Most people I know in town make $10-20/hr. There is a startup scene here but most of those companies either use interns or pay less than $20/hr.
There is a large portion of the population in jobs like nursing, banking, tourism or real estate but they are not the ones who are doing the jobs we are talking about.
Who is going to serve/cook the food? Where will they live?
Teachers make $29-49k in my area. Nurses $39-68k. (based on glassdoor).
Average hourly rate is $17.39 (payscale.com)
If you work 2000hrs/year your pre tax income is ~$35k. Right now there are 1bd apartments going for $1100/mo (albeit brand new with amenities such as pool/weight room).
So if you are lucky enough to make the "average" pay in the area that means you can get a 1bd apt...assuming you qualify. A very low end house you need to make $75k/year to purchase...again assuming you qualify.
> So if you are lucky enough to make the "average" pay in the area that means you can get a 1bd apt...assuming you qualify. A very low end house you need to make $75k/year to purchase...again assuming you qualify.
I think in many parts of western Europe average earners can’t even afford a 1bd apt.
I believe he means that if you were to randomly pick people from the working population (excluding children, disabled, unemployed, etc.), there is a 50% (or higher) chance that person makes minimum wage.
Extreme inequality combined with familial support. It's not uncommon now to have one or more kids living with the parents into their 20s while they go to college and build up their career, right as the homemaker enters the workforce with limited professional experience so you get 2+ minimum wage earners and one established professional bringing in support. Throw in the gig economy, which hoists capital and operational risk onto the employees (sorry, "contractors"), and you've got a majority of the working population making minimum wage.
It's even worse in university towns, where the college kids are almost guaranteed to be working for minimum wage while receiving external funding from loans or parents which can skew the numbers even more.
That's what I mean! On average this number is less than 3%. If it's managing to be 50% here, what is going on here to make the local economy so staggeringly poor? What does a place this devastated have to offer if the housing is not even cheap?
It is semi remote...but still has the "city stuff". Very beautiful area, year round recreation assuming you enjoy winter sports.
But it is a right to work state. I suspect that is part of the issue. There is very much a "Good ol' boys club" in town which has a tendency to employ people due to favors or connections (regardless of qualifications).
Even in the 90s when we had Agilent, Itron, and several other large companies in Spokane the area directly across state line was significantly cheaper to operate in. So we ended up with a few electronics contract manufacturers who got their start being basically sweatshops (yes...solderers get started out at minimum wage or barely above it).
I know a person who in the 90s was making $50/hr as an EE...last I heard he was making $25/hr to do the same job now. (When Agilent shut down it flooded the local market with engineers and techs).
You are off by a factor of fifty. That's like confidently announcing that US median household income is 3.4 million, or declaring that the US has a population of 16 Billion people. How do you react when people hold such crazy views?
"In 2019, 82.3 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.1 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among those paid by the hour, 392,000 workers earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 1.2 million had wages below the federal minimum. Together, these 1.6 million workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 1.9 percent of all hourly paid workers."
Those below the minimum wage are exempt workers such as waiters because they earn tips, and I guarantee you that their real income (on average) is much higher than minimum wage, but data is hard to come by as much of that income is unreported. Thus the 2% figure is a generous over-estimate.
More generally, I'd encourage you to question the mental model that made this sound like a potentially true claim in the first case. An economy where most people are paid minimum wage would be incredibly different than the one we actually have.
Per BLS, 80.4 million workers make an hourly wage, with 1.8 million at or below at the federal minimum. [0]
It is kind of fascinating that people have such wildly different ideas about what the objective facts are, and how that must flow downstream into their worldviews and politics. Between 51.6% and 2.3% is not a small difference! Those are very different worlds we could be living in!
It is fascinating and horrifying at the same time. On the one hand, I am hoping the person was simply quoting something they heard in a rant online. On the other hand, I am hoping it is just a case of misreading available BLS data. Neither is exactly ideal and both paint rather sad picture of how we interpret reality.
