A while back there was a meme on social media along the lines of “Let’s tie the minimum wage to local rent levels and let the landlords and business owners fight it out.”
This is actually a very good idea, because in no county in these United States is it possible to work a minimum wage job and afford any apartment or rental home.
Let me say that again:
In no county in any state of these United States is it possible to work a minimum wage job and afford any apartment or rental home.
Let’s do some math.
The federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour and has been since 2009. Some states have boosted that minimum wage; Georgia is not one of them.
If a worker made minimum wage and worked full time, i.e., 40 hours/week,[1] they would make $290.00/week before taxes. [$7.25 x 40 = $290.00] I’ll be honest: I found myself doing this math over and over because I could not make myself believe that a full-time minimum wage worker in this nation only makes $290/week or $1,160/month.
Then if we assume the worker works all 52 weeks with paid vacation/sick leave, that gives them a yearly salary of $15,080, or just under the federal poverty line for 2025.
Hold that thought.
In Newnan, GA, the average rent is $2,185/month as of this writing, nearly double what someone making minimum wage makes.[2] It would take a minimum wage of $13.66/hour to pay that rent.
Keep thinking. Rent is not anyone’s only expense. Conventional wisdom is that rent should amount to no more than 30% of your take-home pay.
So:
- $2,185 (rent) = .3*x
- x = $2,185/.3
- x = $7,283/month, for a minimum wage of $45.52/hour
This is where my brain went sproing and yours probably is doing the same thing. More than $7,000/month for a minimum wage job??
More sproing: That’s a yearly salary of $94,892, for 52 weeks of pay.
Am I proposing that someone who works at KFC or Kroger or Ollies or wherever should make $95K a year? I never made that much as a 35-year educator with an Ed.Sp. degree, nor as the director of the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program. (I actually made less as the director of GHP; they got a deal.]
Yes, I am in fact proposing that anyone in this great nation of ours who works a full-time job of 40 hours/week should be able to rent an apartment or house in their town for 30% of their salary. The fact that we’re shocked that the resulting annual salary is more than six times their current annual salary — if they’re working full time, which most are not — and more than even most education professionals currently make — is more of an indictment of the capitalist economic forces that we’ve permitted to keep a significant portion of our wage earners in poverty than it is a comment on the “worth” of minimum wage labor.
So could we implement this? It seems clear that it would be unfair to implement the policy on a statewide basis: Average monthly rent in Buckhead is $4,000, while in Hahira it’s $1,295. Creating a uniform statewide minimum wage would be a burden for the employers of rural areas and shortchange the workers in wealthier areas. If we made it applicable by congressional district, though, it would be more equitable. And if our brilliant state legislature wanted to create a more granular regional system, that would be even smarter.
The big, ugly question of course is where is that money coming from? Large corporations can suck it up and make less profit (or pay their CEOs less than 290 times the amount they pay their employees), but what about the local shop or cafe owner? I can’t see how Golden’s on the Square could pay $45/hour to their fry cooks.
It’s fun to think of employers and landlords fighting it out to lower/raise the minimum wage, but let’s face it: Our capitalist overlords would no doubt figure out a way to keep “their” money and screw over the working class. As usual.
I have no real solutions; I will leave it to our brilliant legislature and their continuing efforts to improve the lives of the citizens they represent to figure out the best and fairest way to implement the plan, remembering always that the goal is to make it so that anyone working full time — and almost every job should be full-time — is able to rent an apartment where they live.
Oh, and about that tipped wage of $3.25/hour…
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[1] Most minimum wage jobs don’t offer full-time positions, because if they did, employers would also have to offer health benefits in most cases. So most minimum wage workers have to work multiple jobs and still cannot afford a month’s rent.
[2] Yes, yes, roommates, multiple family members working, yada yada yada. You are missing the point.