On This Day In History

January 5th , 1914: The Ford Motor Company announces the 8-hour-workday and a minimum wage of $5/day.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says that $5 in January 1914 has the same buying power as $153.53 in November 2023, most recent data. This would be a minimum wage of $19.19/hour.

americans will make every issue in the world, whether its genocide or war or funding countries with revolting laws, about them. It always comes back to "oh god i hate my country so much for funding these awful things, they clearly hate americans because theyre doing all these awful things and running us into debt but they wont even pay us reasonable wages!" more so than it is actually about the awful thing

yo are there any canadians following me who have gotten a payout from webtoon... i don't understand how to fill out their tax forms 💀

a deer in headlights

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Wolff

do youguys think he ever worked in the hamburger mines to buy rock and roll cd or is he just unemployed for life

In my years of driving for Lyft in Houston I had two kinds of passengers. One type was annoying kids or lonely middle aged men going to bars. Those were interesting conversation at least. The other was minimum wage shift workers. MOST of my rides were the latter, and took me to a run-down apartment complex or to a shift at Family Dollar. The latter tipped better too, and what does that say about our society? It's ridiculous that I even needed to drive a man 2 miles down the road for his shift at Lowes but there was no walking path from his apartment on the other side of the interstate.

A majority of American infrastructure is hostile to human life and we could change that if enough people cared. But the rich people in the Woodlands don't care because they've got their running trails.

Stadium workers with a message to the Orioles | Edge of Sports

Young aspiring animators in third world countries only option is to die I guess

Thanks Pepsi

do y'all understand how frickin' wild it is that, while scrolling on any given social media platform, you're gonna see posts of people asking for donations because they can't afford rent/groceries/medical bills/clothes/basic necessities? and it's not just one post, it's dozens. I'll get several in a row, sometimes. and you want to donate, but you can't donate to them all because you yourself can hardly afford to get by.

do y'all realize how insane that is?

that americans living in the richest country in the world have to crowdfund their weekly grocery trip, but they might not make their goal because literally no one can afford to buy groceries.

that over 50% of americans live paycheck to paycheck.

that i can bet you that homelessness is getting to an all-time high, but i couldn't actually tell you because HUD doesn't record numbers correctly.

that federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr and has been since 2009.

that in 2024, a living wage for a single adult with no children is $34,923. for an adult with two children, it's $93,579. the hourly breakdown is: $16.79 and $44.99, respectively. the average (median) american receives $21,840/yr or $10.50/hr. (calculations from data found here.)

don't just read this and go "wow that's crazy." sit with this shit and realize that we are being played with in our fucking faces, and what are we going to do about it?

it only took about an hour-ish for the "they can't complain ppl wanna go to the latam now! its so much cheaper its unfair" comments. how about we stop and think about why that might be for a second

like i think that we really really really need to actually gain the social literacy and compassion to understand that. not tipping your server isn’t praxis, but the fact that it’s expected that the customer pay the wage of the server also doesn’t mean that the customer (often also stiffed and a victim of wage theft) isn’t obligated to do so, and that while this is within our own economic system a great injustice and act of violence that needs to be rectified, it is in fact not the greatest injustice in the world and seeing people comparing getting screamed at for war crimes to not being tipped demonstrates a drastic lack of any sense of proportion. this is me speaking as both a service worker and someone engaged in organizing. let me be absolutely clear that I am not saying that not tipping your server is praxis. if you are able to tip i think that you should. i also think that “it’s the social contract in america to tip your server” needs to be read as “the structure has been built so that resisting it is tantamount to being a class traitor, and there are no winners in this situation”. i make less than 1k a month. tipping at 15% is straight up not viable all of the time if i want to pay rent. that’s not praxis, that’s me trying to keep a roof over my head, same as the service worker who i can’t always tip. so much analysis of this matter on social media tends to boil down to brute utilitarianism that causes further fragementation among the working class, and not for unjust reasons.

but just as not tipping my server isn’t praxis, tipping my server also isn’t praxis. not because it doesn’t help the individual (it does) but because it functionally validates the extant system in which the customer directly pays the wages. especially in the digital age: whereas cash tips are often considered nontaxable income, digital tips are administered as directly taxable income by the employer. when tips are paid out as wages i think it’s a little unfair to consider them to be “gratuities”.

again: not tipping isn’t praxis, but i wonder often about how many people who parrot this point are engaged in labour organizing or support in any way other than tipping. everyone deserves to be paid for their labour. but likewise, putting the onus on the working class customer to do so doesn’t actually help anyone except for the employer.

if you’re getting pissed at other working-class people for not tipping high numbers, especially impoverished and/or marginalized people, i hope that you are also engaged in literally any form at all, no matter how intense or dedicated, to any kind of action or organization that supports increasing minimum wage and shifting this responsibility from the customer to the employer (i.e. working class to owning class).

"When [Kshama] Sawant was elected on the promise of passing a $15 minimum wage, every other member of the [Seattle] City Council opposed it. Instead of writing a polite letter to her colleagues pleading with them to support it and then giving up when that failed, Sawant and Socialist Alternative created a campaign called 15 Now:

15 Now set up 11 action groups in neighborhoods across the city mobilizing in the streets and at public forums. [They] organized multiple rallies and marches of hundreds of people in Seattle, a National Week of Action in over 21 cities, and a major presence at both the annual Martin Luther King Day march and May Day march. … Critically, through the action groups and democratic conferences, 15 Now offered activists the opportunity to have ownership over the fight for $15.

Essentially, 'Sawant used her position as a city councilmember and the big media spotlight on her to build a powerful grassroots movement from below.' It was this grassroots mass mobilization — and its credible threat of a ballot initiative that would have passed an even more progressive minimum wage law — that led the Seattle City Council to reverse its opposition and pass the $15 minimum wage, the first of its kind in any major U.S. city, which quickly spread to other cities and even states and changed the national debate. The D.C. progressives, therefore, have Kshama Sawant and her mobilizing, fighting approach to thank for the $15 minimum wage being on the national agenda.

The second major accomplishment of Sawant’s tenure is the Amazon Tax — a tax on the wealthiest businesses in Seattle to fund affordable housing and Green New Deal projects. Two years after a grassroots campaign spearheaded by Sawant won the tax, big business succeeded in getting the City Council to repeal it. Instead of conceding defeat:

Sawant convened a series of Tax Amazon Action Conferences … where hundreds of activists discussed, debated, and voted on a strategy and the elements of a new proposal. … As the drive approached the signature threshold to get on the ballot, and with hundreds of activists flooding city council offices with emails, phone calls, and public testimony, and with the Amazon tax demand being echoed in the street protests, the political establishment felt compelled to advance its own Amazon tax.

The result was an Amazon Tax four times as large as the one that was repealed...

There are two interconnected and mutually reinforcing reasons that Sawant has been tremendously effective where D.C. progressives have failed — her fighting approach and her deep connection and accountability to grassroots organizing.

Her fighting approach includes the critical understanding that elected office is not a friendly arena where progressives can privately convince corporate politicians to do the right thing, but a battlefield of raw power where the Democratic establishment is an enemy that must be forced into giving concessions. Sawant is able to maintain this radical, fighting approach without being politically marginalized because she comes out of, remains accountable to, and is in consistent dialogue with grassroots social movements. The decisions made in the fights for the Amazon Tax or the $15 minimum wage were not made by Sawant herself but were voted on at action conferences where anyone from Sawant to a new volunteer had an equal say. In fact, Sawant never simply decided to run for office, but only did so reluctantly when, as a member of Socialist Alternative, the organization democratically decided that she should be the candidate they run.

Among other leftist lawmakers who have been able to effect progressive change despite being in the minority, close ties and accountability to grassroots movements have been key. In discussing how he has been able to pass over a dozen of his own bills and help make Illinois the first state in the country to abolish cash bail, democratic socialist and Illinois State Senator Robert Peters explained:

I try to tie myself to the movement as much as possible because I am the conduit for their organized power and governing position. And they are the conduit for me being able to govern the way I want to. And if those are tied together, it makes it easier to get things done under the dome. … I believe that my office should be a conduit for organizing, for movement spaces. So basically opening it up, whether it’s mutual aid efforts on the South Side, it’s hosting meetings, it’s being part of meetings. And sometimes when I’m not able to get something done, being held accountable. I try to make sure that I’m tied as much as possible. And I will ask. When we passed the bill … I was talking to the coalition about negotiations on this bill. I said 'They’re trying to do this in the bill, and I need to know: how far am I allowed to go?'… I remember saying to my colleague on the floor … 'My people won’t let me go any further. That’s it. I can’t negotiate any further.' We’re not as weak as people think.

- Jordan Bollag, from "The Left Is Losing Because We’re Not Confrontational Enough." Current Affairs, 20 May 2022.

Mittens off.

Americans are in favor of raising the minimum wage well above $20, according to a new poll.

Yesterday (May 24), Data for Progress, a progressive think tank, published the results of a survey in which US voters were asked how much a person needs to earn to have a “decent quality of life.” “Decent” was defined as the ability to cover expenses for bills and necessities “without struggling.”

gran just texted me a job listing for a signage company seeking a 'sign painter'. Like... sure I wish I could make a living painting signs, but they'd have to pay me full time, $20 or more hourly for me to rent the dinkiest shed in the greater houston area. They probably pay $10 and act super proud about it. What does she think I could do with this? "Just get a different job!" Okay and live where

i had a blueberry bun so expensive today... it wasn't even worth it