Most Americans support a $20 minimum wage. It has been $7.25 since 2009.
It’s honestly hilarious (in the fucked up shit way of course) that people are against this or making it $30, $50… who knows? What if, and let me assure you this is a CRAZY idea… but what if… workers received 100% of the value they produce and through a contract negotiated amongst their coworkers they can choose to scrape some of that 100% to reinvest in this company. Or would this be a cooperative of workers? Kinda like it is now. Actually EXACTLY like it is now. Except, there’s one or only a few people missing from the equation. Hmm. Ah yes, the investors/owners/executives. You know. The ones who PRODUCE FUCKING NOTHING YET SUCK ALL THE SURPLUS VALUE FROM THOSE WHO DO? Those people. Just yoink their stolen property and capital, give it to those who produce, and, like I said, I dunno, crazy ideas, let them figure it out. Or, more crazy ideas, perhaps some amount of the value is scraped “without consent” necessarily and goes into a giant pool of funds. Some massive reserve… perhaps headed by a federal agency of some sort. Hmm, who knows, maybe a federal reserve we could call it. And this centralized federal pool collector distributes the funds in a way as to invest… but it’s the workers investing in what benefits the workers, the vast majority of people in the country (or world) and not just little grifts and schemes to enrich those formerly capitalists who are now forcefully part of what they fear most… the proletariat.
I dunno, crazy fucking ideas though. Probably best to just remain completely atomized and cope by telling myself my boss stealing 9/10 of the value I create is fine because some other schlub gets 9.5/10 of his stolen and boy boy… man what an idiot! Glad I’m smart and aren’t being fucked over only a tiny amount less!
It's a nitpick, but we mean the class right? Gotha programme etc., workers as individuals need to contribute some value to the commons and society more broadly, sort of thing. But that's still the workers getting everything: First as an individual and second as a member of socialist society.
Yes workers at the class labor as the class, it does no good to anyone of we do not work as a class and as a society.
My argument though is if there is a Dictatorship of?the Prolitarate, then all of the government, socoeties resorces is the workers resources
It's crab in a bucket mentality to so many people that make slightly more than minimum wage. "Why should burger flippers make as much as EMTs?" "If they raise minimum wage they will just raise the cost of living so I'll be poor." I know someone like this. They only care about themselves and their own status.
Yes. It’s crab in a bucket but also crabs that have been told by some other crab on the outside of the bucket yelling in that he made it out of the bucket by killing 40 crabs and climbing their corpses to freedom. Of course he was actually born outside the bucket or his father-crab had already piled those dead crabs up for him… but the desperate crabs in the bucket don’t know this and many will think yow smart he was and how they’re smart and not stupid like the crabs they’re currently stomping on.
I really stomped the crab analogy into the ground… or sand?
The crabs in a bucket is meant to describe the mentality of the people not the actual situation. They may have been given the mentality by the capitalist but regardless it is always going to be the "crabs in a bucket mentality." That is the name of that particular kind of brain rot. It's the same with marvel brain, Harry Potter brain, etc. It's just putting a name to the kind of thinking. They all stem from the same source which we much work to destroy but the source doesn't change the disease.
I think the general stupid argument that people make is that it'll raise unemployment and inflation
The whole mechanism behind capitalism is that workers are payed less than they produce, hence they produce surplus value, the graph you provide, I do not see how it is linked to this discussion. Essentialy every worker is having their surplus value stolen
Yes they do, if a service worker was not there, there would be a loss of value, their labor produces value. I can also prove they produce surplus value, as there are service industries, that employ people, and that we rely on, and would consider essential, and yet the companies they work for still make a profit, the profit has to come from somewhere, that somewhere is from the surplus value of the labor, that is stolen from the worker.
I am not going to argue that the most exploited, and therefor the people with the most suplus labor stolen are the workers from the global south, however I do think it is ridiculous to say that no surplus value is created, as if that where the case, no profit could be made. No capitalist is going to hire someone for more than they can exploit them for.
Again none of what I am saying is ment to imply or say that the amount of exploitation or surplus labor being generated by the worker in the global north even compares to the worker in the global south, I would be foolish and, incorrect to try to say they are anywhere near equivalent. I am also not saying that the Global North worker does not benefit from unequal exchange, because again, that would be a grossly untrue statement.
Also I have not read much Walter Rodney, would you mind sending me the theory that says this, it genuinely sounds like an interesting read.
Marx had choice words for those who confuse productive and unproductive labor.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02b.htm
"That worker is productive who performs productive labour, and that labour is productive which directly creates surplus value, i.e. valorises capital.
...
Only the narrow-minded bourgeois, who regards the capitalist form of production as its absolute form, hence as the sole natural form of production, can confuse the question of what are productive labour and productive workers from the standpoint of capital with the question of what productive labour is in general, and can therefore be satisfied with the tautological answer that all that labour is productive which produces, which results in a product, or any kind of use value, which has any result at all.
...
Every productive worker is a wage labourer; but this does not mean that every wage labourer is a productive worker. In all cases where labour is bought in order to be consumed as use value, as a service, and not in order to replace the value of the variable capital as a living factor and to be incorporated into the capitalist production process, this labour is not productive labour, and the wage labourer is not a productive worker. His labour is then consumed on account of its use value, not as positing exchange value, it is consumed unproductively, not productively. The capitalist therefore does not confront labour as a capitalist, as the representative of capital. He exchanges his money for labour as income, not as capital. The consumption of the labour does not constitute M-C-M’, but C-M-C (the last symbol represents the labour, or the service itself). Money functions here only as means of circulation, not as capital.
... This phenomenon, that with the development of capitalist production all services are converted into wage labour, and all those who perform these services are converted into wage labourers hence that they have this characteristic in common with productive workers, gives even more grounds for confusing the two in that it is a phenomenon which characterises, and is created by, capitalist production itself. On the other hand, it gives the apologists [of capitalism] an opportunity to convert the productive worker, because he is a wage labourer, into a worker who merely exchanges his services (i.e. his labour as a use value) for money. This makes it easy to pass over in silence the differentia specifica of this “productive worker”, and of capitalist production — as the production of surplus value, as the process of the self-valorisation of capital, which incorporates living labour as merely its AGENCY. A soldier is a wage labourer, a mercenary, but he is not for that reason a productive worker."
Not addressing your claim but I think we should avoid using Statista as a direct source. They require you to pay to get access to their full reports and often obfuscate the original sources of their data. They are up there with numbeo on "worst shit recommended by google." I am not sure if I agree with the claim, but I'm not acquainted enough with that to actually discuss that part properly.
Usually for things like that Statista gets it straight from the Bureau of Labour Statistics, so that could be an easier to audit source. I guess this specific one might be easier to find in the Bureau of Economic Analysis. I'm not very acquainted with economy metrics in particular for the USA, but I guess that and other websites like ourworldindata and even the world bank have some public info on their methodology and sources, even if their conclusions are heavily skewed. Often just going to wikipedia's "Economics of <Country>" can give you a pretty good initial source. Though it doesn't really matter that much in this case because like the other user my disagreement is more over whether salespeople generate surplus value rather than the data itself, but I thought it was more important to warn about that specific source there for the future.
My bad experiences with them mostly come from looking into demographics because they'll just outright rip off local government statistics institutes and force you to at least make an account just to get the source beyond their pretty graph. It gets weirder with ethnography because they just bludgeon the data until it fits their USA-based frameworks. Shit like calling skin colour in Brazil "ethnicity".
Personally I argue for a $33.33 minimum wage, thought you could easily convince me it should be more
Personally I argue for a $33.33 minimum wage
No! That’s bad because it means less money for the quadrillionaires!
I am failing to see how this is my, or my comrades issues, maybe the quadrillionaires should pull themselves up from their bootstraps
Even though I unequivocally support raising the minimum wage until profits are exactly equal to the minimum wage itself, I think the "minimum wage debate" sometimes gets a bit wonky because of how many bizarre problems Yankees sleepwalked into. I can definitely see somebody living on 15 an hour comfortably if they didn't have to pay like half of their wages on fake services like rent. As it stands they pay outrageous prices for worse versions of cheaper stuff in other countries, and have to work bullshit jobs like doordash/hellofresh to keep up.
Liberals love complaining that increasing wages will lead to inflation (which is already a dubious claim), but then they refuse the other reasonable alternative of redacting the landlords. Even though Stadians have negative class conscience as a society I think it's more likely for there to be some big city rent strike than for their stock exchange hub posing as a Congress passing even a 1 dollar increase in minimum wage. Not to mention gig economy bypassing the already pityful wage for big cities anyway.
I think reducing cost of living and increasing wages should go hand in hand, a thing that the ever-compartimentalising liberal hates to do. The don't pay campaign looked very promising in the UK and I think even made Truss back down on her shit relatively quickly. Hit them where it hurts financially and all.
Libs in the thread thinking they're "compromising" by voting Sanders is just rich, though.
I cannot explain how infurating the libs are at the moment, I do not understand why they are so insessent that we must work with the capitalist class, we do not need them, they need us but we do not need them, they are not our friends.
If they're from the USA they've been taught since young that slavery and apartheid were abolished by asking the racists nicely to stop, so it tracks. Amerika is so diverse and tolerant that torturer and tortured can live side by side in peace.
Remember when we were arguing about $15 like ten years ago? $20 ain't really enough now tbh
When rent has risen to the size of one whole paycheck at least…20 is not that much today
I made $7.25 an hour in 1996 while working at McDonalds. Who the hell would work for that now?
Here's a good clip explaining why, that despite overwhelming majority support on a policy, it won't get passed.
https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx12DM8w6EDQHrvGll0UoHoMnYPwv-i_zJ
The democrats took no action to raise during any time they’ve had control. Capitalist parties are not your friend, no matter what color they coat their alliance to capital in
I think people believe economics exists in a vacuum. Companies and banks try to claim that it does too, but they all play their cards differently when things change.
Minimum wage is not a living wage indicator, it’s a monetary floor. If you raise the floor above current working-class wages you still have to deal with the consequences of every single company raising the prices of everything to compensate for the new monetary floor being higher than it was before. $20 minimum wage means the average value of a house goes from $300k to $600k, the average car price goes from $25k to $50k. You accelerate inflation without getting anyone closer to a living wage. In fact, by substantially increasing minimum wage we would end up sending people who are currently struggling into a deeper financial crisis.
$12 makes a lot of sense because it's approximately the highest value the minimum wage has ever been in real terms.
Higher would be better, but you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. $12 is way better than $7.
Pretty ridiculous that the government subsidizes corporations by paying tax credits and transfers to working people who earn the minimum wage. Not sure what wage fixes that issue the best but I'm sure it's higher than $7.
$33.33 is the minimum I will accept as a minimum wage not a cent less
And even then we should all know it isn't enough and all workers are still being exploited.
You're really just saying you are against any increase in the minimum wage that could ever actually pass. So you're against raising the minimum wage.
If I wasn't so sure the number was just a random number high enough that you can never be accused of being realistic, I'd ask how you decided on that number in particular.
If minimum wage was tied to productivity, the metric I would argue we should be using, it would be about $26 an hour, by the time we get any momentum both productive forces and inflation will have eaten up most of the gains we have made, so I increased the current minimum wage, and saw we where close to a pleaseing looking number. Believe it or not I did put thought into the number I chose.
What I am opposed to is this begging for concessions, by the time we get them we are too little too late, but all the liberals go out to brunch because mission accomplished.
Also why do we have to argue abput minimum wage in the first place, is not all fruits of labor, labor's by right, why must we put up with capital stealing from us to increase their hoard?
Hardly perfection, if it was perfection I was at it would be the complete and unequivocal destruction of the Dictatorship of Capital and Liberation of Workers, in such that they get the full value kf their labor and no longer must beg for scraps, for without the laboror nothing would get done. But I understand that right now it is impractical to do with our level of class contiousness, so my compromise is $33.33 minimum wage or greater,
And it tracks roughly with the levels of production done. If we are doing more work for the Capitalist the Capitalist must pay.
Even assuming that hourly rate did track roughly with the production of the least skilled labor, why would anyone pay that? That’s the employer guaranteeing payment to at best break even, without accounting for any other costs or risks incurred by the employer.
why would anyone pay that?
It's the law, son. It makes people do stuff. With guns.
But there’s no law that requires hiring anyone in the first place. I’m 100% for raising the minimum wage. I’m for raising it to at least a living wage. But the math does not work if the wage paid by the employer = the price charged to the purchaser. At that point, the employer’s best case scenario is $0 profit, and unless the work is performed, sold, and paid for immediately, a loss on every single transaction. No one has any incentive to employ anyone at that rate.
I have no idea whether $33.33 per hour is the actual productivity rate of the least skilled worker. I tried Googling it but the closest I could find is that the average American worker grossed $29.76 per hour, not the value of their work output. I also see a Bureau of Labor Statistics report that says the average worker creates $57.54 worth of goods and services per hour. But I don’t see the $33.33 figure in admittedly half ass searching.
Regardless of what the figure is, there must be some spread between work output and take home pay or no one has any incentive to hire anyone else.
The profit should equal exactly the minimum wage, no more and no less. In fact it should not even be called "profit", just the wage of the administration. Doesn't matter if a profession is "skilled" or "unskilled", people should be paid to live not to value their skills above others. No reason an MD should be paid more or less than a janitor and we wouldn't be able to live without either of them. The pandemic showed clear as day how much work is "essential" and badly paid compared to "inessential" and "skilled".
It's not even like employers themselves are particularly skilled anyways. Now if you believe that some people inherently deserve a worse life due to their profession, you can just say it.
If they do not hire anyone, no work gets done. They have to hire about the same amount of people as already employed, as no capitalist trying to maximize profit is going to pay you more they they think they can get away with, and they will not operate with more workers than they need. They need us, we do not need them
If by skilled labor you mean all labor that is more than being a CEO, then yes, the idea of skilled and unskilled labor is a myth to devide the working class and should be disreguarded.
Second in what universe should we, labor, care about capital or how they feel, they steal from us, they steal our suplus value, they rob the best years of our lives, and in the US, they activly argue aganst us getting basic government survices, they are not our friends. Risk does not cause value, me standing near a fire does not create value, labor creates value. And they would pay it because they need labor, Capital needs labor, labor does not need capital.
Workers: Hi bourgeoisie, I would like a $30 minimum wage.
Bourgeoisie: Fuck off.
Workers: Sorry about that, can we just have a $15 minimum wage?
Bourgeoisie: Fuck off.
Workers: OK you're right. But we've had a $12 minimum wage before, so can we just go back to that?
Bourgeoisie: Fuck off, we're sticking to $7.25. Enjoy your pay cut next year as we increase inflation.
This is to say, the ruling class are not some neutral pencil pushers that listen to reason. They want all the money they can get, and workers want as much of the value they produce that they can get. The only way workers can win higher wages is through class struggle, not winning a logic debate with capitalists.
Yeah perfection would be public ownership of all companies and a ~$60/hr minimum wage pre-tax. 
Actually probably not haha. If you perfectly split all the value made in America as of now, it would come out to something close to $60.
And those $60 bucks just for luxury with all essential stuff like housing, electricity, internet, heating and food already guaranteed by the community.
