Minimum wage should be a living wage. A single person should be able to rent an apartment, get health care, and feed themself on a minimum-wage job. They should be able to save a bit of money - not a lot, but enough to buy the occasional birthday present or fix a broken window.
Minimum wage alone cannot cover rent ANYWHERE IN THE US. This is an utter failure of the minimum wage.
No, it’s not supposed to be “for teenagers.” Teenagers are supposed to have part-time jobs. A full-time job should support a person. Two people with full-time jobs should be able to support themselves and a child–and that means child care needs to cost substantially less than minimum wage.
(Does that mean childcare workers should get paid less than minimum wage? Fuck no! It means companies should offer on-site child care; it means the gov’t should subsidize child care like it does education - by the same logic, because “healthy thriving children” make for a better future nation.)
What @elfwreck is describing a subsistence wage, something that would be viable for a few weeks or months, but cannot sustain a single person, let alone a family with children, in the long term. It is NOT a living wage. A living wage needs to cover ALL accomodation costs, not just rent - furniture purchase, maintenance and replacement, utility bills, cleaning products and all the things you need and use to make a house a home. It needs to cover all transportation costs, to the job, for shopping, for social interactions and for community events and activities. It needs to cover all your communication, basic entertainment, holiday activity and costs to enable to spend time volunteering. It needs cover the costs of purchasing, maintaining and replacing clothing suitable for all seasons. It needs to be able to cover periods (possibly extended or permanent) when we can’t work.
Living is NOT merely existing to service your job. It’s being part of a dynamic community. And being valued and respected whatever role you get to play within that. Don’t *ever* confuse subsistence with living. Don’t stop at subsistence wages, DEMAND living wages and conditions and much more besides.
YES THIS. (I am sorry I gave the impression that min wage should only over rent, medical, food. I meant *handwave* “you know that, stuff you need to survive.”)
Minimum wage should be a full living wage. Not just “it covers the barest essential needs” like rent + bills + food, but covers all the expenses required to live - furniture (although not the best, and not all at once), health care, standard communication and entertainment expenses (home internet/cable, a phone, enough to occasionally see a movie & have dinner out), laundry, new clothes occasionally, shoes, the occasional new book, once in a while, an actual vacation of a few days or an educational workshop, and so on. Should be able to attend concerts sometimes. Go to the zoo. Buy some things at the summer crafts fair. TAKE PART IN THEIR COMMUNITY.
There are 168 hours in a week. A minimum-wage worker should be able to spend 40 of those hours working, maybe 10 more in transit to and from work, 56 sleeping… and the other 62 doing things they enjoy. Minimum wage shouldn’t be “you can go to concerts all the time and buy the top-of-the-line sound system and drive the fanciest car”… but you should be able to enjoy listening to music, go out with friends, and visit your grandmother out of town on her birthday. You should be able to buy her a birthday present without worrying about whether you’ll eat next week.
It’s reasonable that minimum wage would be very snug for a single parent. It’s designed to be a single-person minimum income. However, almost nobody should be on minimum wage long-term: sticking with a job six months or more should get a raise, just because you now know what you’re doing. Sticking with it for a couple years should get enough of an increase to raise a child.
And minimum wage SHOULD cover childcare, with still enough left over to do most of the things I mentioned above. This, of course, would require a change in childcare systems, probably needing a change in laws. Maybe companies need to provide childcare for their workers. Maybe the gov’t needs childcare centers like they have schools. Maybe they need to subsidize local nonprofits that do childcare. There are lots of possibilities.
Rent should not cost more than 25% of income. For the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour, that’d be about $315 a month.
I don’t know of any places where you can rent a room for that, much less a standalone apartment. (We shouldn’t have so many standalone apartments. We should have arrangements more like dorm houses, with shared appliances and utility costs, but cities have a lot of single-family zoning laws that work to extract money from the working class and hand it to millionaire/corporate landlords.)
$315 a month. Avocado toast is NOT what’s keeping Millennials from saving money.
