January 8, 2007
DID WE SECRETLY ADOPT THE FRENCH 35-HOUR WORK WEEK?:
Life at America's bottom wage: The House is to vote Wednesday on a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour (Mark Trumbull, 1/09/07, The Christian Science Monitor)
[M]any families are poor today even though they earn far above $7.25 an hour."Until you're making $10 or $12 an hour, if you're [a single-income household] with dependents, you're going to have a really tough time making ends meet without public assistance," says David Blatt, a poverty expert at the Community Action Project of Tulsa County, about 40 miles from Muskogee in the state's northeastern section.
So if you work two minimum wage jobs you're okay, no? Posted by Orrin Judd at January 8, 2007 6:19 PM
According to the unified Chickenhawk Theory, can one be a poverty expert without being dirt poor oneself?
Posted by: Qiao Yang at January 8, 2007 6:45 PMHeck, OJ, rent out a room and you do ok(with health insurance) for under $5000 a year. A very relaxed and comfortable lifestyle.
Posted by: Robert Mitchell Jr. at January 8, 2007 6:55 PMThere was an amusing story on NPR a couple of weeks ago about raising the minimum wage. The interviewer had a really, really hard time finding anyone in FL who made anything even close to the minimum.
Posted by: b at January 8, 2007 7:25 PMThe only value of a minimum wage hike is if it can be coupled with tax cuts that will actually make a difference.
Posted by: AWW at January 8, 2007 10:54 PM"So if you work two minimum wage jobs you're okay, no?"
Only if you work more hours. 40 hours per week for a year, assuming 2 weeks for vacations and holidays, is 2000 hours. Doesn't matter how you divvy that number up between two jobs if the total is still 2000 hours.
I believe there are a lot of regulations that cut in if you have workers who work more than 38 or 39 hours a week, so getting a second job would work if the hours do not conflict, and you are willing to work more than 40 hours a week to make up.
The vast majority of minimum-wage people who want to earn more money want to do so without working more hours. The master of the vineyard who did NOT pay those who worked the whole day more than those who worked one hour cited the contract they had made. If a person is making minimum wage, they're working at a job for someone who doesn't see them as worth more than the minimum wage: The workers agreed with that assessment when they took the job rather than turning it down.
Yes, if you don't want to be poor you just work more.