Saw in the news today a protest in which demonstrators were advocating in increase in the US minimum wage. One protester held a sign saying “$7.25 isn’t enough to live on.”
Question: was minimum wage ever enough to live on? When I worked at McDonald’s in the mid-1980’s, minimum wage was $3.35, but I was a high school kid living with my parents, so I wasn’t trying to put a roof over my head or feed myself. I assume the cost of living was substantially lower then than it is now, but was it disproportionately lower, such that $3.35 would have been enough to live on back then? what about earlier than that?
When I got my first summer job around 1952, it was $.75, comes to $130 a month. With care, a single person could live on that. You could find an efficiency for $40 and you could eat on $2/day (doing your own cooking) which leaves you $30 for bus fare (about $2.50 a month), clothes, and entertainment. But you could certainly not raise a family or even decently support a wife on that.
This is what I recall through the 60s until we hit heavy inflation. A single person could live a simple lifestyle and just make ends meet. For a few years after it remained feasible until reasonably priced housing disappeared. By 1974 a guy I worked with in Philadelphia couldn’t afford to live anymore. He was making 5 cents an hour over the minimum. His rent was cheap, he had no car, but he couldn’t afford to buy clothes anymore. He got a hardship waiver to take out his Christmas bank account money to buy his girlfriend an engagement ring so his landlord would allow her to move into his apartment so they weren’t paying two rents.
Are you restricting work to 40 h/w? Because some people work multiple jobs. That’s hard to do if one job keeps swapping your hours around. But 70 h/w, which I found reasonable in my 20s, will get you ~$25k/yr, which was enough for health insurance, vacations, restaurants, and IRA contributions.
I lived on minimum wage for a couple of years in the 80’s when I got out of grad school and couldn’t find a real job. Yes, you can live on it, if you don’t have kids, medical needs, hobbies that cost money or a girlfriend. It’s a balancing act with little room for hope.
Just out of curiosity, I looked it up and $2/day in 1952 is equivalent to about $18/day in 2014 dollars. That’s quite a comfortable amount for one person, and you can even eat out three meals a day on that budget.
Food as a percentage of income used to be much greater than it is today. The saying 'Putting food on the table" used to be a real concern for for people. Look at the first graph in the article below. It shows household budgets by category over times. Food and clothing are way cheaper today than they were in 1950 while housing, healthcare and entertainment are more expensive.
Well, besides Minimum wage, there are many other forms of assistance. I took a month to live on what I would be able to get on Food Stamps and other aid in the San Jose area. Surprisingly large amount of food.
You get stamps= $180.
Local Catholic Diocese handed out box with beans,rice, govt cheese, fruit, etc.
Two groups provided lunch every day in the park.
Another church had day-old bread, large bags of potatoes and onions.
So, let me take CA. $9X40=$360. Say $250 after taxes. You can get a room in a house for about $500.
Well some food was. In the early 60s you could get a burger, fries, and a milkshake for 50 cents at McDonalds. I think milk may have been more expensive then than it is now (adjusting for inflation). People ate more fresh foods, which were priced with less competition form inexpensive prepared foods. The other side of the equation is the expenditures in non-necessities growing over time. Better food was a luxury that people spent more on in times past because their weren’t that many affordable alternatives. So $2 a day was enough for a single person to eat, but it wasn’t great food, you can probably do better on $18 a day now. A family of 4 (likely larger than that on average back then) would have had a hard time if their food budget was $2 a day.
Fer sure a single person can dine like a king on $18 a day! Dang, that’s $540 a month!
My own single-person food budget is about $150 a month lately ($171.50 in August, to be exact, but that was a bit higher than usual for me) – and I don’t think I’m even all that especially cost-efficient in my dining habits.
I also believe that there are more families today in percentage terms in which the principal breadwinner(s) are only making minimum. It was not expected that a teen-ager or college kid making minimum was necessarily supporting him/herself completely that way.
My first job right out of college in 1980- lighting director at a local dinner theatre - was salaried at $125 a week. The minimum wage then was 3.10 an hour so I was getting a whole dollar a week above minimum wage. I did get one free meal a day at work.
I was able to afford my own apartment without roommates ( not a nice one in an apartment complex but a 1 bedroom in a subdivided house in an area that catered to students). And I was able to buy food and keep gas in the car (and I lived 30 minutes away from work). I was able to afford to order a pizza or eat dinner out once a week. I was able to get my hair cut and car repaired as needed. I had a pet and I was able to afford cat food and vet bills
And I didn’t feel poor. OK, the one free meal a day was a nice perk but, on the other hand, I didn’t need a roommate so I think minimum wage would’ve been doable even without the free meal.
And I had a lot of friends that didn’t go to college, they got entry level minimum wage jobs right out of high school and immediately went and got their own apartments - it was considered kind of weird to continue to live at home once you were out of school.
Housing is about 4x to 5X more today than it was in 1980. The CPI was around 82 then, it’s 238 today so about 3X more.
Bullshit. Cheap cell phone plans are like $30 a month which is less than I paid for a landline years ago, even not adjusting for inflation. And there’s no long distance charges!
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