I keep seeing signs at all the fast food places :“now hiring— $15”
This is double the pre-covid wages.
Obviously the companies didn’t decide just from the goodness of their hearts to raise the pay. They got desperate for employees.
But today’s economic report says unemployment is essentially non-existent,*
So has $15 become the new standard? Or is it only an illusion (I notice that most of the signs say “up to” $15. What’s the real story?
*(unemployment rate of about 3 percent, which is considered pretty much normal turnover as people voluntarily quit, and are looking for a new job, but not desperately. So they show up in the statistics as unemployed, but most of them are not people who will not be able to pay their rent next week )
I’ve seen similar things to what you’ve seen, and I’ve wondered too about what it means. But one thing I can point out is that the unemployment rate is about workers not having jobs, while those kinds of advertisements are about jobs not having workers.
The federal minimum wage is $7.25. Many states have a higher minimum wage. It is $15 for fast food workers in NY. Many states have laws on the books that will increase minimum wage to $15 within a few years. Washington DC is over $15 now.
Exactly. Those ads are typically for jobs that require minimal experience or education (and are often for jobs that are physically demanding, unpleasant, and/or boring), and which, prior to COVID, were usually low-paying as well. Higher pay offers are, in some cases, the result of increases in state or local minimum-wage laws, as @OldGuy notes, but more often, it’s about “we can’t find enough people to work at what we used to offer.”
Also, with inflation over the past year, the cost of living has gone up substantially, making low-paying jobs even less attractive to potential employees.
It’s not in South Carolina. South Carolina uses the federal minimum wage of $7.25. The employer can choose to pay more than that if they want to, but they don’t have to. I’m a keyholder/supervisor in a niche business, (I.e., needs special knowledge. Not just anyone off the street can do it) I’ve worked for this company for three years, and I make $17 an hour.
I can tell you that a lot of my students (high schoolers) have taken jobs at $10. I think they’re suckers for accepting that in the current economy, but they’re doing it.
BLS publishes wage data by occupation, but they’re not updated frequently enough to see what’s going on ~now. Here are "fast food and counter workers), but from May 2021.
I can’t think of anyone else tracking wage distributions in a way that’s useful to the OP.
I am in Indiana where the minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour. Unless you’re a waitress/bartender/other tipped person where it is even lower: $2.13.
Here in Lake County, which is right next to Chicago, almost no one is earning that little. Indeed, my employer has been raising our wages just to keep up with competitors and try to retain current employees. In practice, no one is offering anything much lower than $12-14 an hour, and most are $14-15. In Lake County. You don’t have to go that far into the state to see offers starting at half California’s minimum.
Of course, we hear a lot of local businessmen screaming “no one wants to work anymore!” No, no one wants to work for what you offer anymore, if you want workers you have to pay more. You can hear the gears seizing up between their ears because these owners have never been in a situation before where they didn’t have all the advantages, the notion that workers have bargaining power at the moment does not compute. How dare the peons act in their own best interests!
He’s autistic, only has a couple of friends and they don’t work. But lots of places start at $15-ish. Trying to get him in at Costco where I know they start at $15 AND treat their workers well. .
I’m in the mountains of Colorado. Ski resort area. Cost of living is astronomical. My bosses boss that has been here for ~ three years and makes a very good dollar can’t find a house to buy because they are so out of reach. I hope we don’t lose him because of this.
A co-worker spent ~ $30,000 redoing her townhouse because she couldn’t not find anything bigger to move her double income with child family into that they could afford.
I lucked out as I bought 15 miles outside of town 30 years ago.
I see wages advertised just about everywhere of $16-$17. You might manage if you don’t mind living with 4 people in a one or two bedroom apartment. Maybe.
One redeeming factor of the cost of living here is going on vacation. We went to Hawaii a year ago. It was maybe a little bit more expensive. So no sticker shock for an $16 cheeseburger.
I wouldn’t call it the minimum wage, which is a statutorily set minimum, but it is the prevailing market wage. The problem as was mentioned upthread, is that while we are technically in a recession (more prominent in certain markets) we are also in a period of near full employment, which to my knowledge has never happened in US history. And we as a country are attempting to fight the highest rate of inflation in over 40 years.
Another problem is that the inflation we are experiencing is being driven by two primary factors: 1) the amount of government stimulus pumped into the economy over the past few years, and 2) a lack of supply, driven primarily by the labor shortage mentioned above. Until the labor supply issue gets resolved we will continue to see some above normal rates of inflation.
And in my opinion, this requires congress making significant reforms to our immigration laws in order to allow for more legal immigration. This will permit the US workforce to increase and lessen the impact of supply shortages and stabilize the costs of goods.
