In 1968 The minimum wage was 1.60

If it had kept up with income growth and distribution it would be 21.16 per hour. Instead it is 7.25. If fucking Mcdonalds could pay 1.60 then those assholes can pay 21.16 now. The revolution is coming.

• Agree-and what the Rethugs want is to get rid of the minimum wage completely. To raise it to $20 an hour now, it would have to be fazed in very slowly but it could be done. As for the revolution, it will never happen while the powers in charge keep the masses fat with the food stamps, reality TV and I-phones. Meanwhile BOTH parties want to flood the USA with (obnoxious)illegals to drive down wages even more.If you live in California, you understand. The construction industry has been destroyed by illegals. If you would have told me this country would be like this 35-40 years ago, I would never have believed it.

• The united states government is essentially a mafia organization for the uber-rich.

  Truth%20fairy

• R2, It's a Corporate America full of the nation's wealthy that has Washington, D.C. under control. This is the best example why the United States is not the best country on earth. (In addition to more examples.)

• [quote]In 1968 The minimum wage was 1.60 And rent on a nice one bedroom apartment in a pleasant working class neighborhood was $95.00 And a new VW cost $1599 And food was maybe $20/week including eating out once in a while.

• The government keeps telling us the USA is the best country on Earth, but the USSR used to tell it's people the same thing. Most in the USA are ignorant and believe what they are told. They are told we "can't afford" to pay for universal healthcare, and that "entitlements" need to be cut. Compare the USA to Australia. They have a better standard of living and more humane government. Currently the Rethugs are going after Social Security(again!) and it looks like Obama may be willing to "compromise" with them. It's just so fucking stupid/ridiculous! Bush/Chaney ran the USA into the ground with debt, but ever since we have had a Democrat in the White House, now the Rethugs are going to "fix" it. These cocksuckers are the cause of 99% of our problems with their illegal wars/policies. I also will never understand gays that vote GOP-except to say they are greedy, selfish pricks. Not a huge Obama fan, but can you imagine if Romney had won?????

• [quote]but can you imagine if Romney had won????? He couldn't win, he was too much of a loser, so Obama remains our Bait and Switch President

• So basically I'm making minimum wage and so are a lot of the rest of you. And I thought I was doing okay since my annual income is about average. But all that means is that the average wage nowadays is equivalent to minimum wage is '68. Remind me again why so many people thought the Occupy Wall Street movement was a bunch of kooks?

• why didn't the occupy movement keep going? That was our closest chance to taking power back from the banks.

• I know where you people live.

  President Dick Cheney

• They got dismissed as a bunch of hipster crazies, r8. Also, in LA, the mayor used public health laws against the encampment -- in the same way they used to use public health laws against gays.

• "Our" President: Joshua DuBois, second from left, hopes to publish a book based on the devotionals he sent to President Obama. Above, Dubois joins Obama and, from left, Sen. Harry Reid, LDS Church President Thomas Monson and Elder Dallin Oaks in the Oval Office in 2009.

  http://www.trbimg.com/img-512a180e/turbine/la-joshua-dubois-20130224/580

• Are you sure it was a $1.60 in 1968, OP? I am pretty sure my first job in the summer of 1972 paid $1.40 and hour.

• May vary, state to state.

• I am sure...it went from 1.40 to 1.60 that year. This is from the Federal tables.

• In 1974 it was two bucks unless you were tipped.

• Do you really think that 15, 16, 17 y.o.s s/b paid $21.00 per hour to cram shitty food in a bag and shove it across a counter - and that the fast food industry should be mandated to pay such wages? If you do, then you're truly out of touch with reality. Please just go to your tea dance, blow some stranger in the stalls, and leave the politics to the grown ups.

• It's not that simple. Although I'm open 50 weeks a year, only 10 of those are in-season, so $21.16 per hour/ per employee would definitely put my very small resort town business out-of-business. Frankly, $15.00 is a stretch. I'd personally be much better off paying my employees $21.16 for the 10 weeks and laying them off for the other 40, but I'm concerned that they'd have no jobs or income off-season.

• As I understand it, states set their own minimum wages, lately which have only been equal to or higher than the federally-mandated minimum (which applies to any job within reach of Congress's power to regulate "interstate commerce"--meaning essentially most but maybe not all jobs)... Lobbying for a living wage should be a stonger effort, and could be much more effective at the local and state level. there are states and cities now that have minimum wage laws at least a couple dollars an hour above the federal minimum. Wages for tipped jobs have pretty much always been exempt from minimum-wage laws, but their are state laws that apply to that and set minimums for tipped workers, too. All the workplace laws --minimum wage, overtime, mandated leave, worker's comp, child labor restrictions, even the standard five-day work week with weekends off--are products of the labor movement and progressive reformers in generations past. Thank your forebears who fought for unions and fought for justice.

• Then, if it is so unfathomable to pay the 20.00 adjusted minimum wage, why was it possible in 1965?

• [quote]I'd personally be much better off paying my employees $21.16 for the 10 weeks and laying them off for the other 40, but I'm concerned that they'd have no jobs or income off-season. I underpay them for their own benefit! My noblesse oblige knows no bounds.

  R17

• R16 I don't think anyone should be serving shitty food, but yes I do think that wages should have kept up with inflation.

• Because lots of people still remembered the Depression in 1965, and knew that the rich people were parasites on society, not its leading edge.

• Fuck you, R17. You've never had the worries of running a small business, apparently; have you asshole?

• I don't understand how it is legal for a registered company/corporation to hire illegal immigrants for pennies on the dollar. Not only are they exploiting these people for cheap labor but they are absolutely destroying the marketplace and making it hard for American citizens to find work and living wages. Why hasn't THIS been addressed by any of the two parties? The debate isn't whether they should stay or go, it's whether they should be subject to the same pay standard as the rest of us. NO ONE in this country should be paid below the minimum wage. This isn't 18th Century Russia....or maybe it is and we just haven't realized it yet.

• R16 = demented self-loather.

• I remember when the government used to work for the people and not the corporations. That seems so long ago now.

• [16] It doesn't matter if a teenager is doing a mundane and unskilled job. People should not be paid slave wages, especially when corporations can afford it. If a job is too mundane/stupid/unskilled, then man corporations should just hire robots, otherwise all workers should be paid a living wage. Good thread by the way @ OP.

• Sorry- 23 was obviously directed to R20

• Before, people used to open places like restaurants to make a living -- now, they won't open them unless they feel they can get rich. Same with construction and all the other places where illegals are the norm as employees.

• The scary thing is that if the government did force corporation to pay a decent wage all they would do is find ways to do implement massive layoffs and replace people with automated robots or ship more jobs to China and India. These bastard CEOs don't care about America, patriotism or their fellow man. All they care about is making more and more money so their shareholders will not balk when they give themselves 8 figure salaries and golden parachutes that would embarrass Imelda Marcos.

• R29 brings up a great point. Business's based on the financial support for ones family, and personal interests have been decimated by the corporate greed machines. It's almost impossible for the small business to compete with the big box stores.

• r29 touched upon something. Nowadays when these small business entrepreneurs open up a business they think they're going to become the next Jeff Besos, Sam Walton or Meg Whitman. It used to be that a family would open up a restaurant or book store because they just wanted to make a decent living and work for themselves and not a boss. Now every Tom, Dick and Harry think they are entitled to become Gilded Age tycoons in just 10 years of operation.

• The truth is that employers could and would pay the hard working employees the $40 or $50 per hour they're worth, if we could pay you lazy, gossiping do-nothings the $0.045 per hour you're worth!

• I worked at Macy's in'78 as Xmas help. I remember making $2.65/hour+ (liberal) 15-20% employee discount. Minimum wage was doable for a teenager paying $105.00 rent in Manhattan.

• [quote]The scary thing is that if the government did force corporation to pay a decent wage all they would do is find ways to do implement massive layoffs and replace people with automated robots or ship more jobs to China and India. and this has already happened to a large extant. But you can Make the car in CHina or Mexico, but you can't wash it there. the US still has a great need for service of this type that would probably fall in the minimum wage area. THis is where this subject is so important.

• The minimum wage should be $1,000, so we can all be rich. The government can do it by magic.

  OP

• Fuck off, this has NOTHING to do with being rich, in 1960 not nearly as many douchebags like you would have thought that way.

• Strawman R36. When we were growing up there was a show called the Jetsons, and we were told we would all work minimal hours in the future, robots would do everything, etc. But you know what that implied? That implied socialism. Spin it any way you like, the technology revolution was sold as a way to lower the crushing burden of work on the soul of the people. And that's how it should have been, had not rich criminals seized control of society and schemed to dominate its politics.

• I'm not exactly sure what "income growth and distribution" is, but if you adjusted that $1.60 wage for inflation, it would come to $10.42 in 2012 dollars.

• Then maybe you shouldn't get involved if the subject is too complex for you r39.

• Before 1938, there was no minimum wage. That 162 years with no minimum wage. How did we ever survive?

• [quote]That 162 years with no minimum wage. How did we ever survive? For 89 of those years the answer was slavery.

• The relationship between wages and prices is now all out of whack in ways never before seen. Even in 1929 Germany, if it took a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a quart of milk, people make several wheelbarrows of money each day at work...

• Only in the south, r42.

• quote]Before 1938, there was no minimum wage. That 162 years with no minimum wage. How did we ever survive? Many people didn't, asshole. And many others got rickets, TB and all manner of maladies related to poverty. So why don't you hop in a time-machine back to the 30s and see how you like it.

• [quote]Only in the south, [R42]. Your lame attempt to defend slavery is noted.

• The federal minimum-wage law has always served a symbolic purpose beyond setting a specific number. It has sent a signal to even the lowest-paid workers: The country believes that what you do has value. The country will offer you a layer of protection that no one can undercut. If there had never been a minimum-wage law passed, r41, If, as in the years before 1938, Americans today could be paid as little as employers could get away with -- and if, in 2013, someone in Congress proposed the first law ever that would guarantee workers a minimum wage...what would it be?

  BG

• OP - $1.60 in 1968 is worth $10.68 in 2013 dollars, not $21. We're a bit behind but not by much.

  http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm

• R39 is correct. Adjusted for inflation, the 1968 minimum wage is about $10 in 2012 dollars.

  http://nader.org/2012/02/29/minimum-wage-catching-up-with-1968/

• income growth and distribution

• Pie charts.

  http://www.epi.org/publication/income_inequality_it_wasnt_always_this_way/

• Agree, OP too many people barely surviving on starvation wages

• If there had never been a minimum-wage law passed... If, as in the years before 1938, Americans today could be paid as little as employers could get away with...and if, in 2013, someone in Congress proposed the first law ever that would guarantee workers a minimum wage...what would it be? What would we define minimum wage to be in 2013?

  The%20here%20and%20now.

• The government has been deliberately understating inflation for years in order to exaggerate growth. The income distribution number is a better number.

• R17, You should be able to pay your core employees a living wage all year long. Temporary help should be hired during the 10 week tourist season at a living wage. If you cannot succeed under that model then you should go out of business. I don't know what kind of business that you have, but sounds as if you are doing something wrong. If you are keeping a full staff all year long, that is foolish (kind, perhaps, but foolish)