<a href="http://livingwage.mit.edu/" rel="nofollow">http://livingwage.mit.edu/</a><p>I found reading the project more interesting than the article.
<i>Olson says it would be too complicated to pay people different wages based on household size</i><p>... also, it would be wildly unfair, and quite likely illegal.
>So what would be enough to live on? That would of course depend on where someone lived, and how much that place costs. And so Glasmeier rounded up some of her best graduate students to create, basically, a giant spreadsheet. They loaded it up with the best regional data available, from government and industry surveys, on costs for housing, food, child care, medical expenses, and transportation.<p>I don't get it: she "avoids tourist traps" (a few paragraphs up) to find the places people really shop. But when estimating cost of living, she uses detached government aggregates rather than finding how people actually make their wages work, meaning she would necessarily miss eg how grandma provides most of the daycare services.<p>I would think that the primary question in building out a living wage figure would be to ask how people are currently pulling it off on low wages, rather than extrapolate one's own life through some categorized figures.
The wonderful thing about the free market is that you don't <i>have</i> to use magical algorithms to determine the "correct" price of things, you just set the price you're willing to buy/sell at, see how many takers there are, and then adjust the price upwards/downwards.<p>If you need to hire twenty people, and you find twenty people willing to do the job for eight bucks an hour, and you can't find twenty people willing to do it for seven bucks fifty an hour, then eight bucks an hour is the correct price. It's not that tricky.
IKEA Richmond BC. Google that + strike, they have been striking for over 1 year over labor dispute.<p>They demolished the existing one and opened a bigger one right next door. It was barely open before strike shut it down.<p>The changes in this article do not help Canadian IKEA workers get a fair wage
Kind of depressing that the largest charity in the world pays just enough to live.<p><a href="http://www.economist.com/node/6919139" rel="nofollow">http://www.economist.com/node/6919139</a>
Hasn't IKEA heard of the Sharing Economy? Living wage is socialism. We're hackers, we should be figuring out ways to externalize the real costs of doing business onto a contract labor force with flexible hours and no guarantee of basic income. Keep people hungry, that's how you squeeze the most of them.
Federal minimum wage is below the survival line (without children), as showed by Amy Glasmeier. So low, that corporations have to find what is the real lower bound for the survival of their workforce. (Not even reproduction of the workforce, just its survival) Isn't that absurd?<p>Let rise the federal minimum wage now.
It's sad that such a worthwhile tool like this uses data that is four years old. I realise the publish cycle of government agencies is slow and as such is a limiting factor, but in this day and age with everything being fast moving, it can be limiting.