BTW $30 isn't like a crazy high number for minimum wage. The current number is well below the poverty line for families everywhere in the United States, and New York has a very high cost of living. Minimum wage is explicitly intended to provide "the wages of decent living." $30 per hour might actually be too low for New York City. $61,500 a year is barely going to pay the rent in the shittiest neighborhoods. https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/new-york-ny/
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If you give your whole life of working hours to a business, the compensation should be a bare minimum of all of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Period.
I'd genuinely be interested to know how many human beings need to work a 40-hour week in order to produce and distribute enough food, medicine, clothing, shelter and education for all 8.2 billion humans, and how many of the rest of us are really just building follies purely just to keep everyone busy.
If tech billionaires insist on continuing to make jobs like "taxi driver" and "checkout operator" obsolete via automation while also refusing to share the proceeds of that automation with the humans whose expertise was used to train said AI and then got replaced, then the question of "exactly how pointless do the new jobs (I mean, 'influencer'? Really?) need to be before we accept that money has ceased to make sense as the way we incentivize people to not have more kids than the global industrial output can sustain?".
I agree with your point, but I'll also say fuck the bare minimum. Any business that cannot afford to pay a living wage has no business being in business. Poverty is exploitation.
Back when it was created, it was enough for a single earner to feed and house a whole family, it should always be compared to that metric and adjusted accordingly.
In Zurich, Switzerland, the cost of living is insane. It's similar to NYC that way. The difference is that their minimum wage is 23.90 CHF / hour which is almost exactly $30 USD per hour.
Because it's such a high cost city, people earning a minimum wage aren't living a luxurious life. But, they do live a pretty "normal" life. They can go skiing in the winter (getting to the slopes using trains and trams). They can go out to eat as a treat, or go to a club. They can buy healthy foods, and can easily afford their (mandatory) health insurance.
It means a lot of things are more expensive, which basically means the middle class and rich are subsidizing the people earning the least. And this is despite Switzerland being an extremely right-wing country by European standards. You really see the affect of high minimum wages when you're paying for things where a big part of the cost is minimum wage labour. Like, if you order food for delivery, you might as well order something expensive and luxurious, because you're going to pay the equivalent of about $20 as a delivery fee.
It's a system that seems to work a lot better than what NYC currently has. When even the lowest paid person is "comfortable", they have more pride in their job, and more confidence in their value. They know they're not as disposable. It also helps that Switzerland has much stronger unions than the US. 45% of all workers in Switzerland are covered by collective bargaining agreements, which is very low by European standards, but is way, way higher than the US rate of 12.1%.
There are already parallels between Zurich and NYC because of the presence of some extremely highly paid people, especially finance bros. But, Zurich should be a model for NYC, and with a $30 minimum wage, they'd take a big step towards that.
I live in NY, not NYC, and make $30/hr as a single guy. I live in someone's garage just so I can have a savings/retirement investment...
Rent at a legitimate apartment complex would eat every remaining dollar I had after my other expenses. NY is definitely expensive...
My dad joked that I need to find a wife with 2 jobs if I wanted a house and then paused for a second, doing the math and realizing that's actually true if we were all around the $30/hr mark...
need to find a wife with 2 jobs if I wanted a house
Or you could split the difference and get two wives with one job each.
Or you could get four wives with a part time job each.
Or you get 8 wives with one job each and now you are making profit over the money you need to buy a house.
My point is
Yep, a lot of people don't realize 7.25 an hour at 40 hours a week is just about 15k a year. Good luck with that wage anywhere in the US.
Baby basket may sound like a weird one without context if you're not already familiar with them, but I assume he's talking about a maternity package, or "baby box" which is a wildly successful program in Finland and other parts of Europe. It's a cardboard box filled with baby supplies, and the box itself doubles as their first crib. It's not legal in the US ostensibly because of the cardboard, but functionally cuz we like to punish women every chance we get. Anyway, being cardboard causes literally zero problems, they help to prevent SIDS, and they're cheap.
We should have been doing this for ages.
TFW your government literally just hooked a brain dead pregnant woman up to life support against the wishes of her family, to force her to give birth, but somehow tries to paint political promises of baby baskets for newborns as dystopian nightmare fuel.
Wasn't the baby just delivered a few days ago, very premature? Wasn't it also known that it had hydrocephaly? (both things not very compatible with life)
Using a braindead woman and her braindead premature fetus as political football against the wishes of her family.
That's so evil it's a fucking cartoon. Like twirl your moustache, give an evil laugh, and then steal a blind person's cane while jaywalking.
And forced the family to pay for it all. Pure fucking evil.
Not sure about hydrocephalus, but it was delivered at the earliest point the hospital was willing to do. The chances of the baby surviving are low regardless of other complications like that.
I learned after, the mother was literally rotting on the table. This was only done because it was a black woman without the resources to fight back.
I thought the republicans loved babies.
Wouldn't they be all over the first two points there?
No, they love unborn babies. Born babies cost the money they want to steal from our taxes.
But they can’t prey on or traffic unborn babies. So they still have SOME interest in the born ones.
They want those from the immigrants. Seriously, what do you think all of this immigration crap is really about? They separate the kids from the families and they are putting everyone in camps that are ran by for-profit private, concentration camp companies. So money, power and sex, what it always is
Same with “support our troops.” Once they are vets it’s time to strip them of all their benefits
I wish I could do those mental backflips, but for physics and maths.
I'm going to misquote George Carlin here, "if you're preborn your fine, if you're preschool you're fucked".
It's amazing, all they need to do is write "socialist" and like Pavlov's dogs maga instantly react with no thought...
How to make maga hate anything: "it's socialism!"
Imagine painting no cost childcare and $30 minimum wage as something bad. Ugh. Those poor rich people are gonna be slightly less rich!
I don't think rich people will be slightly less rich.
Free child care is a no-brainer. More people working, more productivity, more taxes, et cetera.
Hmmm.
So... baby baskets to newborns is about SIDS and keeping them alive. No Cost Childcare is about keeping them alive and well, too.
So... about them kids?
The right: Birth rates are declining!
The right when they see no cost child care brought up: Socialism bad!
I believe that this is part of the Christian dogmatic pipeline. If you require social services, check your closest church. And of course you will need to be a member in good standing to keep access... Etc
It's also convenient that churches tend to be de facto segregated by race. We're not racist, we just setup institutions that happen to work in racist ways.
HOW DARE YOU GIVE A SHIT ABOUT ALREADY-BORNS, THE FREELOADING ASSHOLES DON'T DESERVE MY TAXEEEES!! REEEEEEEE!!!!
I love how "socialism" is a smear in a country that has "e pluribus unum" on its money. Unum, only up to a point, I guess.
Did Mamdani pay for this victory ad?
I have no idea how anyone can think that baby baskets for newborns is a bad thing.
I'm so happy he won :D and in such a landslide
It's ok. They've trained their monkeys to hate objectively good things.