Lemme do some quick back of the envelope math about wages.

On a busy day at the pizza place, we'd have the following crew:

Drivers: $2/hr Tip Wage - 44 man-hours
Insiders: $8/hr - 20 man-hours
Managers: $12/hr - 22 man-hours

For a total of ~$512. Aiming for ~15-20% of sales. /

That works out to ~17% on a ~$3000 night, so that's bang-on target.

Let's say we raised everybody there to a $15/hr wage.

We'd end up adding $778 to labor for the day.

More than doubling! That sure sounds like a lot!

But hang on a second.

Let's assume for easy math that what we're selling is $10 one-topping large pizzas.

For 3k, we're selling 300. We've got to divide up that 778 between the pizzas.

That raises the price of each pizza from $10 to $12.59.

"That's... well, not huge, but it's still more money!"

Definitely! But, here's something important.

The price of a pizza has actually gone down.

Remember, money isn't real! It's a representation of the time worked.

The vast majority of the people we had been selling that pizza to weren't making $15 an hour before. We were in a college town, that manager wage of $12/hour was a /good/ wage. WE were buying that pizza.

So, in terms of value:

The cost of the pizza is lower for a driver.

The driver was probably, with tips, making 10-15/hour, but that depends on how good the night is - some nights, it might not be minimum wage.

So, $7-15/hour. The pizza costs probably more than an hour of work.

Now, if they're making 15, it costs 50 minutes of work. Reliably.

Likewise, for the manager, 50 minutes of labor. It's a few seconds more expensive now, but it's still right about ~83% of an hour.

For the insider, the cost of that pizza went from 75 minutes worth of labor, to 50 minutes of labor. It's 33% cheaper.

There are some externalities - the price of the things we use to make the pizza will go up a bit, but not by much; farms are efficient as fuck, and farm workers process a truly staggering amount of ingredients per hour. It's ameliorated.

The workers are making substantially more money. Their lives are better. They're happier.

And all for an extra $2.59 per pizza, if the only place we're shunting this cost is direct to the customer.

If we get rid of tips? 20% was pretty standard. So now, it's only .59 more.

And now, those workers with more money - they're not putting it into savings accounts. They're buying the things they've just been making do without. Repairing their cars. Buying shit for their leisure time. Hell, FOOD - I /never/ went out to eat when I was working restaurants.

I couldn't justify it! I couldn't afford to!

Hey look at that. More sales.

God forbid, maybe they even make enough money to follow health code rules and actually go to the doctor when they get sick.

Because right now they don't.

The people making your food are doing so while sick. Constantly. https://twitter.com/NomeDaBarbarian/status/1232923056097546240?s=20

Now, I will admit - landlords are bastards. Rent controls are an important part of any kind of widespread economic reform.

But it also means that rent in Charlotte ($1500 avg for a two-bedroom, so 750ish/person)

Goes from 60% of a full-time minimum wage's monthly take,

To 29%.

It cuts the cost of your rent in goddamn half.

It's still not "affordable" by the standards of my parents' generation, but it means that a person making minimum wage can afford on ~1/3rd of their income to live with a roommate.

That's what a $15/hour minimum wage means.

You get to live with a basic human amount of dignity.

And unless the landlord goddamn DOUBLES your rent (they would, the fuckers), it's still a good deal for you.

Because the pizza didn't double in price. It went up by $0.59.

Shitheads like Ted Cruz will wave their hands histrionically and say thing like "Why stop at $15/hour? Why not A THOUSAND AN HOUR?!?"

Because to them, that life - being able to afford half of a two-bedroom apartment in a mid-sized city - is somehow ridiculously luxurious.

Shitheads will further argue, "BUT WITHOUT TIPS, HOW WILL YOU [REWARD GOOD/PUNISH BAD] SERVICE?"

I mean you could tell the manager they gave good service.

I managed a pizza place. We got folks' feedback constantly.

We had no trouble firing bad workers. Ever.

"BUT WITHOUT TIPS HOW WILL SOMEONE BE MOTIVATED?"

By their paycheck. Which they would like to keep receiving.

By their work ethic. Because people want to be good at the jobs they do.

By wanting to avoid the shame of being yelled at. By getting preferable hours. A dozen others.

Folks really want to pretend that minimum wage workers are either "teenagers," or somehow less-than. Somehow bad workers, who don't deserve more.

The average age of a fast food worker is 29.

In my kitchen everyone had or was working on a degree. Everyone was smart and talented.

It's not like their needs are lower, either! These are people with families. Bills. Needs.

Most fast food workers, after all, are on some form of public assistance already. 52%.

Which means that we, with our taxes, are already subsidizing their wages.

https://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/pdf/2013/fast_food_poverty_wages.pdf

And we, in that kitchen, had high standards - we were able to reject 3/4 of applicants without an interview, and another 3/4 of them after.

Which means that only ~19% of folks were "good enough" to work there.

Not even one in five.

For a job that started at minimum wage.

-interlude-

Correction accepted, with a caveat. Most folks working minimum wage jobs aren't being paid any more or less for the value of their work on one day vs. another. I pulled the same wage for a 10 hour shift, no matter how many pizzas I made. https://twitter.com/mikecoonomics/status/1350326512449417217?s=20

It's what the company /tells/ me my work is valued at, but the whole point of me making a wage is that they're harvesting some of the surplus value I'm producing.

I know there's definitions of value to go into, but from me on ground level? Looks a lot like time.

-end interlude-

And we do all of this - ALL OF THIS!

Without touching the profits of the folks at the top of the chain. We haven't gone into the profit margin at all, remember? We raised the price of the pizza, AND ALSO made everyone more able to buy that pizza.

Again, there are externalities, this is all just first-order math. The way folks interact with markets will shift.

But in this thought experiment, we're able to do that whole thing by changing the price.

In my perfect world, maybe the boss even eats that extra .59.

Maybe they're still allowed to become obscenely rich, just slightly less quickly.

We have, as a society, decided that some things are not worth lower prices.

We decided for instance that it didn't matter that their little hands were perfect for sticking into machines, we weren't going to use kids in factories any more.

(Mostly. There's... a big conversation about overseas child labor, and the ways that American capitalism just offloads its horrors to places that aren't as closely regulated.)

We decided, after enough people died from turpentine mixed with opium and cat piss and rattlesnake venom, that it didn't matter that regulation was expensive - when the label called it Whiskey, there had to be fucking Whiskey in that jar.

We have decided, over and over again, that there is a baseline level of "awful" that you must be better than to operate in the United States.

Sorry, kid.

We can decide, if we've got a baseline level of human goddamn decency,

That a person who works a week's hours deserves to be able to live, and then some.

I'm fighting for more personally. I'm aiming for fully automated luxury gay post-scarcity space communism, but it's a start.

Because, and here's the bitch of it:

We have enough.

We have enough food, that nobody need be hungry.

We have enough medicine, that nobody need be sick.

We have enough homes, that nobody need be homeless.

We've got enough, together.

That means that our issue is distribution.

That's the point of an economy, after all. To move labor around asynchronously - so that if I make pizza every day, and you sheer sheep once every three months to make sweaters, we're both always fed and warm.

Any deficit - any hungry people, or sick people, or unhoused people - is a failure of that distribution.

Because - and I know folks aren't used to thinking of it like this, but I promise you it's true - Capitalism is a technology.

We invented it, to distribute resources effectively. To move things that are needed to places they are needed.

That technology can run well, or it can break. Just like any other tech.

If it's not getting the things that are needed to the places they're needed, it's breaking.

If value is disappearing into the vaults of dragons who sit grinning atop wealth enough to buy and sell nations,

it's breaking.

But that's all in the future. That's the argument I *want* to be having.

For now, in the one we ARE having, can we at least make sure that motherfuckers can live?

Please?

/end

Also PS - I know we've normalized it, but y'all realize it's bullshit that you get paid at the end of two weeks, right?

In an era of e-transfers and direct deposits, there's no reason you couldn't be paid for the hours at the end of every day.

Instead, you're giving your boss a two-week interest-free loan on your labor.

And then YOU have to go to a payday loan place to make ends meet.

Fuck you, give me my money.

This thread is dedicated to everyone who heard Ne-Yo say "I knew my rent was gon' be late about a week ago - I worked my ass of, I still can't pay it though. But I've got just enough..."

And just felt that in their fucking bones.

Note - it's worth... correcting? Expanding?

In this thread, I was thinking in terms of wages, but in doing so I left out a larger conversation about what quality of life a person deserves, regardless of the work they do. https://twitter.com/Twofishie/status/1350357566216400899?s=20