In all of our United States of America, there is not one single state where the minimum wage is a living wage. Not one. The call to raise the minimum wage across the country to $15 an hour is not a solution; it is the least we can collectively do in order to recognize the labor that millions of Americans carry out on behalf of all of us. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is pro-labor. On Monday, she tweeted out a perfect synthesis of what’s wrong with our current concept of a minimum wage.
The tweet is a perfect summary of our current wage system. Ocasio-Cortez deftly points out how ludicrous our comparative valuing of products and people is. She also strikes at the heart of free-market profiteering by accentuating the source of a considerable amount of product value: labor.
It is very easy to understand that more money per hour is helpful to people trying to put food on family tables and roofs over heads. But there are larger, more profound results in showing a meaningful appreciation of the cost of peoples’ labor. A recent study points out that there are connections between raising minimum wages and declining suicide rates.