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Antiwork

17 hours a week of minimum wage burger flipping used to be enough to afford a two-bedroom apartment.

I've written this elsewhere on reddit but I want more people to see it. It's a mathematic breakdown of how wages and rent in the past compare to now. In 1970 the minimum wage and median rental costs were $1.60 an hour and $108 a month respectively. That means you could afford a median cost apartment (realistically an okay, 2-bedroom apartment) working just 17 hours a week flipping burgers at Mc D's. In 2022 the federal minimum wage was $7.25 an hour and the median rental cost was $1,545 a month. You'd have to work more than full-time (54 hours a week) flipping hamburgers in order to afford that same apartment. However, the cost of everything else like food and gas and electricity and education has also gone up in that time. Things are different now and what nobody wants to say is that a lot of younger people are…


I've written this elsewhere on reddit but I want more people to see it. It's a mathematic breakdown of how wages and rent in the past compare to now.

In 1970 the minimum wage and median rental costs were $1.60 an hour and $108 a month respectively. That means you could afford a median cost apartment (realistically an okay, 2-bedroom apartment) working just 17 hours a week flipping burgers at Mc D's.

In 2022 the federal minimum wage was $7.25 an hour and the median rental cost was $1,545 a month. You'd have to work more than full-time (54 hours a week) flipping hamburgers in order to afford that same apartment. However, the cost of everything else like food and gas and electricity and education has also gone up in that time.

Things are different now and what nobody wants to say is that a lot of younger people are just fucked. No amount of hard work or planning can save you from the fact that housing prices increase 10 times faster a year than your wages do.

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