Late capitalism sucks, etc. I forget how cheap my East Village one bedroom was when I first moved in in 1979, but I know it was only $300 and change when I left in 1990. As the Pythons say in their Four Yorkshiremen sketch, you tell that to young people today, and they won’t believe you.
But hey, let’s keep voting Republican fellow patriots, because SOMEBODY has to defend the right of Mr. Potato Head to have a gender-specific plastic pipe and mustache.
Wow, Roy. When you’re right, you’re right. And I don’t mean THAT kind of “right!” I grew up in a small town in the Midwest, and yes, my parents regaled me with stories of the Good Old Days on the farms they grew up on. (The fact that they went from Farm to Town was considered a major life step up.) As parents, they just assumed that we would do better than they did. It was America, after all. It’s a damned shame that parents can’t assume this now. Many of my friends have children who can’t make it on their own. And these are well-educated white kids. Sheesh.
My parents were the first people in both of their farm families who went to college. Both grew up poor without really realizing it or being at a terrible disadvantage. Almost everyone else was in the same situation, and they never went hungry or shoeless. But if they were born now, it would be impossible. To support a family, farms have to be much, much larger, and the equipment is expensive. So where I’m from, the farms are disappearing. Townships that once had dozens of farms, each with a large family, now support just a few situated far apart. And many of the people who remain see the community dying, think about “the good old days,” and vote Republican. Almost everyone who remembers FDR saving rural America are long gone, replaced by Fox News rage junkies.
Not only is the equipment more expensive--and you have no right to repair, you're basically buying software and we all know a Eula is not something you want to stake your livelihood on, but you have to buy seed from agricultural megaconglomerates, and it's been engineered so you have to buy new every year, you have to buy their fertilizers and pesticides, and banks that loan you money will be extremely specific about how you grow shit. Animal ranching, I hear, is worse. You're little more than a serf. All you own these days on a farm is the chance for failure and the right to subsidies. It's no wonder so many small farms sold when they could still wrong something out of land developers.
I've often thought that I (we?) grew up in a hiccup of time. The ability to do what you wanted just because you wanted. I took about 7 years off to do essentially nothing except work grunt jobs and get high between the end of college and the beginning of law school. And there was no problem there at all.
On the other hand I worked Legal Aid in Appalachia when I got out, boy was that an eye opener. Had a lot of trailer park residents as clients. Everybody ripping them off. Nuts.
Poor people have targets on their backs. EVERYTHING is more expensive when you're poor, and you are the constant target of every scam imaginable. The people in the poorer part of my town are forced to buy groceries at little corner markets, so a gallon of milk is $7 and a loaf of bread is $4--prices double what you'd pay at the supermarket. Landlord won't allow washers or dryers, so plan on spending $20 a week (and an hour or three) doing laundry at the laundromat. If you're wealthy enough to afford a car, it's likely a 250,000-mile beater with a heater than costs you hundreds of dollars a year in unscheduled maintenance.
"plan on spending $20 a week (and an hour or three) doing laundry at the laundromat"
That is, if you can find a free (or worse, multiple free machines) on the weekend which is the only time you have to do laundry, with everyone else having the same idea as you. And don't forget your mask because half the people don't wear any.
Growing up in the NYC suburbs, we had a milkman. I went to school with his daughters. He made enough money as a milkman to own a house and send his two daughters to college. This was the '60s and into the '70s.
Today that job is making a re-appearance in the tonier neighborhoods. Milk and eggs and cheese delivered right to your front door! By an "independent contractor" earning sub-minimum wage. We've managed to devalue everything that makes a functioning society by elevating greed and acquisitiveness over human decency.
That the problem is absolutely systemic, if not screwing us over by design, is clear from the term the New Yorker must use to seem reasonable -- "fair-market wage." Ain't nothing fair about it at all. Wages are kept artificially low, everywhere, but particularly at the lowest levels.
I told a student that I had gotten out of my extensive schooling debt-free -- and there were really really angry to hear it. I think because most of the time those statements are couched as admonitions to work harder, not be a sucker. There were ways I had to go about doing so, and most were far more about luck than intention.
I barely remember the apartment my parents lived in before I started school. By the time kindergarten rolled around, we lived in The Trailer. It was a gawdawful salmon/pink color with horrible '50s-style aluminum trim. None of this double-wide stuff, either - after my brothers were born, we struggled to fit.
When we moved from the city to a smaller town after I finished first grade, The Trailer moved with us. The only real difference was instead of the outskirts of a city, this park was in the country, surrounded by farms. It was here I first began to notice a stigma attached to those of us whose homes had wheels on the bottom.
When it wasn't outright snobbery and prejudice, there would still be a wariness in dealing with us, a sense we weren't to be fully trusted and bore watching.
Then, after I finished third grade, we moved again. This time The Trailer did NOT go with us - my parents had bought a house! It was an older place, large and multistory, with plenty of room for all of us. I was in ecstasy - the trailer parks began to fade from my memory, replaced by pride in our home.
Which lasted right up until the end of elementary school, when a dismal economy forced my parents to sell the house and relocate to another state. Worse, the first place we lived in the new location was a fucking trailer park - just the thing to start middle school, right?
While the stay in the new park (and at least it wasn't The Trailer) was only a few months, it scarred me permanently. I never again felt safe, even after my folks moved from rentals to buying another house. And within a week of graduating high school, I was out on my own.
College would have meant staying with my family longer, and I wasn't going to live in the shadow of the trailer park any more. I got a job and my own place and never looked back.
And I never lived in a trailer again. To say the experience colored my outlook on life would be an understatement.
And this is why I'm not for the $15/hr minimum wage thing. The fight's been going on so long that $15 is bullshit money. Dunno anywhere that a family can live on a $450-600/wk salary. So first problem is the amount.
Next problem with the fight 4 $15 are the jobs paying shit money -- even maybe more than $15/hr. Part of the fallout from 08 financial collapse is that full-time jobs were replaced with not-so-fulltime. The 30 hr/wk full-time job is too close to the norm. And that's because 30 lets The Man avoid providing benefits, specifically healthcare, that they have to provide to 35 and 40 hrs/wk workers. Did I see reduced hours for low end jobs? There's the growth of gig, uh, gigs and independent contractor bullshit. And one of my favorite factoids again: ~25% of full-time workers need easy credit, public assistance -- food stamps and Medicaid -- and/or additional employment to make a living wage.
So fight for $15? Not even close the hill to die on. What's needed is a living wage has to be law (including a COLA). That's the hill. Everything, anything else is bullshit.
Biden should have put $35 an hour in the Covid relief bill, then bargained it down to $25 (the current equivalent of 1965's minimum wage). Dems don't know how to bargain. It's all about anchoring. Now we're stuck at $15, an anchor far too low.
And yet - and yet, that $15 an hour is considered too high a wage by The Very Serious People. Our idea of wages has been dragged down so far by the service economy that even that inadequate floor is "unreasonable".
For most mom-n-pop businesses, $15 an hour would put them out of business. My sister's flower shop, for example, could never have afforded to pay her small crew that much money.
But it's not an insoluble problem. We index things all the time based on any number of metrics. There is absolutely no reason why we cannot develop a sliding scale system for hourly wages.
You work part-time at my sister's flower shop. you get $11/hour.
You work part-time at a McDonalds, you get $13/hour
You work part-time at WalMart, you get $15/hour
You work full-time at WalMart, you get $20/hour
Based it on gross receipts or something that mirrors the scale of the business.
If you can't pay a living wage to your employees, you don't have a business, you have a charity, living off the good will or desperation of your employees.
Maybe we could try tax breaks for small businesses instead of, say, WalMart, which is also a charity, and one that's absolutely stealing from desperate employees, because they have enough money to pay living wages and just send it upward to the owners. Of course for that to work, we'd have to make everybody agree to stop giving tax breaks to Walmart, which we should anyway. Because they don't just play municipalities against each other, they will close a store and build a new one a few miles away to get new tax breaks from the same municipality.
There are ways we can help small businesses. Those ways shouldn't rely on giving workers less than a living wage. And while a living wage varies from place to place, a federal minimum is pretty much the only way to keep big businesses from playing states against each other in a way that keeps everybody down.
As I said, this may be true, a whole bunch of small businesses that can't afford to pay $15. OTOH, all the studies say it's nearly always upside so you seem to be referencing an exception to the rule.
Too, salaries, at least to the peons, are a small part of overhead, so I don't know.
Mmm, yes, no. Minimum wage should be much higher than $15 but a full living wage act is what's needed. A minimum wage without, say, providing true full time employment, benefits that don't rely on taxpayer $$ and some control of the abuse of gig and IC employment is needed. A jacked up minimum wage isn't enough, not even, by itself, worth a fight.
I dunno. It's worth a fight as long as we're not relying on people stringing three jobs together to make a living to do the fighting. And as long as we don't go "Well, good enough" when we get there. We do both of those things now, and I dunno, maybe we always will. Everyone has plenty of their own problems now, and no one really has the time or energy to fight for each other. I can barely manage a call a day to my representatives and local government, and I've got all the time in the world. (I'm short on the energy thing.)
It's the way we like it, apparently. It's deliberate. When *everything* sucks, people give up and focus on survival. Makes us easier to rob.
tl;dr: Fighting for $15 is not worth -- I mean, $450-600/wk? really? That's worth going to war for? Seriously?
What's needed is an act that ensures a living wage for all full time workers (defined as 30/hr/wk up); benefits; and some sort of COLA. That's the necessary battle.
America is always transitioning economically. Consider Muncie, Indiana, the subject of two classics of sociology during the period from the 1920's to the 1930's: "Middleton" and "Middleton in Transition." With the coming of the Depression, everything changed. Housing, work, family life, community connections, all was overturned. The detail is mid-boggling. If, like me, you grew up with tales of the Depression, these books objectively dissect life before and after 1929 in ways your parents or grandparents couldn't. Each economic crisis since then has made life harder for the 99%. Every story of modern day Americans being ground down reminds me of that unemotional depiction of a town falling apart under American capitalism.
Our leaders, public and private both, don't give a fuck about the wellbeing of ~90% of the population. (Well, the Dems give a little shit.) By that metric, the US isn't even a republic -- forget democracy -- I believe the term is failed state or shithole.
I grew up in Iowa, which used to be a fairly libertarian—leaning liberal—well-educated place. Granted we were always a few year behind the current fashion, but we were a very accepting populace. Iowa was one of the first states to embrace gay unions, It went for Obama very early on. Back in the day we always had senator Tom Harkin's populist politics to balance out that old curmudgeon Grassley. Now I'm fairly ashamed to call it "home" and, if not for my ailing sister, would never go back to visit.
I grew up in Iowa too (on a farm) and the few who are left that I communicate with say it has changed so much. My parents, in their 80's have noticed it. They knew why I left. But I feel the need to visit if for the people. But they chucked the "Education State" thing long ago...sent the young away to find their fortune hoping they'd come home and be the serf waiting for them to die.
Thatcherism and Ronnie's handlers unchained the feral instincts of capitalism (the “animal spirits” of the entrepreneur they coyly named it in Britain) and the capitalist Godzilla will be very hard to reign in.
$15 an hr. minimum would be a start. Strong infrastructure jobs would be a mighty second step. Aussie friends who travelled the States were boggled at some people's dependence on tips to make any sort of wage.
I'm hoping (praying, desperately pining) that The U.S electorate give Joe and Kamala and Bernie and AOC and all the good guys an eight year run and so a reasonable chance at bringing back some sort of balance.
Pray all you like, but McConnell and the congressional crazies and the Supreme wingnuts will be waiting to stomp the mortal luckless shyte out of those hopes.
And so will you with posts like this. I'm sorry, I know you're one of the good guys and I may well be misinterpreting you, but the last thing I need is to be reminded how evil and ruthless the Republicans are. We all know that here. Tell me something I don't know, like how we can beat them anyway. I need hope, not some rando jeering at the people who haven't given up.
I haven't quite given up, but I get people who have. Resignation is the only survivable state once you lose hope. If you get stuck at despair, you're dead. Maybe fast, maybe slow, but it's over. Resignation allows you to walk into a world that's going to shit and while you have no way of fixing it, at least you can do dishes or smile at your kids or have lunch with a friend.
The pandemic has taken a lot of that stuff away, and not given anyone much to replace it with. A lot of people have gotten stuck on despair. I get it. But I think there's still a chance.
I think I get resignation, especially after reading your eloquent description of it. However, there's no need to "stomp the mortal luckless shyte" out of people who aren't resigned yet.
If history is anything to go by, you are correct. The U.S. has stomped me shitless many, many times over the last 5 1/2 decades. Annoyingly, a mortal flaw in my perception is an inability to stop hoping that the good guys might triumph at some stage.
Go Joe ! AOC for me ! Feel the Bern! Karma me Kamala ! And, Viva Greta!
In the 60's my father could support a family of 5 on his one income as a salesman. My mother eventually went back to work as a teacher but that was after the kids grew up. For the first 25 years of my working life I was as bad with money as Roy, never made more than a working-class income, and often less. But I've never not had my own apartment in NYC, and I never had a roommate until I got married late in life and she would kill me if I called her that.
In 1964 the average annual wage (in 2019 dollars) was roughly $50k, also roughly what it was in 2019. But a loaf of bread was $1.78 vs $2.59, the price of a new house averaged $110k vs $238k, and the cost of college tuition was three to four times less than what it is now. The demise of unions has kept incomes down despite rising productivity, and the consequent rise of Wall St. parasitism has raised the price of practically everything to bear the hidden costs of their boundless greed. We've seen private equity vultures devour home ownership, education, and healthcare, so it's no wonder that the same people who invented the need for payday loans would see new profit opportunities in trailer parks.
“You could even get ahead.” I’m a bit older than Roy, whelped late in the Truman administration, but so far as I could tell from the Southern California suburbs of my youth was that upward mobility* was a central tenet of the civic religion: of course a family would trade up over time to grander houses, fancier cars. I know it’s fashionable to rag on the Boomers these latter decades, and certainly the chasm between the cohort’s soaring rhetoric of the sixties and its performance in power by the nineties invites a certain degree of censure and contempt. I think, though, that this early indoctrination of ours—for those of us raised, I mean, under class conditions in which such stultifying assumptions of security and progress might be nurtured—is not given due weight. It was one thing to live in (somewhat squalid) communal housing off-campus in the early seventies, to abjure and even to scorn many of the bourgeois amenities with which we’d been raised, but we all knew, whether or not we acknowledged it to ourselves, that should we ever tire of bohemian cosplay there would always be a spot waiting for us back in the “middle class.” Well, that comfortable certitude didn’t last out the decade, and as a friend of mine observed circa 1987 in approximately these terms, “A lot of people are waking up to the fact that there are only so many places at the table, and that some of us are going to be left out, and they’re saying 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘮𝘦, 𝘣𝘰𝘺!” Hell, I certainly sold out.
*“Upward mobility”—is that even a thing anymore? I don’t claim to maintain a careful watch on the youngs, but among the children of my friends, a generation now approaching forty, there appears to be a keen awareness that their lives are neither as comfortable nor secure as their parents” were, and have little prospect of being so until the latter peg out—for choice, without pouring the offsprings’ patrimony down the rathole of “assisted living.”
When I started my first real job in 1972 at $9,000/year, my one-bedroom apartment, a very nice one, was $180/month. This works out to 24% of my income. Now, a one-bedroom place in my area (Baltimore) $1,115/month. Even at $15/hour, it amounts to 45%. So move to Cincinnati, where the rent is $698.
I never really 'made it' in that classic sense. Never owned a house or a new car. Neither I, nor any love interest, thought marriage and a family was a good idea.
But I'm still alive. [ Year or two older than Roy ]
Late capitalism sucks, etc. I forget how cheap my East Village one bedroom was when I first moved in in 1979, but I know it was only $300 and change when I left in 1990. As the Pythons say in their Four Yorkshiremen sketch, you tell that to young people today, and they won’t believe you.
But hey, let’s keep voting Republican fellow patriots, because SOMEBODY has to defend the right of Mr. Potato Head to have a gender-specific plastic pipe and mustache.
The delicate culture war orchids clutching their pearls over Mr Potato Head would’ve had the absolute vapors over Poker Alice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker_Alice
Wow, Roy. When you’re right, you’re right. And I don’t mean THAT kind of “right!” I grew up in a small town in the Midwest, and yes, my parents regaled me with stories of the Good Old Days on the farms they grew up on. (The fact that they went from Farm to Town was considered a major life step up.) As parents, they just assumed that we would do better than they did. It was America, after all. It’s a damned shame that parents can’t assume this now. Many of my friends have children who can’t make it on their own. And these are well-educated white kids. Sheesh.
My parents were the first people in both of their farm families who went to college. Both grew up poor without really realizing it or being at a terrible disadvantage. Almost everyone else was in the same situation, and they never went hungry or shoeless. But if they were born now, it would be impossible. To support a family, farms have to be much, much larger, and the equipment is expensive. So where I’m from, the farms are disappearing. Townships that once had dozens of farms, each with a large family, now support just a few situated far apart. And many of the people who remain see the community dying, think about “the good old days,” and vote Republican. Almost everyone who remembers FDR saving rural America are long gone, replaced by Fox News rage junkies.
As Roy noted (and the golden era of my youth can confirm), back in ancient times -- NYC in the 70s -- one can be poor and have a pretty fine life.
Not only is the equipment more expensive--and you have no right to repair, you're basically buying software and we all know a Eula is not something you want to stake your livelihood on, but you have to buy seed from agricultural megaconglomerates, and it's been engineered so you have to buy new every year, you have to buy their fertilizers and pesticides, and banks that loan you money will be extremely specific about how you grow shit. Animal ranching, I hear, is worse. You're little more than a serf. All you own these days on a farm is the chance for failure and the right to subsidies. It's no wonder so many small farms sold when they could still wrong something out of land developers.
I've often thought that I (we?) grew up in a hiccup of time. The ability to do what you wanted just because you wanted. I took about 7 years off to do essentially nothing except work grunt jobs and get high between the end of college and the beginning of law school. And there was no problem there at all.
On the other hand I worked Legal Aid in Appalachia when I got out, boy was that an eye opener. Had a lot of trailer park residents as clients. Everybody ripping them off. Nuts.
Poor people have targets on their backs. EVERYTHING is more expensive when you're poor, and you are the constant target of every scam imaginable. The people in the poorer part of my town are forced to buy groceries at little corner markets, so a gallon of milk is $7 and a loaf of bread is $4--prices double what you'd pay at the supermarket. Landlord won't allow washers or dryers, so plan on spending $20 a week (and an hour or three) doing laundry at the laundromat. If you're wealthy enough to afford a car, it's likely a 250,000-mile beater with a heater than costs you hundreds of dollars a year in unscheduled maintenance.
"plan on spending $20 a week (and an hour or three) doing laundry at the laundromat"
That is, if you can find a free (or worse, multiple free machines) on the weekend which is the only time you have to do laundry, with everyone else having the same idea as you. And don't forget your mask because half the people don't wear any.
My student loan in 1965 was $5,440.
Shhh!
Actually, the post-WWII era was an anomaly big time. We were almost the nation we claim to be.
Growing up in the NYC suburbs, we had a milkman. I went to school with his daughters. He made enough money as a milkman to own a house and send his two daughters to college. This was the '60s and into the '70s.
Today that job is making a re-appearance in the tonier neighborhoods. Milk and eggs and cheese delivered right to your front door! By an "independent contractor" earning sub-minimum wage. We've managed to devalue everything that makes a functioning society by elevating greed and acquisitiveness over human decency.
The multi-decade, systematic transfer of wealth out of Black neighborhoods has been described by Ta-Nehisi Coates as "plunder": https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/tanehisi-coates-reparations/427041/. Now the plunderers are coming for the rest of America, and it's finally being noticed that they are leaving no turn unstoned.
That the problem is absolutely systemic, if not screwing us over by design, is clear from the term the New Yorker must use to seem reasonable -- "fair-market wage." Ain't nothing fair about it at all. Wages are kept artificially low, everywhere, but particularly at the lowest levels.
I told a student that I had gotten out of my extensive schooling debt-free -- and there were really really angry to hear it. I think because most of the time those statements are couched as admonitions to work harder, not be a sucker. There were ways I had to go about doing so, and most were far more about luck than intention.
I barely remember the apartment my parents lived in before I started school. By the time kindergarten rolled around, we lived in The Trailer. It was a gawdawful salmon/pink color with horrible '50s-style aluminum trim. None of this double-wide stuff, either - after my brothers were born, we struggled to fit.
When we moved from the city to a smaller town after I finished first grade, The Trailer moved with us. The only real difference was instead of the outskirts of a city, this park was in the country, surrounded by farms. It was here I first began to notice a stigma attached to those of us whose homes had wheels on the bottom.
When it wasn't outright snobbery and prejudice, there would still be a wariness in dealing with us, a sense we weren't to be fully trusted and bore watching.
Then, after I finished third grade, we moved again. This time The Trailer did NOT go with us - my parents had bought a house! It was an older place, large and multistory, with plenty of room for all of us. I was in ecstasy - the trailer parks began to fade from my memory, replaced by pride in our home.
Which lasted right up until the end of elementary school, when a dismal economy forced my parents to sell the house and relocate to another state. Worse, the first place we lived in the new location was a fucking trailer park - just the thing to start middle school, right?
While the stay in the new park (and at least it wasn't The Trailer) was only a few months, it scarred me permanently. I never again felt safe, even after my folks moved from rentals to buying another house. And within a week of graduating high school, I was out on my own.
College would have meant staying with my family longer, and I wasn't going to live in the shadow of the trailer park any more. I got a job and my own place and never looked back.
And I never lived in a trailer again. To say the experience colored my outlook on life would be an understatement.
*sigh*
And this is why I'm not for the $15/hr minimum wage thing. The fight's been going on so long that $15 is bullshit money. Dunno anywhere that a family can live on a $450-600/wk salary. So first problem is the amount.
Next problem with the fight 4 $15 are the jobs paying shit money -- even maybe more than $15/hr. Part of the fallout from 08 financial collapse is that full-time jobs were replaced with not-so-fulltime. The 30 hr/wk full-time job is too close to the norm. And that's because 30 lets The Man avoid providing benefits, specifically healthcare, that they have to provide to 35 and 40 hrs/wk workers. Did I see reduced hours for low end jobs? There's the growth of gig, uh, gigs and independent contractor bullshit. And one of my favorite factoids again: ~25% of full-time workers need easy credit, public assistance -- food stamps and Medicaid -- and/or additional employment to make a living wage.
So fight for $15? Not even close the hill to die on. What's needed is a living wage has to be law (including a COLA). That's the hill. Everything, anything else is bullshit.
Biden should have put $35 an hour in the Covid relief bill, then bargained it down to $25 (the current equivalent of 1965's minimum wage). Dems don't know how to bargain. It's all about anchoring. Now we're stuck at $15, an anchor far too low.
And yet - and yet, that $15 an hour is considered too high a wage by The Very Serious People. Our idea of wages has been dragged down so far by the service economy that even that inadequate floor is "unreasonable".
So what do we do about all this?
For most mom-n-pop businesses, $15 an hour would put them out of business. My sister's flower shop, for example, could never have afforded to pay her small crew that much money.
But it's not an insoluble problem. We index things all the time based on any number of metrics. There is absolutely no reason why we cannot develop a sliding scale system for hourly wages.
You work part-time at my sister's flower shop. you get $11/hour.
You work part-time at a McDonalds, you get $13/hour
You work part-time at WalMart, you get $15/hour
You work full-time at WalMart, you get $20/hour
Based it on gross receipts or something that mirrors the scale of the business.
Not saying you're wrong about your sister but all studies say otherwise.
If you can't pay a living wage to your employees, you don't have a business, you have a charity, living off the good will or desperation of your employees.
Maybe we could try tax breaks for small businesses instead of, say, WalMart, which is also a charity, and one that's absolutely stealing from desperate employees, because they have enough money to pay living wages and just send it upward to the owners. Of course for that to work, we'd have to make everybody agree to stop giving tax breaks to Walmart, which we should anyway. Because they don't just play municipalities against each other, they will close a store and build a new one a few miles away to get new tax breaks from the same municipality.
There are ways we can help small businesses. Those ways shouldn't rely on giving workers less than a living wage. And while a living wage varies from place to place, a federal minimum is pretty much the only way to keep big businesses from playing states against each other in a way that keeps everybody down.
As I said, this may be true, a whole bunch of small businesses that can't afford to pay $15. OTOH, all the studies say it's nearly always upside so you seem to be referencing an exception to the rule.
Too, salaries, at least to the peons, are a small part of overhead, so I don't know.
You're referencing establishment propaganda. They're sociopaths who fight to keep every penny they can grab and that's who the media echo.
Mmm, yes, no. Minimum wage should be much higher than $15 but a full living wage act is what's needed. A minimum wage without, say, providing true full time employment, benefits that don't rely on taxpayer $$ and some control of the abuse of gig and IC employment is needed. A jacked up minimum wage isn't enough, not even, by itself, worth a fight.
I dunno. It's worth a fight as long as we're not relying on people stringing three jobs together to make a living to do the fighting. And as long as we don't go "Well, good enough" when we get there. We do both of those things now, and I dunno, maybe we always will. Everyone has plenty of their own problems now, and no one really has the time or energy to fight for each other. I can barely manage a call a day to my representatives and local government, and I've got all the time in the world. (I'm short on the energy thing.)
It's the way we like it, apparently. It's deliberate. When *everything* sucks, people give up and focus on survival. Makes us easier to rob.
tl;dr: Fighting for $15 is not worth -- I mean, $450-600/wk? really? That's worth going to war for? Seriously?
What's needed is an act that ensures a living wage for all full time workers (defined as 30/hr/wk up); benefits; and some sort of COLA. That's the necessary battle.
America is always transitioning economically. Consider Muncie, Indiana, the subject of two classics of sociology during the period from the 1920's to the 1930's: "Middleton" and "Middleton in Transition." With the coming of the Depression, everything changed. Housing, work, family life, community connections, all was overturned. The detail is mid-boggling. If, like me, you grew up with tales of the Depression, these books objectively dissect life before and after 1929 in ways your parents or grandparents couldn't. Each economic crisis since then has made life harder for the 99%. Every story of modern day Americans being ground down reminds me of that unemotional depiction of a town falling apart under American capitalism.
Our leaders, public and private both, don't give a fuck about the wellbeing of ~90% of the population. (Well, the Dems give a little shit.) By that metric, the US isn't even a republic -- forget democracy -- I believe the term is failed state or shithole.
I grew up in Iowa, which used to be a fairly libertarian—leaning liberal—well-educated place. Granted we were always a few year behind the current fashion, but we were a very accepting populace. Iowa was one of the first states to embrace gay unions, It went for Obama very early on. Back in the day we always had senator Tom Harkin's populist politics to balance out that old curmudgeon Grassley. Now I'm fairly ashamed to call it "home" and, if not for my ailing sister, would never go back to visit.
Just this morning a friend of mine told me he lived in Iowa for 15 years, and it was indeed different then.
I grew up in Iowa too (on a farm) and the few who are left that I communicate with say it has changed so much. My parents, in their 80's have noticed it. They knew why I left. But I feel the need to visit if for the people. But they chucked the "Education State" thing long ago...sent the young away to find their fortune hoping they'd come home and be the serf waiting for them to die.
My Hawai'ian born wife refuses to live there.
Thatcherism and Ronnie's handlers unchained the feral instincts of capitalism (the “animal spirits” of the entrepreneur they coyly named it in Britain) and the capitalist Godzilla will be very hard to reign in.
$15 an hr. minimum would be a start. Strong infrastructure jobs would be a mighty second step. Aussie friends who travelled the States were boggled at some people's dependence on tips to make any sort of wage.
I'm hoping (praying, desperately pining) that The U.S electorate give Joe and Kamala and Bernie and AOC and all the good guys an eight year run and so a reasonable chance at bringing back some sort of balance.
Pray all you like, but McConnell and the congressional crazies and the Supreme wingnuts will be waiting to stomp the mortal luckless shyte out of those hopes.
And so will you with posts like this. I'm sorry, I know you're one of the good guys and I may well be misinterpreting you, but the last thing I need is to be reminded how evil and ruthless the Republicans are. We all know that here. Tell me something I don't know, like how we can beat them anyway. I need hope, not some rando jeering at the people who haven't given up.
I haven't quite given up, but I get people who have. Resignation is the only survivable state once you lose hope. If you get stuck at despair, you're dead. Maybe fast, maybe slow, but it's over. Resignation allows you to walk into a world that's going to shit and while you have no way of fixing it, at least you can do dishes or smile at your kids or have lunch with a friend.
The pandemic has taken a lot of that stuff away, and not given anyone much to replace it with. A lot of people have gotten stuck on despair. I get it. But I think there's still a chance.
I think I get resignation, especially after reading your eloquent description of it. However, there's no need to "stomp the mortal luckless shyte" out of people who aren't resigned yet.
If history is anything to go by, you are correct. The U.S. has stomped me shitless many, many times over the last 5 1/2 decades. Annoyingly, a mortal flaw in my perception is an inability to stop hoping that the good guys might triumph at some stage.
Go Joe ! AOC for me ! Feel the Bern! Karma me Kamala ! And, Viva Greta!
Goooooooooooo TEAM !
It's actually "YO Joe". All my years of watching silly action cartoons have finally paid off!
Oh wait, you meant Joe Biden, not G.I. Joe. Never mind!
Feral is the word.
In the 60's my father could support a family of 5 on his one income as a salesman. My mother eventually went back to work as a teacher but that was after the kids grew up. For the first 25 years of my working life I was as bad with money as Roy, never made more than a working-class income, and often less. But I've never not had my own apartment in NYC, and I never had a roommate until I got married late in life and she would kill me if I called her that.
In 1964 the average annual wage (in 2019 dollars) was roughly $50k, also roughly what it was in 2019. But a loaf of bread was $1.78 vs $2.59, the price of a new house averaged $110k vs $238k, and the cost of college tuition was three to four times less than what it is now. The demise of unions has kept incomes down despite rising productivity, and the consequent rise of Wall St. parasitism has raised the price of practically everything to bear the hidden costs of their boundless greed. We've seen private equity vultures devour home ownership, education, and healthcare, so it's no wonder that the same people who invented the need for payday loans would see new profit opportunities in trailer parks.
“You could even get ahead.” I’m a bit older than Roy, whelped late in the Truman administration, but so far as I could tell from the Southern California suburbs of my youth was that upward mobility* was a central tenet of the civic religion: of course a family would trade up over time to grander houses, fancier cars. I know it’s fashionable to rag on the Boomers these latter decades, and certainly the chasm between the cohort’s soaring rhetoric of the sixties and its performance in power by the nineties invites a certain degree of censure and contempt. I think, though, that this early indoctrination of ours—for those of us raised, I mean, under class conditions in which such stultifying assumptions of security and progress might be nurtured—is not given due weight. It was one thing to live in (somewhat squalid) communal housing off-campus in the early seventies, to abjure and even to scorn many of the bourgeois amenities with which we’d been raised, but we all knew, whether or not we acknowledged it to ourselves, that should we ever tire of bohemian cosplay there would always be a spot waiting for us back in the “middle class.” Well, that comfortable certitude didn’t last out the decade, and as a friend of mine observed circa 1987 in approximately these terms, “A lot of people are waking up to the fact that there are only so many places at the table, and that some of us are going to be left out, and they’re saying 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘮𝘦, 𝘣𝘰𝘺!” Hell, I certainly sold out.
*“Upward mobility”—is that even a thing anymore? I don’t claim to maintain a careful watch on the youngs, but among the children of my friends, a generation now approaching forty, there appears to be a keen awareness that their lives are neither as comfortable nor secure as their parents” were, and have little prospect of being so until the latter peg out—for choice, without pouring the offsprings’ patrimony down the rathole of “assisted living.”
Sold out how? What did you do?
I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
Did you also name your son Sue? ;-)
When I started my first real job in 1972 at $9,000/year, my one-bedroom apartment, a very nice one, was $180/month. This works out to 24% of my income. Now, a one-bedroom place in my area (Baltimore) $1,115/month. Even at $15/hour, it amounts to 45%. So move to Cincinnati, where the rent is $698.
I never really 'made it' in that classic sense. Never owned a house or a new car. Neither I, nor any love interest, thought marriage and a family was a good idea.
But I'm still alive. [ Year or two older than Roy ]