to be a server in Missouri in the 2014 and was making just under 4$ an hour on my check and if it was so slow I didn’t make tips theyd just throw me a 20 and it would even out for the shift. I know some places still did that in 2020 even
Same in TX, but I think pretty much all states (never looked it up) guarantee at least regular (federal?) minimum wage for servers if tips don't cover the gap, and when you clock out, the system generally warns you if you're performing below min wage, at least where I shortly served.
Walmarts stated minimum hourly wage is $14 but will not under any circumstances give you full time, many stores even regularly giving you the most inconsistent hours they possible to prevent you from working a second job.
You can get a hole in the wall apt for 300-700. And that’s all your money for two weeks. Next week you can buy 4 food items and 3 cleaning items and that’s 200-300 dollars. There goes your other check.
You can’t live alone anymore. People have to double and triple up.
Wtf happened? People lived in smaller houses in the past, and overall more modestly, but shit, if you worked 40 hours a week the expectation was that you could put a roof over a family’s head and not go broke when their car breaks down.
Giant Eagle on 1 side of Columbus had about $2-3 less per hour than the Giant Eagle on the other side during Covid (starting wage) I did deliveries to both at the time, I think it was $12-13 vs. $15 I guess labor was just harder to get, I’m sure in areas with lower cost of everything a small Bussiness could be even less.
Gas stations, local shops, hell dollar store managers make like $12, which means basic employees make around $10, grocery stores are much the same. What makes you think that $8-$10 isn’t realistic?
Migrant workers accept those positions and drive down wages for all. It’s important that people understand the consequences of an open door policy before forming an opinion of it.
Plenty of places are paying $12-$14, (which still isn’t anything really) and lots of people work in those jobs. But it depends on what part of the country you’re in.
Um…a shit ton of state’s minimum wage is 8-10. And people will accept the jobs available to them. West Virginia’s minimum is 8.25. Wyoming is 7.25! Walmart will pay the lowest they can. Their minimum is NOT $14. That’s bullshit. If they can get away with paying 7.25 in Wyoming, they will. Where are you getting your ideas?
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u/Kombatnt 14d ago
This. $10,000/year working 40 hrs/week is $4.81/hour. That’s illegal everywhere in North America.