This is the primary reason that inflation exists—so that business/corporations (the owner class) can steal more of your hard-earned money.
Uh, no, the primary reason inflation exists is so that there is an economy, lol.
If there was deflation, the ‘optimal’ thing to do with your extra cash would literally be to stuff it under a mattress.
Too much inflation is obviously bad, but deflation is also really bad. A tiny amount of inflation is optimal long-term.
I might need an ELIF on this, but why any type of -flation? Why not have a dollar today be equal in purchasing power to a dollar 40 years ago, or 40 years in the future?
Here it’s north of $40/hr
The cost of living will just keep going up because inflation is necessary in our current, debt based monetary system. The Fed tries to keep this under control by not allowing the rate of inflation to go much beyond about 2% a year. The recent inflation issue we’ve been having wasn’t about inflation suddenly happening where it hadn’t been happening before, it was about the rate of inflation increasing beyond the Fed’s 2% target. When they talk about inflation getting back under control, they’re talking about the rate of inflation getting back to near 2%. But make no mistake: prices are still going up - they have to, that’s how the system works - and they will keep going up every year, seemingly indefinitely. For this reason, a cost of living raise equal to at least the rate of inflation is absolutely essential, otherwise workers are getting a pay cut.
But this is further complicated by the fact that the core inflation numbers are very broad. Housing costs are exploding. Core inflation would be much lower if not for rising housing costs. But the way housing costs increases are measured is by averaging housing costs across all markets, meaning the cost of housing in low demand areas is averaged with the cost of housing in high demand areas. This means that if you live in a high demand area, the core inflation rate doesn’t necessarily capture the true cost of living in your area, and that the cost of living in your area is going up much faster than the national average. Therefore, many workers need an annual cost of living increase that is much greater than the national inflation rate.
As far as I know, there is no national law requiring companies to give cost of living raises every year. Many companies do, but many don’t. A mandatory, annual cost of living raise is something that unions can negotiate, once again showing the value of unions.
The cost of living will just keep going up because inflation is necessary in our current, debt based monetary system.
You’re making this sound like it’s something that was arbitrarily decided by powers that be, but the fact is that if there was deflation instead, the economy would come to a screeching halt, because it becomes more ‘optimal’ to hold onto cash under a mattress (since in deflation, it grows in value over time) instead of spending it on goods and services.
A tiny amount of inflation is best long-term, for the whole.
All by design
There should be no profits, no bonuses, and no dividends until every worker (not employee, it doesn’t matter what your relationship with the company is if they benefit from your labour) is making at least a living wage with full benefits. Executive pay should be capped at a multiple of the pay of the lowest paid worker or of the average pay paid to all workers. whichever is lower.
There should be no profits, no bonuses, and no dividends until every worker (not employee, it doesn’t matter what your relationship with the company is if they benefit from your labour) is making at least a living wage with full benefits.
To get anywhere, you must define “living wage” concretely. You can use variables of course, but without at least a ‘formula’, “living wage” is just a meaningless, unachievable talking point. You at least have to know what you’re aiming at, to have any hope of achieving it–you’ll never get anywhere just saying “living wage”, because ‘enough to live on’ does not nearly have the same definition for everyone. So, what’s the baseline, in your view?
Example: ‘the living wage should be enough money to afford [list of things] with $X leftover for discretionary spending/saving.’
The classic definition is the wage needed to cover the basic needs of the family including things like rent, childcare, transportation, etc. I would go one further and say that the family needs to not be living paycheque to paycheque. They should be able to save for the future, go out once in a while, educate their children, save and pay for university, and advance themselves. They should be able to live.
The classic definition is the wage needed to cover the basic needs of the family including things like rent
Rent where? Rent costs vary wildly.
childcare
What sort of childcare, and how many children is it meant to support? Or do you get $X per child? And if so, is there a maximum number of children, where having more won’t get you more money?
transportation
Over what distance? And how, owned vehicle or public transportation? If owned vehicle, what kind of vehicle? Used/new? Price ranges for vehicles also vary wildly.
I would go one further and say that the family needs to not be living paycheque to paycheque.
That entails what amount of extra money? And what do you do about people who willfully choose to spend it instead of saving it? Are you aware that in the US, 1 in 4 of people earning $150k or more live paycheck to paycheck? Just because one has money to save doesn’t mean they’re going to do it.
go out once in a while
Again, far too vague. How often? And how much money does ‘going out’ cost? You’d have to figure both of those out, and multiply them by each other, to ensure this goal is met.
educate their children
Taxpayer-funded public school already covers this. Unless you feel everyone should be entitled to the cost of private schooling?
save and pay for university
University tuition is another massive variable, so you’d need to decide how much is given for tuition. Also, if someone does not go to college, do they not get that part of the money?
and advance themselves.
The vaguest criterion yet. It’s pretty much impossible to say if a given minimum wage satisfies ‘everyone can advance themselves’.
As anyone can see, this “classic” definition is still full of major holes, and not nearly complete enough to even conceptualize a goal such that progress toward it can even be measured. Just saying “living wage” over and over will never get anyone anywhere.
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
Profit is theft, labor that is not compensated in accordance with its value.
The owners/investors deserve to origin but so do the workers. All of the profit going to the owner/investors is theft. That’s why I say that there should be no profit, bunnies or dividends until everyone is fairly compensated and the profit should be shared with the workers in proportion to their contribution which is huge. No workers, no company, no profit.