Protecting Poor People from Minimum Wage Increases

Teddy Kennedy is trying to get a Federal minimum wage increase attached as an amendment to the proposed Bankruptcy law changes. The current wage of $5.15 per hour has not been increased for eight years, during which time Kennedy points out the Senate has received seven salary increases. Kennedy proposes a raise to $7.25, phased in over time.

The business think tanks say raising the minimum wage will hurt poor people who will lose their minimum wage jobs to high school students from more affluent families. Supposedly these kids, who only use the money for extra discretionary spending, are not willing to work at the current low wage but will take a job for a couple dollars more.

If you were an employer with a minimum wage employee who is poor and needs the job to live on and is doing decent work, why would you take the job away from him and give it to some high school kid with no work experience who was not willing to work at all until the minimum wage was raised and who really doesn’t need the job but just wants to have some extra money for buying more things he also doesn’t need? Not only would it not be nice to your present employee, but it would be a bad business decision.

I suspect this gibberish from think tank spokespersons has three purposes:
1. To fool the general public into thinking minimum wage increases actually injure poor people; 2. To fool dumb employers, if the minimum wage is increased, into letting good workers go and hiring less desirable ones; and
3. Also if the minimum wage is increased, to get the lazy children of these overpaid think tank people off their asses and out into to the world of work instead of asking for another allowance increase.

The minimum wage has been lagging because the traditional moral force behind keeping it up to date, the labor unions, have lost much of their power, and the only other force with the power to raise the minimum wage, the Republican controlled Congress, lacks the moral integrity to do it.

As an indicator of the Republican attitude toward workers, Senator Santorum has countered Kennedy with a proposal to increase the minimum wage by only half as much, provided that certain business tax breaks totaling $4 billion are also adopted, that many more businesses are made exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act and that overtime pay obligations are undermined by adoption of so-called "flex-time" rules calculating excess hours over a two week period rather than weekly (e.g. you work 20 hours this week and then when you have to work 60 next week you do not get paid for overtime). In the House, Majority Leader Delay says there are no plans to consider any bills to raise the minimum wage.

I learned at my mother’s knee that Republicans are for the big business bosses and Democrats are for the working people. The lesson she taught back then remains true to this day.