If employers aren’t willing to pay low-end employees a decent, living wage, you’d think they could at least come up with some new excuses why they won’t.
Instead, we hear the same tired, phony prophecies of doom should workers make enough to feed themselves and their families.
Recently, when Chicago teachers walked out for a day to call attention to how the state funds (or doesn’t fund) education, they were joined on the picket line by fast food workers and other minimum wage earners who want the minimum wage set at $15 an hour.
And sure enough, there on TV was a representative of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association telling reporters that an hourly wage of $15 would force businesses to lay off workers. Thus, raising the minimum wage would hurt workers, not help them.
Every time I hear this explanation, I wonder why employers now keep on the payroll workers they can do without.
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People who own and operate businesses are smart. They hire people to perform tasks that make money for the businesses they own and operate. So, if they lay off staff because the minimum wage has risen, then they didn’t really need those workers to operate a successful business. Because if they laid off staff needed to operate a successful business, the business would be put at a competitive disadvantage, which might result in less business and lower profits.
A $15 an hour minimum wage is an annual salary of roughly $31,200. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour yields an annual salary of roughly $15,100. In Illinois, the minimum wage is $8.25 an hour, or roughly $17,200 a year.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sets the poverty level for a family of four at $24,300. Neither the federal nor Illinois minimum wage rates come close to paying enough to support a family. A minimum wage of $15 would.
But the folks who pay salaries continue to reject minimum wage hikes – for workers’ own good.
The logical result of such thinking is that if increasing the minimum wage reduced the number of jobs, then lowering the minimum wage would create jobs.
Thus, if workers were paid nothing there would be jobs for everyone.
Right?
Paul Sassone is a freelance columnist for Pioneer Press.