
The woman behind Ikea's living wage calculator - saticmotion
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/woman-behind-living-wage-calculator
======
thyroxo
[http://livingwage.mit.edu/](http://livingwage.mit.edu/)

I found reading the project more interesting than the article.

------
cperciva
_Olson says it would be too complicated to pay people different wages based on
household size_

... also, it would be wildly unfair, and quite likely illegal.

~~~
GeneralMayhem
Certainly illegal. Marital status is a protected class in the United States.

~~~
cperciva
In Canada we have a "disadvantaged group" rule, which basically says that
discrimination is fine as long as you're discriminating in the right
direction. I wasn't sure if the US had anything similar.

~~~
archgoon
Interesting; how does "disadvantaged group" status get determined? Is there a
list; or would it be left to a judge's discretion?

EDIT: Is this the law in question?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_equity_(Canada)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_equity_\(Canada\))

~~~
cperciva
Which groups qualify as "disadvantaged" is generally up to judges to decide,
with the caveat that since Canada has a common law system (portions of Quebec
law notwithstanding) these questions have pretty much all been resolved
already.

I was thinking mainly of the various human rights acts, but the principle
applies across a wide variety of contexts. The federal government is
constitutionally barred from creating laws which discriminate against
aboriginals, for example, but is allowed to create laws which discriminate in
favour of aboriginals since they are considered to be a disadvantaged group.

------
SilasX
>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.

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.

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.

~~~
nhebb
Most likely the professor is pulling together whatever information she can
with the resources she has. Can you imagine how big of a ground effort it
would take to collect the information you described?

~~~
SilasX
Absolutely! That's why I wasn't criticizing the missing country-wide
tabulation of such data, but trying to reconcile its absence with the praise
of the researcher at the beginning, and how she collects another kind of data
on the ground.

Of course, that could just be stuff getting scrambled by the PR machine.

My main criticism was this: if you're going to calculate a living wage,
wouldn't the number one question be "How are people currently living on their
wages?" Even knowing how _one_ family pulls it off would be tremendously
informative, and from that point you could figure the cost of the missing
amenities. In contrast, the researcher's approach is to assume they buy
everything from some model budget (probably based indirectly on her team's own
lives), but less of it.

------
afafsd
The wonderful thing about the free market is that you don't _have_ 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.

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.

------
sergers
IKEA Richmond BC. Google that + strike, they have been striking for over 1
year over labor dispute.

They demolished the existing one and opened a bigger one right next door. It
was barely open before strike shut it down.

The changes in this article do not help Canadian IKEA workers get a fair wage

~~~
gaadd33
Given its about Ikea in the United States, why would it help Canadian workers?
Plus doesn't Canada have a much better minimum wage in the first place?

------
DanBC
Kind of depressing that the largest charity in the world pays just enough to
live.

[http://www.economist.com/node/6919139](http://www.economist.com/node/6919139)

~~~
sliverstorm
What? A charity's purpose is to help those most in need. Every dollar a
charity gives to someone beyond what they _need_ is a dollar they can't give
to someone whose needs still aren't met.

~~~
lambda
I think you missed reading the linked to article. According to the article,
IKEA is actually legally incorporated as a charity, though it's only
"charitable" purpose is "innovation in the field of architectural and interior
design," and the charitable foundation appears to only be a shell built to
avoid taxes and funnel money to the founder (in order to maintain the facade,
it donates minute amounts to the Lund Institute of Technology).

So IKEA, despite being from all outward appearances a privately held for-
profit enterprise, it technically categorized as a charity, and despite all of
this pays many of its employees below a living wage, though has now promised
to start paying them a living wage, at least according to this calculator.

~~~
sliverstorm
Oh, I read the article. I object specifically to the idea of my parent, that
-being a charity- implies they should be giving their employees more. As if
charities were in the business of being generous.

------
jeffreyrogers
10.76 x 40 x 52 = $22,380.80

Pretty appalling.

~~~
lotharbot
I have a wife and a son and we did fine on my salary of $21,000 last year.

There are a lot of parts of the country where that's a perfectly viable wage.

~~~
notduncansmith
That seems nuts to me. I significantly more than that, and it still feels like
we're scraping by. Our location doesn't have a particularly high cost of
living, either.

~~~
lotharbot
one man's "barely scraping by" is another man's "I've got everything I need".

I've got a house, reliable transportation, health care, food, a great school
for my kid, and lots of family nearby. My cost of living would go way up if I
ate out more, bought all new furniture, or spent big money on activities for
my son, and then it would seem like I needed a lot more money.

~~~
existencebox
I think what he was saying though, which I'd agree with, is that in most
places if we assume a minimum livable wage to be ~10$ (which is a generous
statement, I think), one barely comes out at ~20k (napkin math) yearly. Yes,
you may be able to cover the necessities, but you mentioned healthcare, if you
had an unlucky year where you were responsible for the maximum of your copay,
that would probably put you into savings? Or if there was an "act of god" that
wasn't covered under, say, car insurance (to give an example that nailed me
recently, a hailstorm), there's another few k.

As some sort of point to all this, the discussion on livable wage needs to
encompass the fact that there are some big holes in our financial system that
people can still fall through that will hamstring you for years to come, even
if the base wage is technically livable.

------
rubbingalcohol
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.

------
kome
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?

Let rise the federal minimum wage now.

~~~
lotharbot
There are lots of people who work but don't need (and aren't worth) survival
wages -- high school kids who still live with their parents, for example.
Should they be unemployed and therefore unable to gain real-world working
experience because they're not worth survival wages?

There are lots of others who need, but aren't worth, survival wages -- like my
autistic friend. He partly supports himself working, with the rest coming from
government programs. Should he be unemployed and therefore be 100% government-
supported instead of 25% government-supported?

It's good that minimum wage and living wage are not the same thing. Let's stop
confusing the two.

~~~
FLUX-YOU
>There are lots of others who need, but aren't worth, survival wages

That's got to be such a small (and unfortunate) pool of people that I'd
happily send some taxpayer money to meet the article's living wage number. We
can probably pay for it by not buying another single jet next year or
something.

And honestly I'm not trustworthy of corporations' judgments of low end labor
worth anyway. For one thing, you can work at extremely busy stores and get
paid the same as workers at the very dead stores in the next county over
because they use blanket values for these positions.

~~~
lotharbot
> _" I'd happily send some taxpayer money"_

We already do that. Remember how some people were criticizing Wal-Mart because
some of its workers were also receiving government benefits?

When you set the "minimum" to be 100% of a living wage, then people have to
make the jump from pure-government-funded to pure-self-funded without any
intermediate stepping stones. They have to show up and be ready to produce at
a level that completely supports themselves on day one. Whereas a minimum
that's set at 50% (or 25% or 75%) of living wage means someone can show up and
be semi-productive and earn _some_ of their own way, and then either step up
to 100%, or stay at the level they're at as long as they need to based on
their own abilities.

------
joelhaasnoot
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.

