Working for that minimum wage

[Apollo]

I'm all for an increase to $12 an hour nationally, with the higher cost of living Blue states (where you might have a chance to actually raise the minimum wage) raising their State's wages above that, if necessary.

[Kraken]

Minimum wage is $15 in Mass., but the prevailing wage -- the de facto minimum -- is around $18.50, last I heard. The median house price in Greater Boston is $810,000. A 1BR apartment goes for $2,100.

[waitingtoconnect]

I don't think we have a thread for this.

The Democrats' plan to raise the minimum wage to $15 in the covid relief bill was shot down by the Senate parliamentarian, who ruled it out-of-bounds. So now they're kicking around another way to force it though that would comply with the rules. This strikes me as a bad idea, at least based on that article. But I don't think it belongs in a covid bill in the first place.

The minimum wage is a complicated subject. On one hand, it hasn't increased in 10 years. Raising it would lift millions of hourly workers out of poverty. But it would result in lost jobs or fewer hours for a lot of others. Economists disagree on the relative magnitude of those effects, but they're both real to some degree.

What's your take? Where do you fall on a spectrum of "There should be no federal minimum wage" to "The minimum wage should be raised to $15 and indexed to inflation"? Do you support Dem efforts to sneak it in thru the back door? Could they ever get 60 votes to do it the right way?

In Australia they have an independent commission that sets minimum wage called the Fair Work Commission because the centre right party would never agree to increase wages and the centre left would be shredded by the Murdoch owned press if they did. Wages are set across the whole country as well not on a state by state basis.

I think the main issue is in most developed nations that the minimum wage is no longer adequate to rent a place to live which was the original intent. How can anyone live on $15 an hour in most places AND have medical AND have savings for retirement AND provide for children in the western world is beyond me.