Screw Florida

From an email I wrote tonight to Kim:

$14 on a Friday night is ridiculous. So’s $20 on a Saturday night. I’m coming home.

Those numbers refer to tips only. Florida has no minimum wage, so we follow the federal law here. My employer is required to provide me with $2.13 an hour as a “base pay” rate, and if my weekly average pay (including tips) drops below $5.15 an hour (the federal minimum wage, compared with $6.75 in California), my employer must make up the difference. So I should see a small pay check for this week (most of it is taxed — tip jobs [waiter, bartender, etc.] tend to have slightly high rates of taxation). Oh, wait, no, I take that back. Tonight I made a total of $29.585 when you include my hourly wage, and last night I made $23.585. My employer is only required to provide me with extra cash if my total for each of those nights had dipped below $23.175. You gotta love the federal minimum wage Florida.

Were you aware that the federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised in about 7 years? It was set to $5.15 on September 1, 1997. Assuming a 40-hour work week and 50 work weeks a year, that amounts to a yearly wage of $10,300. In the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale area in 2004, $10,300 has the same buying power that $8,886.27 did in 1997 when the minimum wage was set, which seems to mean that workers making the federal minimum wage nowadays can afford about 86.3% of what they could back in 1997. In San Francisco, where the minimum wage was raised to $8.50 an hour this year, workers working the same amount make $17,000 a year, which is equivalent to about $13,764.77 in 1997 dollars. In SF in 1997, minimum wage workers made $10,300 a year (same as in Florida), which shows a quality of living increase for minimum wage workers in SF of 33.6% between 1997 and 2004, compared to the 13.7% decrease of QOL for minimum wage workers in the FLL/MIA area. Note that through all this, the federal Health and Human Services poverty guidelines have been raised 18.0% over that same time period. Sounds like Mi Ami has been fucked and forgotten. Which is one of the reasons I’m moving to California.

Keep in mind that I know nothing of economics. The subject has always mystified me.

Maintaining the same QOL in Emeryville, CA that I do here in Hallandale, FL requires about a 38.6% increase in my income. By my most conservative guesstimates, I made at least 50% more working at Venus in Berkeley (a short bus ride from Emeryville) than I currently do at Tuna’s in North Miami Beach (a bitch of a bus ride from my house in Hallandale, or more often, an inconvenient hitch with one of my coworkers). I say at least, because I’m comparing a very low guesstimate of my average income at Venus with a high guesstimate of my average income at Tuna’s. More likely, I made about 80-100% more, which is what I’d need to maintain the same QOL in the City of SF. However, if I choose to live in SF, I will surely shop around for the nicest cheap apartment I can find and I’ll get some job in the city, where the minimum wage is 25.9% higher than it is in Berkeley.

Again a disclaimer: this is probably all based on some seriously fuzzy math.

Resources:
Minimum Wage Laws by State
Cost-of-Living Calculator over time by Metropolitan Area
Relative Salaries City to City (in current dollars)
History of CA Minimum Wage
HHS Poverty Guidelines over time

Further Reading:
Hope for Florida?