I've been mulling over that recent NYT article which had some business owner complaining that he couldn't get skilled (!) manufacturing workers to work for $12/hour.
At full time with no vacations that's about $25K/year.
When I was in college, I could reliably get summer temp jobs paying $9-10/hr based on my modest typing and basic word processor skills. The BLS's CPI calculator tells me that $9/hour then is about $15/hr now. As I said, my typing skills were modest (reasonably fast, but very sloppy and typewriters were still in use) and my word processing software skills were about at the level of ...typing and printing. And I was 19.
