Upon inception it was set at $0.25. It is now $7.25.

  • BeautifulMind ♾️@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If you do the comparisons in normalized dollars and compare to productivity, minimum wage (if it tracked to the same purchasing power as it did in the 1950s) would be somewhere around $26 in today’s dollars. If you do the same but track to inflation, it would be about $22.

    When the wage doesn’t keep track to inflation, it’s not ‘increasing’, it’s a pay cut. When it doesn’t track to productivity, it’s a pay cut out of labor’s part of any growth.

    When workers earning suppressed wages compete to buy things like housing, they’re bidding against the class of people that received the share of productivity they didn’t- and when the folks making more bid up prices of those things, it’s a double-whammy of foregone wage + increased cost-of-living.