Making $2.15 an hour certainly does sound worse than today’s minimum wage, which federal law mandates must be at least $7.25 an hour. But what Blackburn didn’t realize is that she accidentally undermined her own argument, since the value of the dollar has changed immensely since her teenage years. Blackburn was born in 1952, so she likely took that retail job at some point between 1968 and 1970. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator, the $2.15 an hour Blackburn made then is worth somewhere between $12.72 and $14.18 an hour in today’s dollars, depending on which year she started.
Max Keiser
Financial War Reports
Our leaders know the path to lead us via leadership.
Leadership apparently doesn’t include navigation, thats something thats always bothered me
‘A pox on both their horses’ (hoarses).
In 1971 I worked at a gas station. I made $1.60 per hour.
I could buy gas at a self-serve gas station for 25 cents a gallon, so every hour, I could buy 6.4 gallons of gasoline.
To do that now, you’d need to be making something like $24.00 per hour.
This is a New Zealand story too :
http://www.livingwagenz.org.nz/news.php
http://tvnz.co.nz/breakfast-news/call-create-living-wage-18-40-video-5341187
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/blogs/bull-dust/8302470/How-to-earn-a-living-wage
“Not that I’m regretting moving back here for a moment. I don’t resile from anything I wrote in my blog, Ten reasons why we’re better than Australia.
But alert readers will have noticed I did not include wage rates in those reasons. It’s not a flattering comparison.
The Living Wage campaign’s use of the word “dignity” is an important one for me. It recalls the days when New Zealand could genuinely claim that Jack was as good as his master. When a fair day’s work was rewarded with a fair day’s pay.
I promise to stop saying “in Australia” soon, but, well, in Australia a trade or blue-collar worker is properly rewarded for the work they do and can afford the necessities of a reasonable standard of life.
Why? Certainly a more unionised workforce helps, but mostly it’s healthy competition for skilled workers.
The two-speed nature of New Zealand’s economy has been brought home to me sharply since my return. My (rented) house in Auckland’s eastern suburbs sits on the dividing line between the fabulously wealthy suburbs of St Heliers and Mission Bay and the battlers’ suburbs of Glen Innes and Panmure.
We can sip lattes with the drivers of late-model European cars on Tamaki Drive and then shop at GI Pak’n'Save less than 2km away, where desperately poor families weigh the cost of everything going into their trolley.
It didn’t surprise me when researching this article that while I was away overseas the OECD found that the gap between the rich and poor had grown faster in New Zealand than in any other country in the developed world during the last 20 years.
If what the wage campaigners are saying is correct, then something like 740,000 Kiwis are not really living – they’re subsisting.
In a country the size of New Zealand, that is an utter disgrace.
One solution would be to force employers to pay higher wages by law.
I don’t agree with this.”
ALSO ::
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10865272
When I was a young lolbertarian, an ounce of gold cost the same as an ounce of domestic marijuana.
Either minimum wage should be $20/hr
-or-
Significantly expand vocational 2yr programs that can put people into $30/$40-hr jobs
-or-
Make all undergraduate education free
@User2323. Any ideas like yours that make sense and are far better then what they are doing will never happen. The powers that be do not want us to be successful. For me, the only hope I see is post-collapse. Rebuild without them.
20 yrs ago, I was on £2/hr… £80/wk, -£20 tax = £60 take home.
Bus fare was £10/wk. Wasn’t long till I told em to ram it and find some other sucker.