In 2025, the federal minimum wage is officially a “poverty wage.” The annual earnings of a single adult working full-time, year-round at $7.25 an hour now fall below the poverty threshold of $15,650 (established by the Department of Health and Human Services guidelines). The limitations of how the federal government calculates poverty understate how far…
  • AJ1@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    Isn’t that what servers make in the US? when I lived there in the 90s, minimum wage was 4.25/hr, but the servers in the restaurant I worked at were making 2.35/hr, and that wage hadn’t changed since like the 70s or some crazy shit.

      • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        7 days ago

        De jure, the restaurant has to make the difference up if they make less than minimum wage after tips. De facto, wage theft is about twice as much as all other forms of theft combined.

        • MrVilliam@lemm.eeEnglish
          0·
          7 days ago

          I don’t live in The Netherlands, so I don’t pretend to have any sort of first-hand knowledge of what it’s like there, but this resource says that children under 13 can’t work unless they’re sentenced to community service due to an offense, or working as a performance like as an actor in a commercial or a play. It also looked like there’s no minimum wage for workers under 15?

          But I don’t doubt that Dutch workers have much higher labor standards. Current minimum wage for 21 and older there looks to be nearly double American federal minimum wage (€14.06 vs $7.25). I live in Virginia, which has a much higher minimum wage than the federal one, currently $12.41. The Northern counties and around Richmond are ludicrously expensive, however, so it’s not like people could reasonably get by on that in those areas. You won’t find a half decent house in those areas for under $500k, and actual nice houses start at like $750-900k. If you somehow got a 0% mortgage and somehow had zero expenses outside of paying off that $500k house, it would still take 20 years of working full time at that minimum wage job to pay that. More realistic mortgage rates and expenses would make that take closer to 70 years.

          Average life expectancy in the US is 77.5 years.