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Volkerball posted:A lot of this is rooted in desperation, but it's also rooted in poor financial education, both when it comes to financial tools, and when it comes to predatory scams. A lot of these regulations would help a shitton though? Like a good portion of these predatory scams exploit loopholes in current regulations, so Congressional action would help a lot. It sounds like you're putting most of the onus of responsibility on the victim to not get hosed over
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May 16, 2019 14:02
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Bicyclops posted:I'm amazed San Diego is that low, to be honest. My wife and I had to move outside of Boston proper, which broke my Boston heart, just to find something affordable on the T that wasn't enough of a commute that I would miss too much time with my infant son, and we pay $1500 for a pretty modest apartment (and it's considered a steal - we knew somebody who knew somebody, thanks, white-people social capital - and if we had to move and stay in the area, we'd probably be paying $500 more). Parents lived in Boston for a while, have a few friends there. Boston COL is *nuts*. I straight up do not know why people bother trying to live there sometimes. Also, like everything is outside of Boston proper because the city itself is microscopic.
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May 16, 2019 14:06
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Mineaiki posted:Parents lived in Boston for a while, have a few friends there. Boston COL is *nuts*. I straight up do not know why people bother trying to live there sometimes. Some of us were born here and don't want to leave, basically.  The city itself is sizable enough, it's just that huge swathes of it are functionally off of public transit unless you want to sit on a bus for forty-five minutes.
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May 16, 2019 14:11
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Bicyclops posted:Some of us were born here and don't want to leave, basically. What I mean I guess is that Boston is way bigger than Boston proper would lead you to believe, because in any other city (like Chicago where I live), places like Cambridge would be neighborhoods.
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May 16, 2019 14:17
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Yeah, it's sort of weird that Cambridge, Somerville and Brookline aren't just neighborhoods of Boston. They all do their own thing though, and Somerville is so dense that I can see why they'd want their own mayor.
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May 16, 2019 14:27
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Y'all know (besides being outdated) those figures for 'livable wage' are just what it requires to stick to the classic 'rent and utilities are 1/3 of your income' for a 2 bedroom apartment, right? It doesn't actually consider other expenses. Also no one is trying to loving doxx volker, But I do agree 'lol your parents must be rich' is a bad tact. The problem with the economy isn't that no one can ever be comfortable unless things were heavily rigged in their favor, it's that so many gotchas are in place that when things don't work there's always something a just world pedant can point to as the 'obvious mistake' made. Like for example I've made the 'obvious mistake' of choosing a disabled partner, who also made the obvious mistake of working in education. So they don't pull their full weight in making our numbers go up. Luckily we haven't made the mistake of adding non-economically productive members to our household. But if we ever do, and actually suffer economic hardship from it, there'll be a braingenius ready to explain that surely we're outliers and he's never heard of a child costing that much, or surely it was our own fault for not having had a child during prime breeding years. Or maybe we should've crunched the math and figured out only the top 60% of earners should breed. Here's an article with California's more recent number, which is 67k. It also shows the hourly full time wage needed for each state to keep that same ratio. https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Over-30-Dollars-a-Hour-is-Needed-to-Afford-Decent-Rent-in-California-485861801.html
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May 16, 2019 14:30
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Pulcinella di Bund posted:whenever i see SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS whining about if they have to pay x y z or treat their workers better it will KILL THEIR PRECIOUS SMALL BUSINESS, I think about the ~small business owner~ the millionaire boss was and the boatloads of cash he made and the bribes he would pay to get around regulations. Small businesses loving blow to work for unless you're the founder or a high-level manager. Big companies usually suck too, but the average from is insulated from the worst of the shenanigans and there's enough crumbs to throw at you to numb the pain away.
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May 16, 2019 14:55
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Bicyclops posted:I guess we can add 401ks to the list of things that you're naive about. Yeah he has no idea, my current employer has no match for anyone outside of executive leadership or sales. When I worked for big consulting I only got matched 67 cents on the dollar on 6% because technology delivery took a backseat to the sales and management consulting department. There's also really sketchy things like having employee vesting periods for the match too, where you can wait up to 5 years before you can collect the entire employer match, which can be quite a lot of money.
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May 16, 2019 15:13
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Volkerball posted:And D&D could use some pedantry given that the current trend of blindly posting like we're in the cynicism olympics just last week manifested in an extremely hosed up discussion in USPOL in which several posters explained that suicide was their retirement plan, or that they were/are weighing the option, and everyone sagely agreed that things were that awful. This poo poo was based on the exact sort of nothing matters, everything is poo poo, nothing will get better, everyone is hosed from the get go, and nobody has a chance hot takes that are being thrown out by the same sorts of people in this thread, above and beyond the extent of how bad things are in reality. That's not exactly healthy discussion. I tend to think it's Good For D&D to counter that when facts allow, because the alternate is the suicidal depression orgy that exists solely for people in poor mental states, and provides nothing of value, that this shithole is becoming. Literally even all my engineer and lawyer friends making 6 figgies are struggling and don't see how it could be possible to have kids (money wise) so... like yeah I'm sure that financial irresponsibility is a Thing but there are also systemic issues. Real wages are lower than they were in the 70s; poo poo isn't just all peachy keen. Volkerball posted:For context, I support UBI as a long term response to automation and population growth, socialized healthcare, a free 4 years of college, a higher minimum wage, and protections for workers above the minimum wage scale that are designed to undo the major gains executive salaries have made relative to employee wages over the past few decades and prevent it from happening again. I also recognize that systemic racism has put an economic ball and chain on a lot of minorities and minority-heavy communities, and all of these policies should reflect that. That's cool though. Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 15:52 on May 16, 2019 |
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May 16, 2019 15:50
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CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:Yeah he has no idea, my current employer has no match for anyone outside of executive leadership or sales. When I worked for big consulting I only got matched 67 cents on the dollar on 6% because technology delivery took a backseat to the sales and management consulting department. Vesting is more common than it is not, in my experience. All of that is before we even get into the issue that even if you have an employer who's matching you at 3%, that "free money" doesn't mean anything when you're living paycheck to paycheck. When I first started working out of college, I was making ten bucks an hour. I could barely afford the rent and the student loans. I flat-out couldn't afford to put away 3% of my paycheck. Now I can, and I do, but I'm one of the lucky ones. (My current employer does match, but there was a vesting period.)
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May 16, 2019 15:59
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Moridin920 posted:Literally even all my engineer and lawyer friends making 6 figgies are struggling and don't see how it could be possible to have kids (money wise) This is very location dependant and very proximity to family dependant. And not nessisarily in ways one would expect, some expensive areas have a huge amount of support for parents and some don't.
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May 16, 2019 16:18
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Volkerball posted:And D&D could use some pedantry given that the current trend of blindly posting like we're in the cynicism olympics just last week manifested in an extremely hosed up discussion in USPOL in which several posters explained that suicide was their retirement plan, or that they were/are weighing the option, and everyone sagely agreed that things were that awful. This poo poo was based on the exact sort of nothing matters, everything is poo poo, nothing will get better, everyone is hosed from the get go, and nobody has a chance hot takes that are being thrown out by the same sorts of people in this thread, above and beyond the extent of how bad things are in reality. That's not exactly healthy discussion. I tend to think it's Good For D&D to counter that when facts allow, because the alternate is the suicidal depression orgy that exists solely for people in poor mental states, and provides nothing of value, that this shithole is becoming. I was one of those people. I admit that endlessly wallowing in depression is bad, but if you can't see the kind of poo poo everyone is in (or will be as climate change and automation accelerate), you're just not paying attention. Literally, the "I've got it good now so nothing can ever change" is how the majority of people think... and its obviously a pretty serious cognitive flaw.
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May 16, 2019 17:19
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It's possible to be angry, outraged and depressed about something while still striving toward bettering a situation or yourself. A great deal of the outrage is because people believe better things are possible, and they're working fervently toward those things while their troubles and tribulations remain largely unaddressed, or are outright dismissed as do-nothing millennial belly aching, or because they're working as hard as they can and they're getting nowhere.  Might as well ask a depressed person if they tried smiling.
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May 16, 2019 18:43
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Bicyclops posted:Vesting is more common than it is not, in my experience. Yeah its farcial, I remember having a 100% match on my 401k up to 5% when I was in my early 20s, which was good for socking 5% of $11/hr.
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May 16, 2019 18:50
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To expand on the "cognitive flaw" issue I mentioned before. This kind of broken thinking is equivalent to Steve Pinker's idea that because everything has been "getting better" incrementally for the past 50 years, it will continue getting better in the future. Very few systems in our corner of the universe are linear in nature. They're either cyclical (boom and bust cycles) or asymptotic (look linear until the very end, when they hit a cliff). Things usually work until they don't. Problems build up under a layer of inertia until eventually everything collapses. Feedback loops amplify the problems until the system collapses or resets with massive loss of wealth or life. Our economic system will work until one day it just won't (the 2008 recession). Our ecosphere will work until one day it won't (collapse of the Arctic food web, collapse of the Thermohaline, etc). Our political system will "work" until (beset by the feedback mechanisms of the other two crises) it just won't anymore. Looking back at the last 50 years is the equivalent of someone in 1800 looking back at the 1700's (still largely agrarian) and using that to try to predict the next century (the full-blown industrial revolution). There is nothing comparable about those two states. Past performance is actually no indicator of future results. There is no linear path that you can trace between them. When the change occurred, it was rapid, unstoppable and unprecedented (Marx aside). Most of our upcoming problems are of the same nature... vast, incomprehensible paradigm shifts that look almost nothing like what came before. Your 401K is a revolution or its an Earth devoid of human life.
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May 16, 2019 20:30
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Pembroke Fuse posted:To expand on the "cognitive flaw" issue I mentioned before. This kind of broken thinking is equivalent to Steve Pinker's idea that because everything has been "getting better" incrementally for the past 50 years, it will continue getting better in the future. That's a good point. On a long enough (and large enough) scale there's really no predicting what the future is going to look like or what institutions are going to be around. Most people don't think on that scale, though. That's not a cognative flaw as much it is an adaptive trait that lets people focus on the things that most materially affect their lives. In that regard Volkerball has it way more together I think than most posters ITT. Big picture, yes, a lot of things are extremely hosed up and there's no guarantee society won't go spiraling off into unfathomable distopian darkness or destroy itself by destabalizing the earth's ecology. But it might not. And unless a person's investing in paramilitary training and a survival community or something like that then focusing on that kind of view is paralyzing instead of empowering. Instead, it makes more sense - it's adaptive - for people to look at their individual situations and find the ways they can work within the present paradigm to make that better. So yeah rag on a guy for contributing to his 401K but if society doesn't collapse or the revolution doesn't happen or whatever it's likely to have been a good plan and if either of those things does happen I doubt he's going to be missing those contributions. Similarly, while looking at big societal problems and being able to evaluate what's going on at a societal level is important but getting stuck on that is kind of overwhelming and the cynicism and fatalism that seems to promote doesn't help anyone live their lives. If it helps people get involved and make positive political changes that's all to the good but... in terms of "how can an individual help get his/her life to a better place", not helpful. On that level, an optimistic mindset and an internal locus of control are going to go serve someone much better than a macro appreciation of societal injustices (which do exist and are important, please don't get me wrong) that they really don't individually have the power to change.
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May 16, 2019 21:05
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Coolness Averted posted:So sticking with the general hiring practices thing, I recently had an interview with the most bizzare question I've ever been asked. 'If our company <did a crime> knowingly for profit would you as <position in charge of preventing that crime> report it to authorities?' Hopefully if they offer it to you you're going to run far, far away? O.o
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May 16, 2019 21:09
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BrandorKP posted:This is very location dependant Of course but guess what all the well paying jobs are in extremely expensive areas lol Where are these mythical well paying jobs in low cost of living communities?
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May 16, 2019 21:24
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Helsing posted:I don't know how you can pivot between contradictory arguments this quickly with so little shame but if you acknowledge that statistic discrimination is a huge and pernicious problem then it's really grosse that you fall back on this trite cliches about how "if you don't like your crappy wage maybe you should learn to negotiate better". A lot of good research quoted in your post. I enjoyed looking through it. I think you are mingling two concepts that it would be better to disentangle. Individual people are not statistics. Within every group there's variation in outcome and what I'm proposing here is that whatever the economic or social headwinds an individual faces, they should do what they can to maximize their good outcomes. That means if a person's looking for more money, they should (IMO) go out and play the game and try to get it - and even figure out how to be better at that skill. On a societal level many people won't do that, or will try and not be successful, but that doesn't make it bad individual advice. It's not the solution to everyone's labor problems or to any big picture problems. So I think it would be good to talk about individual strategies separately from these big societal statistical considerations - which are real and valid - rather than treating the statistics as reasons for people to decide advancing in life is impossible.
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May 16, 2019 21:27
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Volkerball posted:The figures on this map are based on the needs of two adults and a child, per your link. I would absolutely agree that you cannot support a family with a stay at home significant other on $14 an hour. But two people together making $14 an hour have an income of $59k with no overtime, which would put them above the living wage in all but 3 of these states. Big cities disproportionately affect these numbers as well. That's why DC is higher than any state, and Illinois is higher than its surrounding states due to having Chicago when the rest of the states cost of living more closely mirrors Iowa, Indiana, etc. Same deal with Colorado and Denver relative to its surrounding states. With that in mind, outside of being close-ish to downtown in the largest, most expensive metropolitan areas, that figure would put a family above the living wage with several thousand a year to spare, and that's a totally attainable short/long term goal for most people. You're all over the place here. Let's not forget that I posted that info in response to you saying that anyone except single parents could live comfortably on $14 an hour. And now you respond by saying that two people both making that wage, without children, would be able to make a little bit above the living wage? That's a substantially different claim, with a lot more strings attached. What are single people supposed to do, drop dead? Also, you're talking about "several thousand above the living wage" like it's loving untold riches. Living wage is the bare minimum needed to support basic needs, not the level beyond which all spending can be saved. In what universe is the 30% rule "conservative"? And how does it make any sense for that to be "especially at lower incomes"? Rent is the biggest fixed cost in most people's lives, and the only people who think it's "affordable" for low-income people to pay 40% or 50% of their income toward housing are the real estate agents selling them that housing. You're talking about $1k a month like it's no big deal, but if you're making $14 an hour then that's literally half your monthly after-tax income. That $650 rent you're so proud of is only barely under the 30% affordability threshold. You manage to make that work not because of your smart financial literacy, but because you're a young healthy person with no dependents and few expenses. I know that because I've made $14 an hour with a $650 rent too. Like you, I felt like I had everything paid for with a little money to spare. And unlike you, I recognized exactly how fast that "little money to spare" I was saving would vanish if any unexpected major expenses came up. Like, for example, when the sketchy startup I was working for at the time ran out of money and decided to just ghost with my last paycheck or two. wateroverfire posted:A lot of good research quoted in your post. I enjoyed looking through it. I think you are mingling two concepts that it would be better to disentangle. Individual people are not statistics. Within every group there's variation in outcome and what I'm proposing here is that whatever the economic or social headwinds an individual faces, they should do what they can to maximize their good outcomes. That means if a person's looking for more money, they should (IMO) go out and play the game and try to get it - and even figure out how to be better at that skill. On a societal level many people won't do that, or will try and not be successful, but that doesn't make it bad individual advice. It's not the solution to everyone's labor problems or to any big picture problems. So I think it would be good to talk about individual strategies separately from these big societal statistical considerations - which are real and valid - rather than treating the statistics as reasons for people to decide advancing in life is impossible. As the employer, you are the one deciding those outcomes. They're not just random statistics floating in the wind - you are the one deciding you're going to pay person X less than person Y for the same amount of work. Don't go and loving blame that on them, or on statistics, or on random variation, or on anything else. They're "playing the game" by working for you for your profit, loving pay them fairly for it.
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May 16, 2019 21:40
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wateroverfire posted:play the game Why? What is the good that is being advanced here? Other than you trying to squeeze out more profit by paying people as little as possible.
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May 16, 2019 21:45
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doverhog posted:Why? What is the good that is being advanced here? Other than you trying to squeeze out more profit by paying people as little as possible. the profit is the e: it was a typo but I'll leave it cause it's good Doktor Avalanche fucked around with this message at 21:59 on May 16, 2019 |
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May 16, 2019 21:55
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Moridin920 posted:Of course but guess what all the well paying jobs are in extremely expensive areas lol Transportation. But that's not what I'm taking about. There are large diffences between close to equally expensive areas. It's much more expensive where I live now ( East side Seattle suburbs) than where I live before ( North of Savannah ) and my salary hasn't changed. But it's soooo much easier to have kids here than in GA even with less personal resources. Because there are far more community resources.
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May 16, 2019 21:56
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Pembroke Fuse posted:To expand on the "cognitive flaw" issue I mentioned before. This kind of broken thinking is equivalent to Steve Pinker's idea that because everything has been "getting better" incrementally for the past 50 years, it will continue getting better in the future. This is a very concise and excellent post. We're going to capsize.
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May 16, 2019 21:58
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wateroverfire posted:That means if a person's looking for more money, they should (IMO) go out and play the game and try to get it - and even figure out how to be better at that skill. It doesn't really matter how good of a negotiator you are if the average pay rate for your position is X, and the labor market is such that the employer can respond to your negotiations with "no", because you need the job a lot more than they need to fill it. It's weighted for the corporation/company from the get go, on the basis that the company isn't going to get evicted or starve if they're a man down for a month, but you just might if you're out of work for the same period of time. And it's such a waste of time, for the company, and the applicant. People make judgment calls about jobs all the time, just based on the rates listed. If I had to get a retail job tomorrow, I wouldn't bother with anything below nine dollars an hour, because any store/company paying less is going to have enormous turnover and a host of other problems which would make it absolutely terrible to work at. If I was interviewing for a job paying a salary, I would expect some back and forth. If I went in for a job and the interviewer started haggling with me over a mediocre hourly pay-rate, I would leave, unless it was a company I really wanted to work for. Such a thing would tell me so much about what kind of management I could expect to deal with. It would tell me, immediately, that the people making decisions put the company before the staff, and were probably the type to stick their fingers into people's work.
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May 16, 2019 22:11
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wateroverfire posted:That's a good point. On a long enough (and large enough) scale there's really no predicting what the future is going to look like or what institutions are going to be around. Most people don't think on that scale, though. That's not a cognative flaw as much it is an adaptive trait that lets people focus on the things that most materially affect their lives. In that regard Volkerball has it way more together I think than most posters ITT. Big picture, yes, a lot of things are extremely hosed up and there's no guarantee society won't go spiraling off into unfathomable distopian darkness or destroy itself by destabalizing the earth's ecology. But it might not. And unless a person's investing in paramilitary training and a survival community or something like that then focusing on that kind of view is paralyzing instead of empowering. Instead, it makes more sense - it's adaptive - for people to look at their individual situations and find the ways they can work within the present paradigm to make that better. So yeah rag on a guy for contributing to his 401K but if society doesn't collapse or the revolution doesn't happen or whatever it's likely to have been a good plan and if either of those things does happen I doubt he's going to be missing those contributions. There are probably small things you can do to ensure a better chance for the survival of the human species that don't involve 401Ks. Not being able to solve the big problems by yourself does not imply a retreat into a hazy capitalist myopia. We have the power of collective action... and that is still just made up of a bunch of small, frail, individual voices and actions.
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May 16, 2019 22:36
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Main Paineframe posted:You're all over the place here. Let's not forget that I posted that info in response to you saying that anyone except single parents could live comfortably on $14 an hour. And now you respond by saying that two people both making that wage, without children, would be able to make a little bit above the living wage? Once again, the living wage you posted is the living wage for 2 adults and a child. That is not the same thing as the living wage for a single person. So that data is irrelevant, and since you didn't provide that context, very misleading. I mean on its face the idea that the minimum livable wage across the entirety of the country for a single person flirts with $50k annually, is ridiculous. I tried my best to address both situations. The single person living on their own, and the family of two adults and a child that would be relevant to the data you posted. quote:In what universe is the 30% rule "conservative"? And how does it make any sense for that to be "especially at lower incomes"? Rent is the biggest fixed cost in most people's lives, and the only people who think it's "affordable" for low-income people to pay 40% or 50% of their income toward housing are the real estate agents selling them that housing. You're talking about $1k a month like it's no big deal, but if you're making $14 an hour then that's literally half your monthly after-tax income. That $650 rent you're so proud of is only barely under the 30% affordability threshold. 30% is the perfectly ideal situation in which you have enough disposable income to be choosy. It's fairly common for 30% to not cover the cost of rent if you have a lower income, but it's not like the second you cross over 30% you're automatically hosed and you die. 35% isn't ideal and 40% is starting to get a bit extreme, but you can go over 30% without being in a dire financial situation. The $1,000 figure was for a multiple bedroom home in the 2 adults making $14 and a child scenario, and the $1,000 is actually less demanding as a percentage of the household income in that scenario relative to the single individuals $650. quote:You manage to make that work not because of your smart financial literacy, but because you're a young healthy person with no dependents and few expenses. I know that because I've made $14 an hour with a $650 rent too. Like you, I felt like I had everything paid for with a little money to spare. And unlike you, I recognized exactly how fast that "little money to spare" I was saving would vanish if any unexpected major expenses came up. Like, for example, when the sketchy startup I was working for at the time ran out of money and decided to just ghost with my last paycheck or two. I didn't do it because I'm a dummy, but I could've saved up a few months living expenses for situations such as that one. It's definitely the first thing on the list in pretty much every budget planning guide.
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May 16, 2019 22:42
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Cicero posted:This is pretty gross and should be probe-worthy imo. Attacking posters for their own shittiness is fine, trying to pry into their family background for gotchas is really dumb and bad After so many stories have come out about people who justify their Just World bullshit with "I was able to get on my own two feet with two separate five hundred thousand dollar loans from my impossibly rich grandpa and also he bought me my first and second houses so why can't you," I felt that at least making sure this wasn't another one of those was worth checking. Going explicitly for the parents was probably wrong, but it felt like the most obvious tack. Both of their posts reek of having benefited from substantial external / circumstantial support that they aren't acknowledging. Sorry about your mum, Volker, I hope that someone pays her better some day. If it turns out that wateroverfire's bullshit is almost entirely based on him basically or literally being given the company by someone richer and more powerful than himself, and he quietly never mentions that fact, but that's why he feels he can't change anything despite being the owner, I will not stop laughing.
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May 16, 2019 22:50
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wateroverfire posted:Hopefully if they offer it to you you're going to run far, far away? O.o It kinda depends, the company that negged me, yeah that's probably gonna be a pass without a generous offer. But the "Would you report <crime>?" question could be a useful test of "Is this applicant looking to just say what I want to hear, or are they going to enforce the policies that keep us compliant?" if anything their not making an offer would be more damning since then it would look like they passed on a skilled candidate for saying he wouldn't break the law. I've just never directly been asked that as a hypothetical. Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 23:25 on May 16, 2019 |
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May 16, 2019 22:56
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ChipNDip posted:Small businesses loving blow to work for unless you're the founder or a high-level manager. Big companies usually suck too, but the average from is insulated from the worst of the shenanigans and there's enough crumbs to throw at you to numb the pain away. Big business gets media attention on the biggest abuses at some point, mass public movements can force positive changes on national or even international scales. Even though many such crimes never get addressed, they have a greater potential to do so. When small business abuses workers, you only have a few people involve and often the business owner has major influence in his local area to squash investigation or talk. You also have hard time drawing up mass movement against it, they can more easily stymie the union effort as well. It is especially bad in the outlying settlements as different from the city. One summer I spent with with a great uncle and great aunt on their mostly idle farm near the Saône, there was a most-goods store in the nearest village, which we never went to while I was there. We instead traveled several villages over to another store. When I asked him why, he said the store once employed my cousin removed (not sure of term for relation) and consistently cheated hours and promised pay. But the store owner, he was good friends with local society and so great uncle could not force punishment on the owner and could only persist in private boycott of his family and 2 or 3 neighbor families who would believe him. CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:Yeah he has no idea, my current employer has no match for anyone outside of executive leadership or sales. When I worked for big consulting I only got matched 67 cents on the dollar on 6% because technology delivery took a backseat to the sales and management consulting department. Hmm hmm, I would have thought glorious People's Republic would compensate you better for your genocide support. You should ask for the greater pension match?
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May 17, 2019 02:00
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Volkerball posted:Once again, the living wage you posted is the living wage for 2 adults and a child. That is not the same thing as the living wage for a single person. So that data is irrelevant, and since you didn't provide that context, very misleading. I mean on its face the idea that the minimum livable wage across the entirety of the country for a single person flirts with $50k annually, is ridiculous. I tried my best to address both situations. The single person living on their own, and the family of two adults and a child that would be relevant to the data you posted. That data is relevant because income stats are generally given for households, which is problematic for a ton of reasons. If we're talking about income in that context, then it makes the most sense to look at the needs of a 2 adult/1 child family, because household income is an extremely poor metric for discussing anything else. Remember that household income isn't calculated in the same way that households are calculated for something like tax purposes, it's literally just the total income of everyone sharing a residence. More to your point, there's effectively no data that shows $14/hour being anywhere near "comfortable" for a single person. For example, take a look at data from MIT's living wage calculator. This CNBC article compiles it nicely. $14/hour at 40 hours per week for 52 weeks will hit or modestly exceed the requirement for some states and also fall short for several states. This is also complicated by the fact that the average employee doesn't actually work anywhere near the 2080 hours per year that this represents, and this is more true as you move towards the lower end of the scale. It gets more complicated, though. This is what MIT has to say about their living wage model: quote:The living wage model is a ‘step up’ from poverty as measured by the poverty thresholds but it is a small ‘step up’, one that accounts for only the basic needs of a family. The living wage model does not allow for what many consider the basic necessities enjoyed by many Americans. It does not budget funds for pre-prepared meals or those eaten in restaurants. It does not include money for entertainment nor does it does not allocate leisure time for unpaid vacations or holidays. Lastly, it does not provide a financial means for planning for the future through savings and investment or for the purchase of capital assets (e.g. provisions for retirement or home purchases). The living wage is the minimum income standard that, if met, draws a very fine line between the financial independence of the working poor and the need to seek out public assistance or suffer consistent and severe housing and food insecurity. In light of this fact, the living wage is perhaps better defined as a minimum subsistence wage for persons living in the United States. So $14/hour, if worked a minimum of 40 hours per week for 52 weeks per year, will, for some portion of the country, provide a subsistence wage that would allow a single person to not require government assistance for basic survival. If you see this as anything other than completely damning then I don't know what to tell you. There is essentially no data to support your argument that $14/hour is fine or comfortable in anything except very low COL areas. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 03:48 on May 17, 2019 |
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May 17, 2019 03:45
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Paradoxish posted:That data is relevant because income stats are generally given for households, which is problematic for a ton of reasons. If we're talking about income in that context, then it makes the most sense to look at the needs of a 2 adult/1 child family, because household income is an extremely poor metric for discussing anything else. Remember that household income isn't calculated in the same way that households are calculated for something like tax purposes, it's literally just the total income of everyone sharing a residence. Agreed. quote:More to your point, there's effectively no data that shows $14/hour being anywhere near "comfortable" for a single person. For example, take a look at data from MIT's living wage calculator. This CNBC article compiles it nicely. $14/hour at 40 hours per week for 52 weeks will hit or modestly exceed the requirement for some states and also fall short for several states. This is also complicated by the fact that the average employee doesn't actually work anywhere near the 2080 hours per year that this represents, and this is more true as you move towards the lower end of the scale. This is a more useful metric. 14x40x52= 29,120, which clears this living wage figure by more than $5,000 annually in 31 states. All but 8 states have a living wage that is lower than this wage figure by $3,000 or more. It would fall short in only 4 states. The $29,120 is pre-tax, but the living wage figure is also pre-tax, at least in the interpretation of that CNBC article. And again, you can see the impact of major metropolitan areas on a states final number, with Denver and Chicago raising their states figures. Outside of those cities you'll see a cost of living more in line with neighboring states. So it's likely that sizable chunks of some of these states with the highest living wage numbers don't reach the average cost of living for the state as a whole. As to the hours worked, the average full time American employee works 47 hours a week, or 2,444 hours per year. That tends to jive with my experience working in factories at entry level. Per the bureau of labor statistics, the fields with the most hours worked weekly are manufacturing, logging, mining, goods producing, transportation, warehousing, and utilities, which aren't what I would call at the high end of the scale. When you take the average 40 hour work week at $14 an hour, and add the average 7 hours of overtime a week for a full time employee at $21 an hour, the end result is $36,764 annually, which surpasses the living wage in all but 8 states by over $10k annually.
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May 17, 2019 05:41
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Volkerball posted:When you take the average 40 hour work week at $14 an hour, and add the average 7 hours of overtime a week for a full time employee at $21 an hour, the end result is $36,764 annually, which surpasses the living wage in all but 8 states by over $10k annually. Hold up there chief
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May 17, 2019 05:49
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Lol you think employers give overtime anymore. A grocery / liqour lead with 30-40 years experience might get OT. Regular highers probably not.
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May 17, 2019 05:54
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Volkerball posted:As to the hours worked, the average full time American employee works 47 hours a week, or 2,444 hours per year. That tends to jive with my experience working in factories at entry level. Per the bureau of labor statistics, the fields with the most hours worked weekly are manufacturing, logging, mining, goods producing, transportation, warehousing, and utilities, which aren't what I would call at the high end of the scale. When you take the average 40 hour work week at $14 an hour, and add the average 7 hours of overtime a week for a full time employee at $21 an hour, the end result is $36,764 annually, which surpasses the living wage in all but 8 states by over $10k annually. It's extremely misleading to use average full-time hours worked for this particular comparison. What you want to look at are numbers as directly reported by BLS in the Employment Situation Summary, and you want to use overall hours worked rather than hours for full-time employees only: quote:The average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls decreased $14/hour is at the lower-end of the pay scale and that almost universally skews towards jobs that are either not full-time or that barely pass the 35 hour hurdle. More importantly, full-time employment data collected by BLS does not distinguish between actual full-time employment and people working multiple part-time jobs. In other words, average full-time hours includes people working multiple part-time jobs who are not being paid overtime at all. Edit- And this isn't even getting into how ridiculous it is that your argument in favor of $14/hour being "okay" relies on people literally working more than 40 hours per week to exceed subsistence wages. Just holy poo poo, dude. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 06:03 on May 17, 2019 |
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May 17, 2019 05:58
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Volkerball posted:Agreed. So you’re just ignoring the part, from the article you linked, where the average American works 34.4 hours per week, which drops that actual annual income level down to about 25k per year, making the number of states you’d exceed the living wage by 5k or more drop from 31 to literally 0.
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May 17, 2019 05:59
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It's also worth adding that the average American doesn't work 52 weeks per year, so even 52 * 34.4 * 14 is going to end up being slightly on the high side for hourly employees. Edit- Oh, gently caress, let's add some more variables into this mix. About one-third of US workers participate in the gig economy in some capacity. The hours that these people work contribute to BLS full-time/part-time statistics. Someone working 25 hours at a part-time retail job and another 10 hours of Uber is technically employed full-time as far as BLS is concerned. Not only are these people not getting paid overtime, they're also paying self-employment taxes which creates an even bigger divide between their apparent pay and their actual take-home income. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 06:20 on May 17, 2019 |
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May 17, 2019 06:10
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Paradoxish posted:It's extremely misleading to use average full-time hours worked for this particular comparison. What you want to look at are numbers as directly reported by BLS in the Employment Situation Summary, and you want to use overall hours worked rather than hours for full-time employees only: I would not argue that working less than 40 hours a week is likely not going to provide someone a comfortable margin over a living wage. But there are plenty of full time positions out there, and the math still comes out the same if you're working multiple part time jobs that add up to 40 hours a week. I would argue that a lot of part time employees are either college or high school students, supplemental income to a household, and people with other forms of income (disability, social security, etc), who don't need to or can't work full time (benefits for those who can't is a different discussion), which drive down those averages, so that number is misleading in its own way. quote:Edit- And this isn't even getting into how ridiculous it is that your argument in favor of $14/hour being "okay" relies on people literally working more than 40 hours per week to exceed subsistence wages. Just holy poo poo, dude. It most certainly did not. The second paragraph regarding overtime was just running up the score.
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May 17, 2019 06:21
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Volkerball posted:I would not argue that working less than 40 hours a week is likely not going to provide someone a comfortable margin over a living wage. But there are plenty of full time positions out there, and the math still comes out the same if you're working multiple part time jobs that add up to 40 hours a week. I would argue that a lot of part time employees are either college or high school students, supplemental income to a household, and people with other forms of income (disability, social security, etc), who don't need to or can't work full time (benefits for those who can't is a different discussion), which drive down those averages, so that number is misleading in its own way. “There are plenty of full time positions out there” and yet, from the article you cited, there are 6.5 million people working part time that want to work full time. Why do you keep putting forth arguments you’ve pre-debunked? Is this a form of performance art?
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May 17, 2019 06:40
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Volkerball posted:I would argue that a lot of part time employees are either college or high school students, supplemental income to a household, and people with other forms of income (disability, social security, etc), who don't need to or can't work full time (benefits for those who can't is a different discussion), which drive down those averages, so that number is misleading in its own way. And salaried employees who are reporting 60-70 hour work weeks are going to drive the average up. There are serious issues with self-reported works hours generally being overestimated (there have been several studies on this, I'll dig up some links tomorrow) anyway, but if we're going to use them then there's no reason to use anything other than overall average hours worked. This is more likely to skew high than to skew low. I'm honestly having trouble believing that you're arguing in good faith if you're really insisting that a straight 52 * 40 * 14 calculation isn't a serious overestimate for hourly employees. Just to point out how ridiculous this actually is: the BLS doesn't even collect overtime data for non-manufacturing overtime worked. Very, very few employers are paying overtime because very, very few hourly employees outside of specific industries are even hitting 40 hour work weeks. Here's a breakdown of average hours worked by industry: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm. Note that the service sector essentially never manages to crack 40 hours. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 06:47 on May 17, 2019 |
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May 17, 2019 06:40
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