Minimum Wage

$10.00

I think it is time to raise the minimum wage.  The people who earn the current minimum wage, or a little bit more than the minimum wage, are having a hard time supporting themselves.

The federal minimum is now $7.25.  Let's make it $10.00.  Expensive cities and states -- San Francisco, New York -- can set higher minimums if there is local support.

People get crazy when they talk about this.  

Those who support a higher minimum wage believe that evil, greedy CEOs and billionaires are getting wealthy on the backs of poor people.  This is largely untrue.  Most low-wage workers are employed in retail and food service establishments that run on very slim margins.  

Those who oppose a higher minimum wage argue that there will be fewer jobs as a result.  This probably is true.   Businesses that cannot raise prices enough to generate income at this wage will close.  Fast-food businesses probably will move faster than they are doing already to replace counter workers with digital ordering systems. 

I prefer not to get into these arguments because they lead nowhere.

What moves me is the simple fact that we have a large working class of people who must piece together several low-wage jobs just to make ends meet.  The Affordable Care Act decreed that full-time workers -- defined as those working 30 hours a week or more in a job -- must get health insurance coverage from their employers.  And many business owners need higher staffing in peak hours and leaner staffs during the slower periods of the day.  Effectively, it makes sense for employers to limit hours for low-skilled and easily replacable employees.  

If you have the misfortune to be one of those easily replacable employees (and there are more people looking for work than there are jobs at this point), you find yourself stringing together two to four part-time jobs and traveling from one job to another  -- a few hours here and a few hours there every day -- to achieve something like a 40-hour workweek, which is what used to be the definition of full-time employment.

Raising the minimum wage to $10 will allow some of these unfortunate people to cut back the number of part-time jobs they hold.  For two such people who are married, 40-hour workweeks at minimum wage will generate an annual income of $40,000, which isn't great but is certainly above the poverty line.

For the rest of us, this will mean higher prices at restaurants and grocery stores, and even fewer employees in department stores.

For workers whose efforts cannot generate more than $10 an hour worth of benefit to employers, this will mean unemployment.

Those are the trade-offs.

I'd like to see a lower than 25-percent high school dropout rate.  I'd like to see more training programs in high schools and community colleges.  I'd like more employer- and union-sponsored internships in the skilled trades.  I'd like states to drop expensive certification requirements for mid-skill jobs like hair braiding.

We can't seem to get any of these common-sense things done, unfortunately.

So, at the very least, why don't we should raise the minimum wage?