By making the worker subsidize their income from other sources. NOBODY gets by on $13/hr. But, like Q says in her comment below, when she splits the rent/utilities, healthcare covered under her parents plan, and phone covered under her parents plan, then she can totally live off of $13 an hour! Phone $80/mo. Healthcare $250/mo. Rent $400/mo (just picking a number at random. insert whatever number you want, or is appropriate for your area, from $300-$2000/mo.). Utilities at probably $100/mo. So she is being "subsidized" $830/mo. That's how she can live on $13/hr. No shade to Q, of course. This is totally common. But when you back up and look at the big picture of how communities work, how taxes work, and how businesses work, you realize that everyone in Q's life is PAYING HER EMPLOYER for the privilege of employing her for $13/hr, rather than her employer just paying her a living wage. "But I can't afford to pay my receptionist $25/hr!" the business owner cries! Then you don't have a viable business, sir. It's as simple as that. If you can't pay a living wage to each of your employees, without accepting handouts from your employee's families, or getting tax cuts from the local municipalities, then YOU DON'T HAVE A VIABLE BUSINESS. Period. That company will fail, because it has failed to adequately calculate their cost of operations, which only ever go UP. And if you have a hidden number in the cost calculations of your budget that keeps going up forever... you will fail. Eventually. This is why businesses are complaining they can't hire anybody... the working class have found out they were being cheated, and inadvertently subsidizing their shitty employers' business plan, and aren't having it anymore. And there are literally dozens of famous successful businesses that operate with integrity and pay people properly, while still providing excellent products at a competitive price. Dick's Drive-In and Gravity Payments are just two of them, employing different methods to achieve the same result. "Genuine question, how does one get by on $13 an hour?"
The "subsidy" idea is backwards. The financial support Q gets from roommates and family means her employer has to pay her more, not less, to keep her as an employee. Suppose that Q works at WLOG, Inc for the pay, not for professional networking or for experience or anything else. Her real dream is to be an artist and spend all day painting, writing and composing music. But housing, food, and art supplies cost money and for now she doesn't think she can earn enough from art to live on. So she works at WLOG to pay the bills. She gets a roommate. That helps with rent. She still can't quit and do art full time, but she feels more financially secure. Then she gets healthcare through family. That helps too! She's not comfortable enough to quit, but if for some reason she got a pay cut now she would quit and see if maybe she can make it in the art world. With rent-sharing and family healthcare, she doesn't need the job badly enough to accept $10 per hour! Then she gets the family phone plan, and a distant relative dies and leaves her a monthly annuity. Jackpot! She gives notice at work. With all her financial advantages, she doesn't need the income from WLOG enough to justify giving up her art dreams. How does WLOG respond? Do they say "We see you don't need income as much as you did before, therefore we invite you to continue working for us at a reduced salary"? No, if WLOG wants to keep her services now that she has outside income, they must offer her a raise. Imagine how much you would have to offer a millionaire to work as a receptionist.
We are, in practice, saying the same thing, and in agreement I believe. If the employer was paying a living wage, then Quats (or any other receptionist) wouldn't need to rely on outside sources for life essentials, like rent and healthcare. She'd pay for those out of her earnings, like anyone else. The reason why the employer can pay less, is because there are other people that are better subsidized by their support network, rather than paying for their own expenses. It depresses the price point at which people will trade their time for money, down to Quats $13/hr, which nobody anywhere can live on alone, without support. This is kinda sensitive to me right now, because I am helping a friend out in NYC, whose parents have both passed recently, and she and her boyfriend just broke up. She's a successful actor (extra) and makeup artist and glass artist and musician and and and and... her money comes from a lot of different places. But she is completely alone. She has to pay her rent. She has to pay for her own healthcare. She has to pay for her own internet/phone and utilities. Etc. It's hard. It is panic-inducing. She's constantly on the verge of losing everything, and she's in her 40's. But she does all of these things because it keeps her solvent. She literally can't take a 40-hour a week job for even $25/hr because she has zero support/subsidizing from family/partner to keep her finances in the black. She gets her $600/day for being an extra on a TV show or movie, then goes home to make a glass commission, before going to DJ at a roller rink, and applies for art grants and other opportunities while laying in bed at night before going to sleep. It's vividly clear when working with someone who DOESN'T have those subsidies to fall back on.
Wallerstein again: - Subsistence includes gardening at home or assembling Ikea furniture - it's stuff that you would have to pay for but you aren't. - Piecework is selling shit on Etsy, breaking up cartons of cigarettes to sell on street corners, babysitting for your neighbors, anything you make money at but not regularly. - Work-in-kind is anything that you would normally be doing except you can't because you're earning wages so someone else is doing it for you. - Wages are paid employment from a regular employer, either by hour or by item. - Influence is anything you do that makes you more valuable to your community, family or larger social unit, or that makes your community, family or larger social unit more valuable compared to others. These are not exclusive categories. Wallerstein's argument is that everyone's existence is some blend of all of this, and that they are interchangeable. For example, if you eat a lot of stuff out of your garden, babysit your kid brother and make dinners, you are participating in an economy even though you aren't drawing wages. Further, the more of a wage economy you wish to have, the more of the non-wage economy you need to address through other means. For example, the invention of washing machines, supermarkets and other labor-saving creations released a lot of potential wage-earning by freeing up work-in-kind. This tedious article presupposes that at some point in the near future, "anything you do that makes you more valuable to your community" will replace everything else. It doesn't take much of a sense of anthropology to see that the more "first world" your economy, the more emphasis is placed on wages and the greater the de-emphasis on everything else. So it should come as no surprise that as the available wages decrease, the utility of other forms of income come to the fore. and if you are "completely alone" your alternate income streams are thin. And here's the thing. Civilization concentrates in cities because of network effects. The opportunities are greater. This is why cities tend to fill up with the young, and the higher the inequality, the more likely those young are sucking down someone else's wages from the hinterlands. There simply aren't many places where you can make a living as a makeup artist. Full stop. Unfortunately, those places tend to be the ones where out-of-towner rich kids suppress everyone's earnings potential. ...she bloody well could in Akron, Ohio. But she doesn't want to be in Akron, and I don't blame her. 'cuz the "being an extra" thing ($600? Friend of mine bought Alfred Molina for $1250; I've never seen extras paid more than $150 a day) and the "DJ at a roller rink" thing and the makeup artist thing are donezo.There are five kinds of income: Subsistence, piecework, work-in-kind, wages and influence
She literally can't take a 40-hour a week job for even $25/hr because she has zero support/subsidizing from family/partner to keep her finances in the black.
But her skills aren't worth $25/hr. in Akron, and the people she is competing for work with in NYC ARE subsidized, so they CAN take $25/hr. She's in every slot on Wallerstein's list of income categories. (I'm actually going to commission a large stained glass window from her, to help her through the holiday season.) She literally can't take a 40-hour a week job for even $25/hr because she has zero support/subsidizing from family/partner to keep her finances in the black.
...she bloody well could in Akron, Ohio. But she doesn't want to be in Akron, and I don't blame her.
"Worth" is the wrong way to look at it. She could bag groceries in Akron for $17 an hour. Maybe she can't earn $25 an hour anywhere doing anything except New York and LA. Like I said, civilization concentrates. But if she's making stained glass for someone on the other coast, a proximity to New York isn't a factor in that aspect of her business at least.
I'm not sure if we agree or not. I don't feel like we are saying the same thing. I said That is pretty clear to me. Do you agree? Sorry to hear about your struggling friend, it sounds very stressful, and reminds me how fortunate I am to have reached a point in life where I don't have financial anxiety, thanks in part to support I've received from family and rent-sharing roommates.The financial support Q gets from roommates and family means her employer has to pay her more, not less, to keep her as an employee.
A lot more businesses could afford to pay their employees 25 an hour as long as all their competitors had to pay the same thing. You can’t really pay folks 25 when your competitors are paying 13, or when UW outsources to India and can cut costs that way.
ROFL. No. That's not how competition works. If you are a welder and being paid $14/hr and the shop down the street is paying $25/hr, you leave your job and go get one over there. I tell you what ... I'll start a business as a call center doing tech support for Microsoft Office 365. All of my workers get paid $5/hr, and I am going to charge customers $25/hr for our services! The banks and investors will throw money at me! How can I NOT make $$$$$?!??
The thing I hate the most about economists and economics is the condescendingly simplistic way economic models work. Anyone sheep-dipped into engineering or, to a lesser extent, physics and chemistry will tell you is that your model should include everything relevant to the system and exclude everything that does not aid you in answering the question you're posing. Economists? The model should only include the stuff that proves your point and anyone who questions your boundary conditions is a heretic who should be burned at the stake. This is what drew me to Wallerstein. His whole point is that the only way you can study sociology in a limited way is by analyzing stunted little failurecultures that don't fucking get it and if you aren't analyzing the Triangle Trade AND everyone involved in it you aren't analyzing you're fearmongering. This whole 'who's subsidizing who' thing. It's overly simplistic. LA Times did an analysis back in 2016, 2017. The majority of people in LA under 30 were getting an average of $3k a month just to fucking live in LA. That was the beforetimes so good luck finding the article now, but USA Today wants you to know that the number of adults under 30 living with their parents has gone from 52% to 47% since 2020 so... obviously shut the fuck up. LA was a real wake-up for me. I was paying $800/mo for a shithole in North Hollywood and mixing reality TV so I could afford to go to meetings. Buddy of mine flew out from Hawaii, immediately moved into a $6000/mo penthouse and proceeded to work for free, 90 hours a week, for 18 months in various writer's rooms. Guess which one of us got staffed on Private Practice? Granted, he also nearly destroyed his marriage and did two stints in rehab but I mean... you can get a lot more done if your parents are subsidizing you $10k a month. Some industries are just.fucking.full of shit like that. Whenever we were having a miserable time on some show or other I would say "hey we could be wearing bags in Victorville at $350 for 12!" 'cuz the thing is? Those gigs exist, they're about half what they should be paying, and people take them because their parents are paying their rent and they are living the dream until they get sick of it, at which point they're going to go work at Daddy's bank anyway. Ask me about the Kings season opener I saw from the corporate box seats because a screenwriter friend's daddy couldn't find anyone to use the tickets. The reception gig is $13/hr because at any professional or legal organization with any kind of prestige, it's done by unpaid interns now. I knew a production company with five of them at any given time - people paying $20k a year to go to school at Emerson, then paying $8k a month to live in LA, so they could get "work experience." And because they were at Emerson, they worked for Emersonians, and got the gigs that nobody else could get when they were out. A lot of it? Script reading. I know a guy who did that professionally, had been doing it long enough to reject Being John Malkovich for HBO (I know). For reading your 20k word screenplay and writing up a 2500 word analysis of it, he made $25. He'd do five or six a day. And that's about all he did. So let's get back to the welder. If you are a welder and being paid $14/hr and the guy up the street is a "maker" who mostly herds packets at a data center but bought a MIG welder at Harbor Freight last week? He's going to take your business for practically free, right up to the point where he's decided he's bored with it. Let's get back to Quats. She's making $13 an hour because half of the jobs she could do have been taken up by children of friends doing it for nothing. "low prices are a reason they overlook their scruples" is a misrepresentation and he knows it and that's why we have each other blocked - so much easier to keep making your fallacious points when nobody calls you out on it. It's disingenuous to say that Quats is being subsidized by her family because we're talking about wages. It's more accurate to say that Quats' workplace is being artificially suppressed by every other family out there. There's a photographer in our building, or will be until December. She's 20. She has absolutely fucking no idea what she's doing, but she rented an office for $800 a month so that she could look professional. Lo and behold she's going through "family difficulties" and asked to be let out of her lease. She's the reason I stopped photographing for money - not her personally, but the legion of bored white women with an Amazon DSLR rig who basically need to earn a dollar to justify to their husbands that they're not hobbyists, they're professionals. The pandemic did a big, important thing - it pushed young professionals back in with their parents. And now? All those parents are saying "get a job." Whenever people who need the money to live compete against people who need the money for validation, wages go down. Libertarians don't see this because their boundary conditions are whatever justifies their hatred of their fellow man.
on god this is the truth - i live in a college town and work on a street adjacent to a campus of 50,000 -that's a lot of kids who will work for piss wages for spending money and a lot of kids who don't need any money but will work for free for "experience" i am making 13 dollars an hour because companies are entirely satisfied with being critically understaffed and paying peanuts to monkeys, just as long as the big number on the balance sheet gets bigger - when i see a motherfucker talk about the real world like everybody has perfect knowledge of all their options and a perfect ability to carry them out my eyes glaze over because it's a pitiful cardboard cutout of the world that gets trotted out to win cheap points - hint: if every economics 101 alum agrees with you, that's more of a knock on you than a benefit every kindergarden class agrees: 5 minus 6 is 0 because when you take away 5 apples from 5 apples, there aren't any left to take away. libtards destroyed with facts and logic
Excellent clarification. When looking at broken systems, it's important to be precise with our speech, and I wasn't. Thanks for that! I definitely didn't want to seem to be placing the blame on Quats or her family... they are doing what anybody would do to help their kid/partner get along. It's disingenuous to say that Quats is being subsidized by her family because we're talking about wages. It's more accurate to say that Quats' workplace is being artificially suppressed by every other family out there.
And when I need welding services I call around, get quotes for $30/hr and $40/hr, and support the business that has minimized costs and passed the savings on to me, because that's how competition works. You might be willing to spend more money on a business that you know pays employees better (even if you get exactly the same service from them). If there are enough customers like you, a business can get some market advantage with a pro-employee reputation. I doubt there are many such customers. The most vocal critics of Amazon on Hubski are also Prime members, paying $139 a year for the privilege of patronizing Bezos. They even admit that low prices are a reason they overlook their scruples, as if low prices and minimizing labor costs are completely unrelated. I shop at Trader Joe's all the time. I believe staff there is well-compensated; they seem loyal as I see the same faces week after week. I look for two francophone workers and try to chat with them. Their compensation costs more than what they would get at Walmart, and that extra compensation comes out of my pocket, obviously. I have a comfortable budget for groceries, so I am willing to pay more for the pleasant atmosphere. If my budget were tighter, I would save money by giving up on charming staff and shopping elsewhere.
I mean you pay the bare minimum that you can or you find some way to show your customer value in the fact that you can hire significantly better talent for 25 than I can for 13. Business leaders (professional management class not small biz owners) are Penny wise and dollar foolish so more often then not my shitty 13 dollar high school drop outs look equivalent to your 25$ professionals. In your example I’ll undercut you with people that get paid 5$ a day in India because that’s business. That’s how we ended up in the shitty support situation we’re in today,