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minimum wage

lucasdaytona

lucasdaytona

Veteran Member
Joined
Jul 23, 2011
Messages
564
Location
Brasil
Hello to everyone!

I'm Lucas, from Brazil.

I want to understand more about financial situation of the people who deals with vintage computing, and I think that the minimum wage paid in the country is a good indicator. So, please tell me what is the minimum wage of your country. And please tell how much is that in USD, otherwise I will not understand...

Here in Brazil, the minimum wage (paid for those who work 40 hours per week, 30 days of vacation on a year, legal work) was recently increased, now it's 645 Reais, or 343 USD.




Thank you!

Regards,

Lucas
 
I was ready to blow this off, but you know this is actually interesting. I didn't know each state in the US had it's own ability to set a minimum wage. Course I think a lot of folks will be googling it just like myself or you could do, but here are the state minimum wages according to wikipedia. Federal is up to $7.25/hr.

Here is another comparison (*also via wikipedia so grain of salt for accuracy) of minimum wages by countries.

The problem is the cost of living is different in different areas where they have different taxes coming out of your salary, house and land prices might be higher, or food costs, etc. For example a study which I can't find a reference to quickly from some school I think said based on the cost of living you would have to have a minimum income/wage of $75,000 or something to live in Silicon Valley, CA. Their point was a federal or state wage wasn't enough to live in higher cost places like Alaska, California, or Hawaii (the extremes of course being the cost to import goods to those places).

What are your thoughts on the correlation between minimum wages and vintage computing or collecting?
 
In 2012 the Arizona State minimum wage is $ 7.65/hour (just increased 10 cents per hour for the first time in two years), but that doesn't mean that people actually get $ 7.65/hour.
People in the service industry (restaurant waiters/waitresses, etc) generally only get $ 2/hr with the balance of that $ 7.65 expected to come from tips.
Others, like those in the landscaping industry won't get anything like $ 7.65/hr.
To top it off, an employer in AZ can call you in for the day, and if it's not busy they can send you home having worked 1/2 hour, and that'll be all the pay you get for that day.
(that's in contrast to Canada where if you're called in, and then sent home, you have to be paid a minimum of 4 hours).

I don't think vintage computer collecting relates in any way to minimum wage - from my experience, you need a lot more than minimum wage just to be able to buy the parts to fix the crap you get off Ebay.
 
I went to college in Arizona, then moved back home to Oregon (which has one of the highest minimum wages in the country - with no allowance for service industry tips - minimum is minimum, period.) When a friend and his wife graduated, they moved to Portland, too. The husband was an Oregon native, but not the wife. She had been waitressing to pay for college, and was pursuing a graduate degree here in Portland, so she waitressed again. She was floored by the fact that she had gone from the "below minimum plus tips" to "actual minimum, higher than AZ's, plus tips". (Right now, according to the US Department of Labor, it's $4.00/hr in AZ for tipped positions, $8.60/hr in Oregon for all positions.)

Current US federal law states that tipped employees must still receive federal minimum wage. The employer may write tips off against that up to a certain amount per hour, but they still must earn minimum wage. So, for example, the minimum federal wage for tipped employees is still $7.25/hr, but employers may pay as low as $2.13/hr if tips are sufficient to bring total income up to $7.25/hr via a "tip credit". (Some states have different methods of calculating - in some states, the tip credit is a flat dollar/hr amount, in others it is a percentage.)

Lucas, for 40 hr/week, this amounts to USD $15,080 per year at the Federal minimum. (While positions that are tipped can have a lower minimum, they are theoretically supposed to get minimum wage including those tips.) The highest minimum wage state is Washington state, at $9.04/hr, which equates to USD $18,803 per year.
 
I believe that farm workers operate off of a considerably different wage-hour schedule. In general, they make nothing close to the wages their city cousins do.
 
Anonymous Freak said:
Lucas, for 40 hr/week, this amounts to USD $15,080 per year at the Federal minimum. (While positions that are tipped can have a lower minimum, they are theoretically supposed to get minimum wage including those tips.) The highest minimum wage state is Washington state, at $9.04/hr, which equates to USD $18,803 per year.
Click to expand...
But can you LIVE on that wage?
 
It depends largely on exactly where you live. In most large cities - not a chance. But a single person in a smaller town could likely support themselves on Washington state's minimum wage, living frugally.

Penn State University has a "living wage calculator" that figures out how much you would need to make to live reasonably: http://www.livingwage.geog.psu.edu

Kiplinger has a list of the 10 cities of at least 75,000 population with the lowest cost of living:
http://www.kiplinger.com/tools/slideshows/slideshow_pop.html?nm=10leastexpensivecities

So comparing the two, the lowest cost-of-living city, Fort Smith, Arkansas, has a "living wage" need of $7.17/hr for a single person, in a state that has a minimum wage of $7.25/hr. So a single person could live on minimum wage there.

By comparison, New York City has the highest cost of living, with a single person needing to make $11.86, yet minimum wage is only $7.25
 
I believe that California minimum wage is either $8 or $8.50 per hour. The cost of living in San Francisco is very close to that of NY City (if not the same) and interestingly enough SF has it's own minimum wage law that sets it to ~$10/hr for San Francisco County, so a single person making minimum wage could probably live in SF, though on the frugal side of things.
 
Lorne said:
... that's in contrast to Canada where if you're called in, and then sent home, you have to be paid a minimum of 4 hours...
Click to expand...

I fairly sure that this is the same in CA. I seem to recall the law stating that there is a minimum shift length of 4 hours. I remember being called in for Sunday morning meetings at Best Buy and being paid for 4 hours, even though the meeting was only 2 hours long.
 
Maybe I misremembered, but yeah that sounds more accurate with living wages needed. Say somewhere like Mountain View, CA you would need (I guess it's a bare minimum) 12.24/hr as a single adult vs the 8/hr current minimum wage. That site suggests a yearly salary required of 25,460 for just yourself. If you had a kid (single parent) you'd need to make $45,262 a year or $21.76/hr.

Given I do think cost of living ends up being filtered a bit with the pay of the same job here vs there probably (hopefully) being higher.
 
Back a couple years ago the stupid ex-governor of California tried to lower the minimum wage to $6.55 an hour, lower than federal. That's the reason it didn't pass. I remember that since my mom works for the state, and even now the pay sucks (especially in Napa where our $1400/mo rent is CHEAP!)
 
It wasn't my intention to simply link minimum wage with vintage computing, I just want to know if people around the world could live and buy vintage stuff. Here in Brazil, if you complete high school, you should be able to receive 2.14 USD/hour, working 8 hours per day. This might sound absurd to some people, but here everything tends to be expensive, even food. The market is very abusive, one example: I buy computers parts from ebay, to resell them here, and even with oversea shipping, I still win some good money, I buy a 9 USD (with shipping) Pentium M 740 from ebay, and sell it here for 20~25 USD, simply huh?

It's a beautiful place to live, but there's much more poverty than I wanted to see.
 
Pretty interesting profit margin for a single sale. Good for you though. How do gas and food prices tend to compare? Here where I am gas crept up (after new years and folks driving back it somehow managed to be worth more) to 3.17 or so a gallon. Milk is around $3.25 a gallon I think (depends on the store, once and a while I can get cheaper mexican label milk for slightly under $3.00). Not sure what other things apply but rent, and food can really make or break folks depending on location. Not to mention bills for heating or cooling. Tonight is the second time it'll freeze since our one December freeze for a few nights in a row. Other than that I've just been enjoying not having the AC on year round, but fortunately we don't have much to heat either.

I remember one or two folks here who were talking about the price of coal brickettes which is interesting (never seen one personally and I think they're banned in most states). But that, gas, electricity.. it's a tricky economy to figure out :)

I do think some folks are using obsolete (probably not vintage) gear as their main gear due to funds and availability. Just like a person or two in Africa who would be excited to get a PIII level computer at the house or for schools.
 
lucasdaytona said:
It wasn't my intention to simply link minimum wage with vintage computing, I just want to know if people around the world could live and buy vintage stuff. . . . It's a beautiful place to live, but there's much more poverty than I wanted to see.
Click to expand...

I have half my basement (and some upstairs too) full of vintage stuff. I don't normally consider paying money for old stuff though. I've gotten most of it from the dump, and before that, just picked up the freebees. After 20 years things tend to be "vintage". Anyway, what I'm saying, is this hobby requires absolutely no money - even to participate in a big way.

As for quality of life - here in BC we have a huge, and growing, number of poor people. The minimum wage is $10 but you only take home about 70% of that because of taxes and benefits. So that $1150 or so can go pretty fast when you consider that a basement suite in Vancouver is typically close to $1000/mo. Obviously you have to share or live in a poor place. In my own case, I'm on disability, and that gives you under $1000 per month. I'm extremely lucky that I own paid for property so can live a decent life, but many people are not so lucky. I am also able to walk and do things. Can you imagine what it would be like to be in a wheelchair and have to live in a shared apartment and skimp on food? Then there is a growing portion of the population who just live on the street. The fact that the price of food has doubled in the last few years is also really putting pressure on many people. We certainly have an interesting mix of rich and poor in this Province.
 
In Norway there's no minimum wage (as in: There's no law stating one). There are however other regulating mechanisms in place so in practice it's recommended that people 18 and above shouldn't accept e.g. a summer's vacation job for less than around $18 per hour.
(Lately there have been (due to EU) quite a few cases of rip-off companies, often based abroad and thus ignoring all laws and regulations anyway, where they import foreign workers who are paid a third of that and getting no overtime (which _is_ regulated by law) and so on.)

-Tor
 
Tor said:
In Norway there's no minimum wage (as in: There's no law stating one). There are however other regulating mechanisms in place so in practice it's recommended that people 18 and above shouldn't accept e.g. a summer's vacation job for less than around $18 per hour.
(Lately there have been (due to EU) quite a few cases of rip-off companies, often based abroad and thus ignoring all laws and regulations anyway, where they import foreign workers who are paid a third of that and getting no overtime (which _is_ regulated by law) and so on.)

-Tor
Click to expand...

Tor,

$18/hr is a REAL great money here, you have to be at least college to try to win this high money, I understand that life costs more in another countrys, but it's impressive. People living in streets is absolutely normal here, you saw them every day, every place, every city (Brazil is a country much bigger than all Europe).

About the Gas/Milk:

a gallon is 3,6 liters right?

so, a gallon of milk will be 4 USD , and a gallon of gas will be 6 USD.

And the worst part about the gas, the public transport system is terrible, without a car, you can not go to everywhere. THERE'S NO GOOD SUBWAY, and every bus is full in working time.

Someone talked about PIII machines, another day, a woman just called me to fix her computer, when I was there, the pc was a Pentium 166MMX... another day was a K6-2 400. See, we have all top class tech stuff here too, but a lot of people couldn't afford this.

All I think is that vintage computing here is very very expensive. I'm glad to hear that it's not as this everywhere.
 
lucasdaytona said:
a gallon is 3,6 liters right?
Click to expand...
A US gallon is 3.79 litres according to www.gallonstoliters.com (!).

A litre of milk here is between 13 and 15 NOK, which translates to about $8.80 per gallon. Gasoline is actually in the same price range at the moment, so it costs the same as milk, funnily enough.

A pint of beer in a pub is now around $12 or $13 (there's of course quite a bit of variation there. Anyway it's mostly stout that's sold in pints, otherwise it's half litres. Except for those places that sell beer in 0.4l, which I don't frequent. The price per litre is much higher in that case).

It's probably better to compare hamburger prices. but now that I think about it I have no idea.. I never buy junk food, I don't even visit the joints so I can't recall the last time I saw the price of burgers.
Let's see, today I paid $12 for a hot lunch at the canteen at work. But usually I choose the smaller portion and then it would be about $9. This would be about three times as expensive in a cafeteria.

Bus to town (20 minutes walking distance) is $4.50 with no rebates (lasts for all the buses for an hour), or $3.50 if I use a prepaid card.

A small apartment can be some $1200-$1800 a month. But this also varies a lot. There's no upper limit there but it's hard to get below $1000, even for cheap small student's apartments.

So all in all the wages are OK in Norway (even without a defined minimum wage), but we also need the money for the cost of living. I shall not mention the price of a new car, let's just say we tend to laugh when Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame complains about how expensive some car is (in the UK).

(I should also mention that taxes are quite high. Income taxes are about 50% for me, lower for those with loans. And the VAT is 25%, applies to almost everything except books (no VAT), or food (slightly lower VAT). The taxes pays off though, I don't need all those health insurances and the like so to me it's a bargain that I'm pretty happy with. Wouldn't change that for anything.)

I've almost never seen vintage computer equipment for sale in Norway, so I don't know what the level is there. It's been more common to simply give away stuff to good homes (e.g. old minis and the like).

-Tor
 
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