Nov. 10--If there's one thing I've learned from writing about whether the minimum wage should be raised, it's that writing about whether the minimum wage should be raised is a tricky business.
There are passionate voices on both sides of the debate, and those voices are often backed up by research that supports their points of view.
There's no question the American public supports a minimum wage increase. In the midterm elections, four states -- Alaska, Nebraska, South Dakota and Arkansas -- voted to raise the minimum wage. Voters in San Francisco favored a minimum wage boost up to $15 an hour. And more than 65 percent of Illinois voters said yes to a nonbinding ballot question that asked if the state's base wage should be raised to $10 an hour from $8.25 an hour.
Some opposed to a wage increase argued that voters sent mixed messages, because they also elected a number of Republican lawmakers who oppose changing the minimum wage. I disagree with that analysis. None of the candidates ran strictly on opposition to a minimum wage increase, and there were so many other factors at play in the election that you can't claim the GOP wave was an indication that public opinion on this issue has shifted.
It hasn't. People want to see the minimum wage raised.
If the election taught us anything it's that states and cities aren't going to wait around for lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to act.
"It's clear that states and cities are going to have to lead the way for restoring the minimum wage to a more meaningful level," said Paul Sonn, general counsel for the National Employment Law Project. "We're seeing it already. More than half the states have stopped waiting for Washington and raised their minimum wage above the federal level. And now some larger cities are raising their wages higher than the state level. The question now is how long is it going to take before Washington is pressured to act."
While I very much like the idea of people making more money, I have trepidations about just raising the minimum wage without also implementing policies that will help people earn more in the long run.
I wrote a series of columns on this subject earlier this year, focusing closely on the pro and con arguments. Before immersing myself in the issue, my opinion was, I believe, similar to that of most Americans: "Yeah, we should raise the minimum wage. It's too low and it seems like the right thing to do."
But, as with many things in life, the realities are far more nuanced.
Opponents of an increase describe the minimum wage as a "blunt instrument" for addressing the needs of lower income people. They believe a better approach is to bolster the education system and offer more job preparedness programs while possibly tweaking the Earned Income Tax Credit, a federal wage subsidy for low-income people, to more directly benefit those who need financial help.
"We've got to get into teaching people how to fish," said Allen Sanderson, a senior lecturer in the University of Chicago's Department of Economics. "In the high-tech world that we live in, somebody who's unskilled, their economic life is basically over. They're virtually unemployable. So one has to find out how to fix that. Even if it takes 10 years, it's going to be much, much better in the long run."
In the end, I agreed that just raising the minimum wage is not the best idea. It's a Band-Aid over a bullet wound. The income gap and the struggles low-wage workers face need to be addressed in a comprehensive manner, so why not make a moderate increase in the minimum wage while putting programs in place that give people a fighting chance to move up into higher paying jobs.
Sounds good, right? The problem is, I still don't hear politicians who oppose raising the minimum wage talking about logical alternatives that will help low-income workers.
Sanderson agreed: "Politicians have a very short time horizon. In some ways, they just don't give a rip about something that happens 10 years out, they care about something that's two years out."
Sonn, with the National Employment Law Project, agrees that comprehensive change is needed, but believes a wage boost should come first because it's "a readily achievable first step."
"We need to tackle and modernize our job training system, but that's not enough," Sonn said. "We need revamped job training and K-12 education and a college system that better fits our economy. But it's clear none of that is adequate to raise income levels for people on the bottom. It's numerically impossible to turn all low-wage jobs into stepping-stone jobs, because there are too many of them in our economy."
This all makes me sigh rather loudly.
The smart thing for us to do is attack this problem from different directions -- a moderate wage increase; better education; smarter job training; tax credits that target those who need it most. But it's clear the political will isn't there, and even though politicians pride themselves on being communicators, they've done a lousy job explaining the need to look at more than just the per-hour money.
Unless wage increase opponents get their acts together -- swiftly -- it's clear states and cities will take action and the minimum wage will go up.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I want people to make more money, and I don't presently see another option on the table.
I just think we could do better. And we're not.
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