New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani forcefully defended his call for a $30 minimum wage during the final debate of the race Wednesday night, warning that under the status quo, the expensive metropolis is at growing risk of becoming “a museum of where working-class people used to be able to live.”
The inability of many New Yorkers to make a livable wage in the city, Mamdani said, “is pushing them to live in Jersey City, to live in Pennsylvania, to live in Connecticut, because they can’t afford to live in New York City.”
Under Mamdani’s proposal, which would have to be approved by lawmakers, New York City’s wage floor would rise incrementally before reaching $30 an hour by 2030. The minimum wage would then be tied to either cost-of-living increases or worker productivity jumps.
Current NYC minimum wage is apparently 16.50. So a 1.8x increase over 5 years (how long are mayors for in NY?).
I… my inner labor 100% supports minimum wage increases. My inner realist understands that has a very substantial impact on businesses and tends to result in fewer employees doing more work (and rapidly getting them salaried so that overtime doesn’t exist). Which has a net negative impact because now one person is getting paid a living wage rather than two people getting paid enough to live in a closet in a flat.
Which is why, like most things, the solution is to decouple life from work. Universal Basic Income is what we desperately need. It resolves the minimum wage issue AND automation. The former because Fred’s Khlav Kalash
KCorner isn’t destroying their margins to have more than one person working the counter and the latter because… we are RAPIDLY reaching the point where jobs permanently go away (see: Tech). And it actually fulfills the capitalist dream where the people working (because they want additional spending money or “to have a better life”) actually want to be there.And… I kinda think that is less of a pipe dream than a first term mayor managing to increase minimum wage by 1.8x in 5 years.
I’ll also just add that NY, like much of the modern world (not just the US), is largely driven by commuters. People who wake up in Jersey or on the outskirts of town, drive in at 3 am, and then are part of the team that open up the shop at 4 so that you can buy your bagel when you walk out the door at 5:30. And… in a lot of ways that 16.50 goes a LONG way once you get to a place with a semi-reasonable cost of living… that said workers have difficulty enjoying because they are getting back home with just enough time to eat a meal and then go to bed.
Which is a very different problem and also why this kind of rubs me the wrong way the more I think about it. Don’t get me wrong, there are LOTS of people barely existing in NYC. But a lot of them are people with REALLY good jobs who just still live in one of the higher cost of living places on the planet. Not so much the people getting minimum wage to make their coffee.
It has an impact; not a substantial one. Of course businesses will complain. They don’t want to pay workers at all, let alone fairly, but the only real impact is a slight reduction in profits once.
We can argue on what you consider “substantial” to me. We can also both just walk away and whack it to Sailor Moon hentai. The latter might actually be a more productive use of time. Err, also let it be known I am referring to Queen Serenity or whatever since I just remembered most of the sailor scouts are teenagers and that makes this joke real fucked up.
The fact of the matter is that, yes, it does have an impact on businesses. Moreso small businesses than the megacorps.
Like… it is generally common knowledge that most restaurants fail in the first year and a large part of that comes down to wages and profit margins. Ignoring the hell that is tip based economies for the moment (they still factor in to a minimum wage increase but at a much lower rate), wages come out of revenue. Revenue is based on price per meal. If wages increase, you either pay out fewer hours or raise prices.
Which… does get to the tipping side of things. EVERYONE fucking hates tipping (except for the workers who work it). But the people arguing that we should just bake that into the price are quite often the same ones arguing that everything is getting so expensive. Like… no shit?
Because, at some point (essentially microeconomics at a scale where it sort of works), you can’t raise prices AND you aren’t selling more hot dogs. Same with trying to run a hardware store that has to compete with Amazon and Lowes. And you very much CAN see that over time where minimum wage goes up (good!) and you have more and more restaraunts and local hardware stores with fewer and fewer staff. We all hate the idea of waiting 5 minutes for someone to come make a key but… that someone was busy mixing paint and searching the stock room for that color of doorknob someone needed.
Which, again, is why I am a firm believer that the goal needs to be UBI and we need to decouple work with life. It obviously needs fine tuning so that there will actually still be people willing to do those deeply shit jobs but we also need a way that isn’t just a constant cost of living loop.
Look, I’m not going to deal with all that gish gallop nonsense. I’m just going to say that there is no proof of a causative relationship between higher minimum wage and any particular business failing.
Well, thanks for being honest, I guess?
You’ve done Duane Gish proud.
12.5% annualized
Yeah. To me that sounds insane (especially if you are getting the increased passed annually rather than all at once but scheduling the bumps) but, like I said, NYC is weird in that the inflation loops tend to be much more delayed. Or, I guess, have already gotten so fucked that it doesn’t matter as much that the staff at the smaller shops that are increasing prices to increase wages already can’t afford the stuff they sell.
I’m used to discussions and campaigning for even single digit percentages being A Thing.
I don’t know about NYC, but the Federal Wage has been stagnated so long, that 12.5% annualized increase seems like the BARE MINIMUM workers deserve.
I’m in Arkansas, so 30$/hr is probably a little “too much” here, but I believe in a the minimum wage should be a living wage at 40hr/wk.
Oh. There is VERY much a big gap between what people deserve and what they get (and where that money should come from but…).
My point is more that if you tell the average voter you want to raise the minimum wage by 10%, you get some knee jerk reactions that almost immediately translate into calls to ALL the representatives.
I don’t think that’s right. The average voter wants the minimum wage raised by quite a bit. Capital voters paint nightmare pictures no matter how small the increase is.
There is a pretty good It’s Always Sunny joke about how they are pro mental health but anti taxes an it more or less loops around until they decide the important thing is a new stadium for the Eagles. It is a disingenuous comparison but it also kind of sums this up.
People are, by and large, pro minimum wage because even the chuddiest republican knows how much those jobs tend to suck. Just like people, by and large, want to get rid of tipping and just bake a cost of living into the price itself.
Then you put it up for a vote (either just as legislature or as a proposal for the general public). And you suddenly see all the people who realize that money comes from somewhere will lose their god damned minds and start finding excuses.
There are definitely ways to sell it but it is always an uphill battle.