Put a little asterisk after that number, a lot of employees who earn tips can be paid even less.
I see this mentioned a lot - and it’s not technically true I don’t think. If tips do not push their pay above the minimum wage per time worked, then they do in fact get paid out at minimum wage. Not that I’m here to defend a
$7.75$7.25 minimum wage - that’s an obvious problem. But AFAIK, a server who did terrible in tips is still taking$7.75$7.25/hr home at the end of the pay period.But their employer isn’t paying them minimum wage, regardless.
It’s kind of a semantics argument I guess. Their employer is ensuring that they are taking home no less than minimum wage - because they are paying them up to minimum wage as necessary.
To properly address this would require fully overhauling our tipping culture and laws around pay for tipped workers, which sounds great to me as a consumer. But if you ask a waiter or bartender, many would MUCH rather leave things the way they are, because they make an absolute killing and taking 100% of pay from their employer would result in a substantial pay cut.
Retirement homes constantly have this issue regarding their wait staff. The servers you want to hire won’t work there because they don’t get tips. We started our servers at like $16/hr and could still only ever get high school and college kids, or people who were retired or needed a second job part-time.
I was a cook at a restaurant chain at Christmas one year. Waiter and I worked identical shifts, and were walking to our cars at the same time. He mentioned how excited he was that he’d made $300 in just cash tips that day. I told him I worked the same amount of hours and only got about $90 after taxes. I asked if he felt he worked over $200 harder than I did that day, and he dropped the subject.
My point being: wait staff and bartenders make too much from their tips that they don’t want them to go away. As someone who was always working on the line and only got 2 tips over the course of a decade-long cooking career… I can’t say I blame them.
Their employer is ensuring that they are taking home no less than minimum wage
You are assuming their employer is on the up and up. If they are not willing to pay them AT LEAST minimum wage, what makes you think they are going to make up the difference?
Yes, I’m assuming they’re obeying labor laws of the United States. Businesses operating illegally are kind of outside of the scope of the conversation, don’t you think?
Alternative fix: make the minimum wage an actual minimum wage regardless of tips. Let the market sort itself out from there.
I don’t disagree. But for the sake of playing devils advocate a bit - restaurants already take YEARS to achieve profitability because costs are so high. If you suddenly triple all of your wait staff’s salaries, small, local restaurants making good faith efforts to operate ethically would probably be the ones to suffer.
And yet - I’ve heard that if McDonald’s were to pay employees $15/hr, because of economies of scale, it would raise the cost of a burger by mere pennies.
So if your local mom and pop’s can’t afford to operate now, and all you’re left with is Chili’s and Olive Garden and McDonald’s who priced them out of business with capital investment and economies of scale, mom and pop go away and all we’re left with is the corporate garbage. And when the competition is dead, prices will steady climb. Meanwhile, those m&p restaurants all have waiters now making $0/ hour.
I’m not an economist. Obviously. And maybe it wouldn’t be so dire. It just feels like “let the market sort itself out” would work great for the CEOs and not anybody else. I haven’t seen the market self correct for my benefit in years. But in our failing capitalist society, I think there are about a thousand ways the worker and the consumer end up fucked either way.
Very few small mom and pop shops might need to raise prices, many of them already pay decent wages far above the minimum actually, but corporate restaurants and chains like McDonalds can absolutely afford $15 an hour without raising prices because they already pay above that amount in other places. There is already the assumption that if McDonalds could raise their prices then they would. What they pay their staff isn’t a factor in the equation unless they were close to net zero or below, but unlikely because McDonalds makes Billions in Net Revenue annually in the USA alone. If the corporation decided it would be more profitable to close lower traffic operations in small towns then that would be a good thing for local restaurants.
If this sort of idea really hurt the small times more than the corpos wouldn’t be fighting tooth and nail to stop it from happening using lobbying groups.
If you suddenly triple all of your wait staff’s salaries, small, local restaurants making good faith efforts to operate ethically would probably be the ones to suffer.
So how do restaurants outside the US that do not rely on the patrons paying their staff survive?
They didn’t fuck their system in the first place. I’m not sure how we unfuck ours with so much wrong at every step.
That’s truly inhumane. Even when I was a server - not America - I was paid the same wage as a line cook of similar experience.
They don’t make less just because they’re paid less by their employer. The minimum wage of how much they actually make is the same.
And as a result, servers in the US make a lot more than line cooks of similar experience. That wage gap is a source of frustration for cooks.
And as a result, servers in the US make a lot more than line cooks of similar experience.
That’s heavily variable on where you work. High end restaurants with more expensive menu items and generous tippers pay better than the Sunday Service Waffle House crowd.
And different restaurants tip out differently. More egalitarian venues tend to pool tips, so line cooks get a slice of the tip out at the end of the day.
I worked in damn near every type of kitchen, from restaurant to banquet hall to school to what have you. None of them tipped out the kitchen because of the laws and guidelines around all of it. And the one that DID tip out the kitchen, they would only schedule up to 32 hours/week or whatever to avoid paying health insurance benefits, and your pay was $3+ dollars less than competing restaurants in the area an hour because “you’ll make it up in tips.”
And the tips would’ve been split between all staff, so your share is a lot less than what the servers would get individually. And the entire time you’re going to hear or fight with servers who don’t think its fair they have to split their tips with the kitchen. I’ve heard it: “Why should I? They were my tables and I did all the work?!”
I even watched a cook one night welcome a server to come back in the kitchen and do his job while he went out and did hers. When she said she didn’t know how to cook, he responded, “Huh… All of us on the line could do your job, right now, but none of you could do ours… And you deserve all the tip money because…” 😂
More egalitarian venues tend to pool tips, so line cooks get a slice of the tip out at the end of the day.
Federal minimum wage law requires that if front of house tips are pooled to be distributed to kitchen staff (who aren’t traditionally tipped), then front of house must first be paid at least minimum wage pre-tip. So that kind of restaurant, while becoming more popular, isn’t exactly the type of restaurant in the discussion when we talk about servers being paid less than minimum wage before tips.
Sure. All staff must be paid a minimum wage under the federal guidelines. The catch is that tipped income goes to meet that wage obligation, which means they have to get paid to the minimum first under law.
But (a) wage theft in the US is rampant, with tipped workers routinely being underpaid or shorted by non-compliant management. And (b) even under the guidelines, min wage is a pittance. You can’t survive on $7.25/hr in a normal 40 hr work week.
So even if employers are compliant (which they’re often not), you’re talking about people trying to live on $14k/year in a country where apartments rents bottom out at the $6-8k/year range in the slums and even the meagerest grocery bills easily run into $4-5k/year range in the wake of inflation. Nevermind utilities, transport, health care, clothing, etc.
Utterly unsustainable.
And Republicans are arguing to pay disabled people and children less.
K first part is bad but why are CHILDREN even part of the conversation
Because Republicans are evil.
I think someone misunderstood what the “Fight for 15” was getting at
Well done USA. Approaching 3rd world wages. 🙄
I remember the McDonald’s I worked at gave everyone raises right before minimum wage went up to 7.25 to make it seem like it was their choice.
I was struggling to make ends meet back then. I had a shitty car and tiny apartment with a roommate and just scraped by. No fucking clue how people are making it work today. I have a decent job now and I’m still just scraping by.
We need unions.
they aren’t. tens of thousands of homeless people in just cali alone.
You really really do. I don’t mean to target you personally here. This is meant for everyone reading:
If you have time to hang out on Lemmy, then you have a couple mins looking up what unions the industry you’re in has or is trying to setup.
Just learn, I’m not even asking that anyone do anything… but if you know more about the situation where you live, maybe you can help people.
No corpo is gonna do it for you. It’s workers for workers.
For the love of god, increase it to something reasonable then implement yearly increases based on inflation so that I never have to hear about this again.
This or tie it to the average government wage of a member of Congress, they get a raise and the people get a raise.
They would slash their own salaries to $7.25 or less and enjoy the usual net pay raises from their billionaire donors and stock increases as a reward for keeping it that way.
And voters will cheer them on for being so selfless and suffering with the common man.
$7.25 in 2009 is worth $10.62 today. $4.95 in 2009 is worth $7.25 today.
In effect, the value of federal minimum wage has decreased by 31% in the last 15 years, since a dollar today only buys 69% of what it did in 2009, on average (as defined by the consumer price index)
I do wonder if trying for $15 is just asking too much. Maybe a compromise at $10.62 to restore what it used to be, is all we can hope for at the moment.
The minimum wage was supposed to be the absolute minimum a person could be paid in order to live. It’s not an excuse to pay employees starvation wages. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, can survive being paid $11 an hour in today’s economy (much less the $7.25 it is now). That is why nearly every liberal state has independently moved their minimum to at least $15/hr if not more.
And in 80 years it has risen $7.00 from its 25¢/hour origins.
We need a new word for dignity because the one we are using is doing it wrong.
with context, that’s a 2800% increase in 80 years, a 35% increase per year average. 15 years = 525% increase lost, final value would be 45 per hour. I have no idea if this is right and don’t condone this math for any reference.
The math is not right. Percentages don’t multiply like that.
A change from 0.25 to 7.25 over 71 years means an annual increase of about 5%. That 5% annual change, starting with $7.25 15 years ago, would take us to around $15 today.
That’s not how compound increases are measured.
We can use the compound interest formula for this.
A = P * (1 + r) ^ t- A is the final amount.
- P is the starting amount (the principal).
- r is the rate (as a proportion, so 50% would be 0.5).
- t is the time.
To figure out the annual increase for the whole time we can plug in what we know and solve for what we don’t:
7.25 = 0.25 * (1+r) ^ 80 29 = (1+r) ^ 80 years 1.043 = 1+r 0.043 = rSo that’s about 4.3% increase per year over the 80 years.
Now we can see what we would have as minimum wage if it had continued over the past 15 years:
A = 7.25 * (1+0.043) ^ 15 A = 7.25 * 1.043 ^ 15 A = 7.25 * 1.88 A = 13.63So that’s a $13.63 minimum wage.
Minimum wage should not be voted on by congress. It should be pegged to cost of living by region. The government already does all this measuring of cost of living by region. Make the minimum 125% of cost of living and be done with it. It’s clear congress can’t handle the task.
Make the minimum 125% of cost of living
Do the math for a 32 hour workweek to meet this criteria and make it so you have to include healthcare benefits proportional to the hours worked.
Ironically the company I work for would go under if they had to pay a living wage like this to the workers. We pay minimum wage in our state to close to 400 workers, almost all of whom cannot speak English today. It’s miserable manufacturing work but 100% required, the product is positive to humanity and can’t possibly be outsourced. Can be better automated though, which should be done.
How’s life at the fleshlight factory? Thank you for your service, by the way.
Yeah, an hour of someone’s life is just worth less in the flyover shit states.
EDIT: Why don’t the worthless people in the flyover shit states want to vote for us?
The “low cost of living” in the “flyover states” is subsidized by a complete lack of accessible social services or government accountability.
You can get a house for a bit more than 100,000. But you’ll pay for it by sending your children to a school where your high schooler is being taught math by someone with a GED. Or when you lose a tire to a crater in the road. Or when a tornado hits your town and emergency services aren’t available because your Governor is in Paris and didn’t bother to tell anyone.
It’s really Galt’s Gulch here. The low cost of living/low pay works like a trap, because how the fuck can one save up to get out?
No, but the same food and lodging costs drastically different based on location in this country. A New York City cost of living would bankrupt small businesses in rural Nebraska who also price their services based on regional costs. It’s just more logical than a flat minimum wage for the whole country.
No, but the same food and lodging costs drastically different based on location in this country.
Rent’s going up everywhere. Lower wages for the states whose voters you regard with contempt is only going to create a permanent underclass of flyover Morlocks who will get hungry.
Dude, what are you talking about? I live in rural Indiana. I also realize that cost of living is not the same in every area and making the minimum wage one flat rate creates problems when the cost of living is not flat. This is common sense, not a bias against “flyover states” like the one I live in. That’s why I said it should be pegged to cost of living reports that are already conducted by the government across every region of the country. This way if rent goes up, it would automatically be accounted for and adjusted.
This is common sense, not a bias against “flyover states” like the one I live in.
Just because you consider your life to have less value than someone in a non-flyover state, that doesn’t mean you get to tell the rest of us that our lives have less value.
“Rose.”
$7.25 was unlivable 15 years ago.
And by the time we get a $15/hr minimum wage, a living wage in any state worth living in will be $75/hr.
This is wild. Especially since the US separates tippable jobs.
I just looked this up. $7,25 is 6,68€
In Germany minimum wage is 12,41€ ($13,47) as of its last adjustment Jan 24. Thats f*cking DOUBLE. Further adjustments are already planned. And there is no difference between wait staff and other workers.Here the leading argument is, that one full time job on minimum wage should provide you the minimum you need to live on. You can not live on 7,25 working only 40h a week, can you?
Canada is us$12.50. That’s getting close to double, and we share a long border.
You wanna make almost twice more money AND pay 1% less tax for the free healthcare, then go north.
Quebec is 15.75 afaik, which is 11.30 us dollars
Realistically for housing to be 1/3 of your income, the minimum wage should be closer to $20/hr right now. I live in a pretty small town and most basic 1Br apartments are starting at ~$700/mo so around $1k/mo once you factor in utilities. If we round the numbers a bit, 3000/160=18.75 so housing would be a bit less than 1/3 of gross income, and noticeably less than 1/3 of the person’s income after taxes and insurance.
The abysmal wages compared to the cost of living are why micro-financing (“Buy now pay later”) is a thing now
…ideally, minimum wage should be set per-county at three times one standard deviation below the mean housing cost…
(3 * ((600 SF * σ $/SF) * FHA 30-Year Mortgage)) / 2080
Nice
For reference, the cost of living doubles every 25 to 30 years. $7.25 in 2024 is worth less than $5 in 2009 money. Less than the $5.15 that was the previous minimum wage.
We need to stop looking at minimum wage as a set number across the country, It creates a wage disparity for the working class. A livable wage in Alabama would not be a livable wage in California, a livable wage in California would be an insane wage in a place like Alabama.
The minimum wage needs to be directly tied with median housing costs either at the state level or at the county level. The wage needs to be set where housing would only comprise of a max of 30% of income. So at 30% if the median rent is $2000 per month, the livable wage in that area would be set at about $6700 a month, or about $42 an hour. This would help control housing costs as well as keep wages livable.
Regardless, nobody can live on 7.25
I acknowledge that, but people keep quitting a specific number and specific numbers don’t work across the nation. Because of varied COL. Minimum wage should be tied to a major COL item like housing
It’s probably more realistically possible to put some rent caps in than implement $42/hr minimum wage. Virtually all minimum wage employees would be laid off with all the businesses who employ them shutting down too. The only businesses that could survive that much dramatic increase in payroll costs would be the ones making really huge profits, which would almost certainly not include every restaurant in most cities.
Minimum wage in California is $16. Berkeley it is $18.67
No where near a livable wage
The median required minimum livable wage in California for a single person with no children, according to MIT living wage calculator is $27.32
Even if it does get increased to $18, it’s not livable.
Suppose that happens. What’s stopping the landlords from just raising their rents then? Can the government control housing costs? Is it even possible in a “free” economy?
The government wouldn’t need to control housing. Landlords would be under pressure from other companies to keep housing low so their wage costs remain as low as possible.
Oof. Rent is easily there in my city. And the minimum wage is… Umm… Not.
That’s why the 2 should be connected
I don’t know if tying it to something that’s inflated above core inflation is a good idea. I think the better approach is to reduce the cost of housing.
It should reduce that artificial inflation
I’m not sure how it would do that.
Under pressure from employers. If their labor costs are directly tied to the cost of housing there would be pressure to keep housing costs low. In turn still keeping wages livable
You should have gone to school, you could’ve learned a trade But you laid in the bed where the bums have laid Now all the time you’re crying that you’re underpaid It’s like that (what?) and that’s the way it is Huh!
I love how this comment is getting voted down - truth hurts 😅😂
Implying that laziness is the only possible cause for being on minimum wage isn’t truth.
It’s a BIG factor…poor academic attainment is the driving force behind the majority of minimum wage jobs. If you’re smart and have drive you don’t work for $7 p/h.
Say that’s true. Do you then actually believe that if you’re not smart or you “don’t have drive,” you somehow deserve to be unhoused or starve, to be unable to access healthcare?
I’m all for people improving their lives, but as a baseline I just don’t believe that certain people deserve the consequences of horrible poverty just because they didn’t or couldn’t perform academically.
Also what’s the justification for having a system that allows employers to exploit workers by paying poverty wages while materially benefiting from that labor?
The question fundamentally misunderstands the nature of human existence and the principles of a free society. No one deserves to starve or be unhoused, but reality does not cater to mere desires or needs. The essence of survival and prosperity lies in an individual’s ability to think, produce, and trade value for value.
Those who are not smart or lack drive must still be responsible for their own lives. A free society offers opportunities for all, but it does not guarantee outcomes regardless of effort or ability. The moral and practical basis of capitalism is that each individual must earn their way through rational thought and productive work.
It is not the role of employers to ensure the well-being of their workers beyond the agreed-upon exchange of labor for wages. Employers do not exploit workers; they offer them opportunities. Workers are free to accept these terms or seek better ones elsewhere. The notion of “poverty wages” ignores the individual’s responsibility to improve their skills and increase their value in the marketplace.
Workers are de facto responsible for creating the opportunities that employers gate keep. Employers violate workers’ inalienable rights. The workers are de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce outputs, but the employer gets sole legal responsibility for the positive and negative results of production. This violates the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match.
No one is responsible for creating land. Landlords deny everyone’s equal claim to land
Your assertion that employers violate workers’ inalienable rights by controlling opportunities does not align with the principles of a free society… Employers provide opportunities through their legitimate ownership of capital and resources, and workers voluntarily agree to the terms of employment. This voluntary exchange is a fundamental aspect of a free market. Legal and de facto responsibilities are aligned through voluntary contracts, and any perceived imbalance does not justify infringing on property rights.
As for landlords and land, the legitimate acquisition and ownership of property are central to individual liberty. If landlords have acquired land through just means, they have the right to control its use. The idea of equal claims to land undermines the principles of justice in acquisition and transfer of holdings. Historical injustices in acquisition should be rectified, but this does not negate the current rights of property owners.
It is so much easier placing the blame on “the system” rather than on the individual not raking responsibility for their lot. For the vast majority of cases you’re on £7 p/h because fundamentally you deserve to be. The market doesn’t reward failure or lack of ambition.
Second Bill of Rights. Unpack the supreme court, get a super majority in all branches of government and make it law.
Unpacking it takes on a whole new implication now that the President only has one way to force someone off the court.
Actually, the Supreme Court just handed the President a whole new way of getting rid of them… Legally arresting and possibly even executing them if that President so chooses to make such acts official.
