[wredcoll]

> Minimum wage should be temporary - so this study is kind of stupid.

I see this type of attitude/comment frequently whenever the minimum wage comes up, but I've never seen any kind of justification for it.

If these aren't "real jobs" that deserve "real pay" then why are there billion(trillion?) dollar corporations built entirely on top of employing millions of people at minimum wage?

[rufus_foreman]

>> why are there billion(trillion?) dollar corporations built entirely on top of employing millions of people at minimum wage?

There aren't any such corporations. There are under a million people earning the federal minimum wage in the US: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T16OC2.

[ceejayoz]

That's $7.25, to be clear. In 30 states, that's illegally low.

[olddustytrail]

Isn't that entirely because several states have a higher minimum wage than the federal one?

I ask as an outsider and have to wonder why this didn't occur to an American.

[_aleph2c_]

If you have a minimum wage job, your priority should be to find a better paying job. There is no fairness here and nobody cares about your problems like you do. Don't let the political attitudes or fashionable views of your friends effect your own agency, you need to look out for your own economic interests right now.

I think the study is kind of stupid, since the minimum wage category is a temporary category with extremely high variability, it's not a fixed target. So the base assumption that it stays put long enough to study doesn't hold water for me.

[ndileas]

I think a lot of the confusion here comes from a conflict between people talking in personal mode and societal modes. As an individual, you absolutely want minimum wage to be temporary, and if you are smart and lucky you can usually make this happen.

You're taking more a societal point of view. At this level, I think you're missing the point of minimum wage. It doesn't provide a family with a living wage; it's just a limit on the monetary abuse that an above board company can dish out, just like we have labor laws that limit other types of abuse (like excessive hours for example). Whether and how our society should be ensuring living wages is kind of another discussion, much more complex. As they currently stand, minimum wages are probably a net good.

[rjp0008]

>>It's not intended to provide a family with a living wage;

Maybe not family but definitely the individual, FDR on minimum wage:

Ultimately, he hoped to mandate that all workers would be paid "living wages" as described in his 1933 speech on the National Industrial Recovery Act, "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."

From: https://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/blog/posts/what-did-fdr-...

[ndileas]

I don't see any particular reason to pay attention to century-old rhetoric. I think "intended " was a poor word choice; see my other response. Also, I could live on minimum wage today but I'd hate it.

[quantified]

We pay lip-service attention to the two-century-old rhetoric of Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and others who drafted the first constitution.

[ndileas]

I mean, maybe you do. I'm just a dog on the internet.

[pydry]

So you'd toss out the constitition?

[ndileas]

Rhetoric != Law

[nemomarx]

not intended by who? when the minimum wage was introduced it was talked about as a living wage intended to be enough to raise a family on.

[ndileas]

I'm just making an observation in the sense of "the purpose of system is what it does", not writing a treatise on the history of rhetoric around minimum wage. Maybe "intended" was a poor word choice on my part. Minimum wage can't easily feed and house 3 dependents in many places as it stands today.