Work ethic? low pay?

Minimum wage is NOT enough to make a living off of... and Obama put it well, that no one working full time should live in poverty.

 

RooRshack

I understand there are slight variances. What I mean is is there no getting away from min' wage jobs? The suggestion is, people have min' wage jobs expecting to be paid a hell of a lot more. Is that possible?
Do we have to admit that some people will just have to work min' pay jobs and work with out much complaint. Have a good work ethic anyway.
Where I live a wage is determined by the 'industry average' - obviously people want more, but is that fair?

 

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The system as it exists will always require people,skilled or not,to do the kind of jobs that no one else such as the real middle class and 1% want to do.There is no way around this fact given the system we live in.The only way in a hypothetical egalitarian society would be for EVERYONE to time-share the dirty jobs on a voluntary basis.Given that this is highly unrealistic at the moment,I believe people in low skilled work should definitely be paid more,for their self-worth and the general good of society.

 

minimum wage pays a single person just enough to scrape by. This means the first time an emergency pops up - a doctor's visit (because I doubt most minimum wage workers are insured), a problem with your car, an illness that causes you to miss several days of work...and you're taking money normally spent on rent and utilities and spending them on something else. Next thing you know you're living without power and heat or you're getting evicted because rent is late. Even a jump in utility costs, like the $200 difference in my electric bill in the summer and the winter, can make it hard to follow a budget making minimum wage.

I make several dollars above minimum wage and I couldn't do it without someone else living with me paying half the bills.

Forget having a child. There is no way a single parent making minimum wage can afford daycare, food, rent, utilities, gas, car maintenence, car payments without some kind of government assistance.

Which is kind of ironic. Businesses tend to be for lower taxes and less money spent on social programs yet if they pay their employees a low enough wage they're actually responsible for the neccessity of these social programs.

 

i did say "is," not "has been for the last 40 years." the last 6 years shows the largest increase on that graph.

yeah, you're not going to live in new york city on minimum wage. most places, you can.

and no, i'm not saying it's a lot more than enough, just that it's enough to pay all your bills and have a little bit left over to play with.

 

^Right-wing apologist no thanks.

 

please, go on.

 

Under your system everybody would need to be trained up to a certain level. Well. when I say everybody, perhaps a certain majority.
A multi-tier system where a certain amount of people can shift between certain levels of work.
I wouldn't expect a teacher to become an open heart surgeon. Everybody has an income they aspire to - and their version of a 'dirty job'.
You say everybody should spend time doing 'dirty jobs' - the problem with that is, why should somebody that has been trained to be a teacher or a doctor spend anytime doing a 'dirty job'?
I understand there are jobs nobody else wants to do - but have you ever heard the saying: 'Somebody has to do it'?

 

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No I won't bother.Plus you are generally a funny guy.

 

What has his sense of humour got to do with anything? Did you type something THEN realise who you were responding to?

 

I appreciate a sense of humor and don't automatically hate people with different politics to mine.We're all on a spectrum trying to work things out.

 

Fair enough, but you clearly had an issue with what was said. It would be nice to hear what you have to say further.

 

i posted something along the lines of

in order for profit to exist it is necessary for people to produce more than they earn. the formula can be written as:

the ammount of work you do

minus

constant capital (equipment and running costs)

minus

variable capital (wages)

equals

surplus value (profit)

minimal wage workers minimise rigidity in the workforce which ensures a healthy flow of profit. if they strike for more wages and improved working conditions (which increase variable and constant capital, therefore giving them a larger share of the total value of their labour) then they can simply be got rid of, and replaced with other workers who are more desperate.

they are the perfect sort of workers, unskilled and expendable. :devil:

but then i deleted it, i really wasn't in the mood to get into an argument and i thought i might.

 

Thanks. I can appreciate why you deleted it.

 

profits over people, man. its an ugly system.

 

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A college degree or even taking relevant classes for a career are worth the student loan. Just pay it off asap.
Took me over 15 yrs to pay back $8k in loans. In the end interest doubled the loan close to $16k. Creditors try to garnish wages, take tax retrun checks. Sucks! At on point I negotiated a one time pay back that would have saved me $3k but couldnt get that much cash. You can negotiate with creditors.

 

there are some things, very few actually, that need to be done for organized socity, and the infrastructure that depends on that, to exist. and of course people living in urbanized areas are completely dependent on the existence of that infrastructure. at current excessive human population levels, we all, to some degree, are. and certainly our comforts, conveninces and amusements are.

so there is a share we all owe to the existence of such things, or "owe" to the degree that we want them to exist. which many, though by no means all, do.

but the share of effort THAT would take, devided evenly, even among the willing, would be FAR less then our now, more or less traditional 40 hours a week.

a fair share of what NEEDS to be done (and again only needs for the bloated numbers of our population to go on living and having our toys to play with) would amount to no more 16 hours a week. if that. if even four hours every four days or something.

so the idea of a work ethic is mostly, though not entirely, something of a con game. more like any other excuse for fanatacism, just that.

but there ARE some things that do need to be done. pretty much these are limited to infrastructure maintainence, and all of the elements THAT depends upon. that and growing, processing and distributing food, though the latter, people in a non-urban setting could almost as easily do for themselves. sometimes more so.