YUGE! NYC gets $15/hour min-wage by 2018; NYC suburbs 2021, rest of state gets 12.50 by 2021

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

While this is fantastic for literally millions of workers who are overdue for a raise, over here are a pair of comics to consider:



and



Quick math: 65/hour is roughly 130K/year (assuming full time)


Link for Title lead-in: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/01/nyregion/new-york-budget-deal-with-higher-minimum-wage-is-reached.html?_r=0

Comments

[garote]

I have heard complaints in the Bay Area that anything below 85k a year is not a "living wage", primarily because of the cost of housing, which has risen to exploit the high salaries of tech workers.

Where is the true evil here? That tech workers are making "too much"? That baristas and store clerks are making "too little"? That landlords are able to charge something close to what the market will bear for rents? That federal taxes are not progressive enough and the techies keep "too much" of their wages? That county taxes are majorly skewed towards young and new owners thanks to Prop 13, and they seek high wages to compensate?

It's a complicated scenario. But the general sentiment is that the high-paid tech people are ruining it for everybody else and so, everybody else should get a slice of their money pie to even things out.

Which they do, indirectly, through higher tax revenue and the improved public services it buys - but that's not enough for the people who are seeing their rent hike up every year. They want these tech people to dry up and blow away, so things can get back to "normal". Barring that, they want their own wages to go up, to compensate.

Here's the thing that bothers me though: What many of them do isn't actually much more valuable or difficult than it was ten years ago. If they lobbied for a government mandated increase of their wages up into the 85k a year range, to compete with the tech people for a middle-class life in the Bay Area, should they get it? What would happen if they did? Wouldn't they only succeed in driving up their own cost of living, right up through the roof?

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

I've heard people argue that, inside of the 5 boros of NYC, 250K is middle class.

I damn near blew a gasket at em. And this is a good progressive; someone down with the cause, for the working people, and who backs up words with deeds. My jaw damn near broke when it hit the floor after he said that.

This high cost of living argument pisses me off, because, **they are spending their money in a high cost of living area** something that the poorer among us cannot do.

Just cause you pay 50K a year in rent, doesn't mean you are middle class. It means you've chosen to live in a place that costs you 50K a year in rent, something that the middle class cannot do.

[garote]

But what if you grew up in the area, and as an adult, find yourself priced out of the market because of a bunch of other people moving in? "If you can't make ends meet, then leave" is a pretty bitter pill for them to swallow...

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

Does. Not. Matter.

The question that was at hand, was, and is, "Is earning $250K/year middle class?"

And the answer is a very simple, very straightforward, NO.

"But I live in a city that has high taxes" Big fucking deal
"But it's expensive for me to park my car!" cry me a fucking river
"My apartment costs a thousand dollars a week!" WHICH IS WHY YOU AIN'T MIDDLE CLASS

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Are you sure you don't want to say that they are not 'working class' rather than middle class. A lot of people seem to me to regard the middle class as the very broad territory between those making minimum wage and the millionaires.

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

Did I fucking stutter?

250K income is the 97%.

NINETY FUCKING SEVEN.

97th percentile IS NOT middle class.

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

I don't know. Do you stutter? It might help to explain your hyper-defensiveness. People can think differently on what constitutes the middle class, even if you cannot conceive of it.

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

People can be wrong about word usage. I'm sorry you are stuck in some, frankly very foolish, relativistic mindset.

People who say: "I think middle class is X" CAN BE WRONG ABOUT THAT. You are arguing that because it's "my idea" of XYZ, I cannot be wrong about it. Well, sorry bub, you totally can. Words have meanings; and abuse of words is just that. It's not "well, that's how I see it"; well, I don't give a fuck how you see it, how you see it does not alter the meaning of words, and you don't get to redefine language any which way you please.

The top 3% being part of the "middle class" is about as fucking insane as it gets. You are literally not even including all 1%'ers as being outside of the middle class, since top 1% begins around 500-600K/year. Not even 1M.

So if you think anyone between min-wage and 1M+, that means that THERE ARE 1%ERS IN THE MIDDLE CLASS.

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Oh,well, I didn't know you were the resident expert on the language. One can still define the middle-class functionally as being that class between laborers and owners, for instance. In so far as we are talking about law and politics, I find it instructive that our congressmen can be heard on the floor to refer to people making $250 thousand dollars as being part of the middle class.

For the record, I am mostly playing devil's advocate here. My sensibility here probably runs close to yours. I regard the upper-middle class as being pretty rich, too. I just understand that people can and do speak differently on the subject.

[garote]

See, when someone says "upper class" to me, what I hear is, "financially independent". Living off of dividends, rental income, or a trust fund, with "work" an entirely optional prospect.

In my area, you can have a married couple, both working full-time, both living in the same 1-bedroom apartment, each making about 125k a year (total 250k) and they will tell you that they MUST leave the area if they want to start a family, because having one stay-at-home parent is too hard on the finances. For the area, I have trouble calling them "upper class". For the country, based solely on their income, then sure, I can see how the label applies.

But the situation says something else about the cyclical nature of the tech industry, and how it compels people to migrate to follow the best wages: People become horribly isolated from their family AND their local community. ... And family and community are exactly what you need to make child-rearing about ten times easier and cheaper. If you can't raise kids where you live, is it JUST because your income isn't high enough? Or is it because you've prioritized income over many other things?

Usually what happens is, couples will work and save until they can't stand it any more, and bail out for some other part of the state/county. I have seen this progression first-hand ... let's see ... at least five times in my own friend group. Move here, work for 5-10 years, move away to have kids, never to return.

Are they upper-class when they're here? Or only after, when they have the money saved up? Or do they never reach the upper-class at all, since they spend almost all of their time working hard and obsessing over their finances? As long as they are here, the cost barrier to "independently wealthy" is very, very high.

You can claim that it is de-facto irrelevant since there are People Starving In Africa or whatnot, but the choices these people face are still not easy, and they spend a lot of their time surrounded by ostentatiously wealthy industry giants and their shareholders, comparing stats on their vacation homes and private planes. It's sick, and that's why most of them burn out and leave.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Yep, you're right. There are different ways to define middle class. The St. Louis Federal Reserve bank doesn't use income because it varies too much.

So it looks at three demographic characteristics — age, education and race — that aren't as volatile and that they say better determine one's income and wealth accumulation. The middle class is generally made up of people who fit some combination of the three. (This is not to say, for instance, that every 45-year-old black college grad is middle class.) The Fed describes those doing better than the middle class as thrivers and those doing worse as stragglers.
Source: CNN what is the middle class anyway. (http://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/what-is-middle-class-anyway/)

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, cause CNN, they got no biases, they're straight reporting! yup yup yup.

Fuck CNN. And fuck that methodology.

Age 0-39 w/ a college degree, automatically middle class? FUCKING HORSE-SHIT.

[garote]

I always figured that "middle class" meant, you could lose your job and be okay for 2-3 months (while you look for a new one) without having to go into debt.

So, if you live in a 3k/month apartment (many areas San Francisco), you need to have 10k in savings to call yourself "middle class". Otherwise, you're "working class" because if you ain't working, you ain't got no class. :D

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry that you have butchered the meaning of words so thoroughly. Cuz that's just absurdly wrong.

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

Allow me to improve upon my answer, and give a reason I think your methodology is deeply flawed.

Your methodology would permit someone earning a MASSIVE income to be middle class, *IF* they were very bad with their money and didn't save it.

You've confused someone's thriftiness with their class.

If you spend all your money as soon as you get it, you'll never be able to lose your job and be ok for 2-3 months. But if you're getting $1M every month, but you somehow spend $1.05M every month, you got nothing in savings, but are most assuredly NOT middle class.

So I would recommend you consider that not everyone emphasizes savings the same way, and as such, it is a poor methodology.

[catlin.livejournal.com]

I have worked fast food, off and on since I was sixteen in the late eighties, to when my kids were little a few years ago.

It HAS changed, a LOT since I started. First- manpower has been cut drastically. Where we were never without plenty of physical labor as a teen, now managers cut staff at the drop of a hat to the point I often ran the front of the store alone, verses as a kid having had another register or two working, and someone running for us. Second, the increased tech went hand in hand with faster speeds being demanded, not with less work. Higher expectations of the lower amount of workers increased the stress of the job about a hundred times over, and it was already a very stressful job just due to the speed you had to work at, without making people unhappy.

[garote]

It makes a lot of sense that the increased technology would make the job more complicated and more exhausting. I guess that's just the march of progress.

I mean, the whole point of adding some new-fangled device or procedure to a job is to produce the same or more of a product with the same or less of an employee's time, and the margins are low in fast food, so managers and engineers are constantly meddling with the process.

In the early 90's I worked the grill at a Wendy's for a while, and the manager there was constantly fiddling with the schedule, as well as the division of labor. It was a new franchise, so from one half-hour to the next you didn't know if you were going to be running around with your pants on fire, or waiting in a completely empty store, doing whatever you could to "look busy". I remember feeling jealous of the Carl's Jr. people who could just feed the patties into a machine at one end, and walk away. Of course they probably had to break that thing down and clean it at, like, 4:00am...

But if the labor is more difficult, why hasn't it become more valuable at the same time? If fewer people are qualified to do it, and/or if the market is growing, wouldn't those people be able to demand a raise - and get it?

[donkeyjon.livejournal.com]

But if the labor is more difficult, why hasn't it become more valuable at the same time? If fewer people are qualified to do it, and/or if the market is growing, wouldn't those people be able to demand a raise - and get it?

The problem here is that the last part of this statement isn't happening. The technologies that are raising productivity in low wage jobs are also making it easier to train someone to perform those jobs, meaning that it isn't creating a rash of jobs that require particular skills, but turning skilled jobs into unskilled jobs. This means that any wage increases due to market fluctuations are overcome by the ability to add or replace workers without long training delays or expenses.

Wages, in our system, are based primarily on replacement cost. If the company can replace you, and the cost of doing so (in lost earnings, training costs, etc.) is less than what you are currently making, then it makes sense for them to do so. This drives the creation of technology that not only raises productivity, but reduces ramp-up time and costs to get a new employee up to speed.

[catlin.livejournal.com]

Because we have so severely demonized service workers that when they ask for a living wage the first thing people think is get a real job, ignoring the fact that this Is a real job that not everyone can successfully do.

Think about it. When we complain that the service is lousy but also say the workers dont deserve good pay, what do we expect? It is Hard work physically and emotionally working fast food and then we add to it claiming its a job just any untrained person can do? No. Just anyone Can't successfully work fast food. You have to be able to think fast, remember details, smile when someone just called you worthess, pay attentuon to everything around you, and do this all for anywhere from 2 hours to 12 never knowing if you will be cut to save labor. Now a days you have to also juggle schedules for two jobs since you are probably working part time.

I did this long enough to see plenty fail at it.

[garote]

But that's confusing two "we"s. The customer/bystander, and the franchise owner(s). So when you ask "what do we expect", well, largely we expect our food to be prepared promptly as ordered, for a decent price, and we remain totally ignorant of the details.

I am generally in favor of minimum wage laws, provided they come with certain restrictions. But I'm still bothered by the essentially "at will" nature of the relationship between an employer and an employee. Basically, if the pay isn't good enough, don't accept the job. If you do accept the job, then making an outside appeal only makes sense if there are extenuating circumstances, for example the employer is the only one in town. (Though I bet "only one in town" is horribly flexible in court.) I'd happily apply a minimum wage law to stop Wal-Mart from paving over an entire community's home-grown businesses and leaving only poverty in its wake. But just saying, "It's hard as hell, these people deserve more for how hard they work," isn't a very good case to my ears. Entire sections of the economy have grown, withered, and died, with an attendant change in wages, and I'm sure all those people worked like hell the entire time, even as their work evolved right out from under them.

[donkeyjon.livejournal.com]

That does raise an interesting question, however. Those employees who could not be an effective employee in fast food because of the stress and workload....what job would they be productive at? And, if there is a job that is more suited to them, do they have the required skills and training to do said job?

[garote]

I'd recommend working in a library as a page. It was great for me in late high school. Quiet environment, nice people, ... though you had to be fast shelving books or you'd fall behind instantly.

Of course, libraries are drying up and blowing away...

[oslo.livejournal.com]

Well, skills and employability don't necessarily scale along a single axis, do they? Conceivably, someone who fails in retail might be doing so only because they don't have the people skills necessary to deal with a quick sequence of interactions with near-total strangers who (more often than not) are eager to hate customer service workers. Put them in an office environment, where most of their personal interactions are likely with co-workers or third parties that are ready and interested in dealing with one another professionally, and their other skills might have the opportunity to shine.

I did retail, fast food, data entry in an office setting, and music performance, all before doing what I do now (law). I don't think I ever failed in those other roles, but certainly I can reflect upon all those experiences and see how some of them suited me better than others. I might never have made a great cashier. But a lawyer or an oboist?

I would also say that I wouldn't underestimate the role that struggling to make ends meet plays in a person's engagement or competence on the job. I can fairly say that I might have felt differently about my job as a cashier if I felt like it was a professional role, involving real skills and commitment, which I would have felt if my employers had deemed fit to (i) pay me more than they did and (ii) provide training commensurate with such a role. As it was, I received virtually no training and was paid at a rate I could handle only because I lived rent-free with my parents and rode my bike to work. Is it surprising that I disengaged at work and psychologically structured my day around breaks and quitting time?

[donkeyjon.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely true. What I'm getting at here, and something I've been thinking a lot about lately, is we've really gotten to the point where tying "making a living" to work is not the solution. Over time, I'm liking the idea of a basic stipend for everyone as a better solution than a minimum wage. Having worked fast food, manual labor, retail, IT, middle management, grad student, and now college professor jobs, I can say that the cross-section of society that I've seen is often ill-suited to the job they are in, but trapped in that position because they made poor decisions a decade before, and can't get out of the hole they've put themselves in. What these people really need is the ability to continue making ends meet while they retrain for another career. Raising the minimum wage won't do that.

[oslo.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised to see you suggest something like a guaranteed income, given your previous self-description as a conservative. Personally, I think a guaranteed income actually is more consistent with conservative principles, but for whatever reason it hasn't taken.

I think, for instance, that instead of structuring welfare as a number of different programs targeted for providing various, specific kinds of support - food stamps, rent support, Medicaid/Medicare, EITC, and several others, at the federal and state levels - it would reduce the administrative costs to provide simply a single cash stipend and let individuals determine for themselves how they are to spend it. If they run out of cash, tough. That would reduce the costs of providing the benefit and also help to ensure that it's spent efficiently, as most people won't simply blow it all on steak dinners and marijuana but instead figure out how best to survive on what they get.

It's very frustrating sometimes to see that this kind of benefit has no chance of getting through a GOP-controlled Congress because it is too easy to characterize as a giveaway to morally inferior "takers." For a party that bills itself as being in favor of "liberty," it is entirely too preoccupied with how welfare recipients live their lives, abandoning any of its professed beliefs about people's fundamental ability to look after themselves when they end up needing a bit of support to get by. Ironically, they do this by adding red tape and expense to the welfare benefits they nonetheless maintain, as we can see throughout the country in states that have decided to require welfare recipients to take and pass drug tests.