Assuming 1 childless worker, got a list of things here (would like to know more about how these numbers were arrived at, but I’ll take them at their word).
Food, medical, housing, transportation, civic (apparently this is recreation etc.) Internet/mobile, and “other” (saving?)
I looked up an area near me. They give annual values, but I, like most Americans I imagine, can relate more easily to monthly costs, so I divided everything by 12. So here’s what MIT says a “living wage” should pay for, per month:
Food: $406. That seems like a LOT for a single adult. My roommate and I spend less than this for the both of us and we buy groceries together, so I know how much our combined cost is.
Medical: $276. Can’t really comment in either direction about this, fact is that medical costs vary SO much from person to person, and even for the same person at different stages of life, that I’ll just give the benefit of the doubt that that’s the correct cost on average.
Housing: $1615. My rent is less than this, and I’m talking about the actual rent, not just the 50% of it I pay (as I said, roommate). I could see this being more or less accurate for my area for someone just moving in someplace, though.
Transportation: $897. What the fuck? If you have shitty credit AND you financed an expensive car for a shitty rate, then maybe you could get here, not that requires a series of bad decision making. NOBODY should be paying anything close to this a month for a car, even if you get gas weekly.
Civic: $251. That’s significant, $60+ every week? Doing/buying what?
Internet/mobile: $117. That sounds fine, assuming middle of the road Internet and standard mobile plan.
Other: $368. Well, what can you really say about “other”?
So, other than a few of those categories being WAY out of proportion imo, the biggest issue I see here is that MIT is giving different, separate “living wages” for 3 categories of people (1 alone, 2 with 1 working, and 2 with both working (why isn’t this just the first category doubled?)), and for 0 to 3 children. So, some issues I’m seeing:
It’s one thing to force a company to pay a worker more if they have a kid(s), and/or live with someone who doesn’t work, but you can’t force a company to hire these people. Considering that the value of the labor itself obviously does not increase based on those things, this seems like it’d obviously create massive direct (there’s likely some that’s indirect, but the fact is that your boss is not entitled to know anything about your living situation) incentive against hiring anyone other than single childless individuals.
Typically an employer is not even entitled to know such personal details about a worker/applicant in the first place. But if we put these into effect, they would have to, in order to know which category you fall into, which leads back into 1 above.
There is a LOT of work that does not generate nearly that amount of value (in the case above, around $27/hour assuming 40hr work week) for the business, but are things the business can’t function without. It’s easy to say “if you can’t afford to pay every single one of these positions at least this living wage, then you can’t afford to be in business”, but the fact is that this would place huge obstacles in the way of a small business getting up and running to any real degree. Megacorporations have pockets deep enough to eat the cost though, and so they’ll become even better at driving small business to extinction than they already are, and hasten us toward a society where they’re the only real game in town. And I shouldn’t have to list the reasons that an ‘employer monopoly’ is a REALLY bad state of affairs for the working population.
“Just increase the minimum wage to a living wage” is not the ‘duh, just do it’ obvious solution it’s made out to be.
You make good points, but I have to disagree with #3. If a business cannot exist without a certain type of labor, then that labor is responsible for 100% of the business’s produced value. Yes, this might result in a $45 burger and fries, but we’ve been coasting on exploitation for decades and have been sheltered from the true cost of goods and services.
Plus, there are a plethora of jobs that are overdue for being replaced by robots, but haven’t yet because exploiting humans is cheaper. If someone who mops the floor gets a $35/hr wage, we might finally get a commercial-grade mopping robot that doesn’t get the damn mop head caught on every chair leg and fridge wheel.
I’m mobile so I can’t check those numbers, but they leave the sources they got for the calculations they provided, by category here
I know the numbers are pretty on point for for poverty vs living wage for my area, but like any actual research studies YMMV, but they do have sources of why they have the numbers they do, and they are by verified/reliable sources
the definition of living wage is already defined by MIT
They actually have a pretty decent website that calculates it for you here
Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.
Assuming 1 childless worker, got a list of things here (would like to know more about how these numbers were arrived at, but I’ll take them at their word).
Food, medical, housing, transportation, civic (apparently this is recreation etc.) Internet/mobile, and “other” (saving?)
I looked up an area near me. They give annual values, but I, like most Americans I imagine, can relate more easily to monthly costs, so I divided everything by 12. So here’s what MIT says a “living wage” should pay for, per month:
Food: $406. That seems like a LOT for a single adult. My roommate and I spend less than this for the both of us and we buy groceries together, so I know how much our combined cost is.
Medical: $276. Can’t really comment in either direction about this, fact is that medical costs vary SO much from person to person, and even for the same person at different stages of life, that I’ll just give the benefit of the doubt that that’s the correct cost on average.
Housing: $1615. My rent is less than this, and I’m talking about the actual rent, not just the 50% of it I pay (as I said, roommate). I could see this being more or less accurate for my area for someone just moving in someplace, though.
Transportation: $897. What the fuck? If you have shitty credit AND you financed an expensive car for a shitty rate, then maybe you could get here, not that requires a series of bad decision making. NOBODY should be paying anything close to this a month for a car, even if you get gas weekly.
Civic: $251. That’s significant, $60+ every week? Doing/buying what?
Internet/mobile: $117. That sounds fine, assuming middle of the road Internet and standard mobile plan.
Other: $368. Well, what can you really say about “other”?
So, other than a few of those categories being WAY out of proportion imo, the biggest issue I see here is that MIT is giving different, separate “living wages” for 3 categories of people (1 alone, 2 with 1 working, and 2 with both working (why isn’t this just the first category doubled?)), and for 0 to 3 children. So, some issues I’m seeing:
It’s one thing to force a company to pay a worker more if they have a kid(s), and/or live with someone who doesn’t work, but you can’t force a company to hire these people. Considering that the value of the labor itself obviously does not increase based on those things, this seems like it’d obviously create massive direct (there’s likely some that’s indirect, but the fact is that your boss is not entitled to know anything about your living situation) incentive against hiring anyone other than single childless individuals.
Typically an employer is not even entitled to know such personal details about a worker/applicant in the first place. But if we put these into effect, they would have to, in order to know which category you fall into, which leads back into 1 above.
There is a LOT of work that does not generate nearly that amount of value (in the case above, around $27/hour assuming 40hr work week) for the business, but are things the business can’t function without. It’s easy to say “if you can’t afford to pay every single one of these positions at least this living wage, then you can’t afford to be in business”, but the fact is that this would place huge obstacles in the way of a small business getting up and running to any real degree. Megacorporations have pockets deep enough to eat the cost though, and so they’ll become even better at driving small business to extinction than they already are, and hasten us toward a society where they’re the only real game in town. And I shouldn’t have to list the reasons that an ‘employer monopoly’ is a REALLY bad state of affairs for the working population.
“Just increase the minimum wage to a living wage” is not the ‘duh, just do it’ obvious solution it’s made out to be.
You make good points, but I have to disagree with #3. If a business cannot exist without a certain type of labor, then that labor is responsible for 100% of the business’s produced value. Yes, this might result in a $45 burger and fries, but we’ve been coasting on exploitation for decades and have been sheltered from the true cost of goods and services.
Plus, there are a plethora of jobs that are overdue for being replaced by robots, but haven’t yet because exploiting humans is cheaper. If someone who mops the floor gets a $35/hr wage, we might finally get a commercial-grade mopping robot that doesn’t get the damn mop head caught on every chair leg and fridge wheel.
I’m mobile so I can’t check those numbers, but they leave the sources they got for the calculations they provided, by category here
I know the numbers are pretty on point for for poverty vs living wage for my area, but like any actual research studies YMMV, but they do have sources of why they have the numbers they do, and they are by verified/reliable sources