The minimum wage is an economic issue that has suffered under years of misinformation from the corporate media. We're all familiar with the refrains: it drives down employment, hurts small businesses, and the economy as a whole, etc. Well, we already know that's just not true - the most prolonged prosperous period in our nation's history, post WWII up to the stagflation of the 70s, was marked by all of those things that we are told are bad for the economy. There are also lost of theoretical economic arguments for the minimum wage along the lines of Ford's living wage theories.
That said, focusing on all of the abstract economic minutiae, as important as those are, is not the purpose of this diary. This diary is about one facet of the economics of the minimum wage that doesn't receive enough attention given the potential power it will have to resonate in part of the Republican coalition. That facet is families.
A little economics 101: competition tends to push prices down to their bear cost. This is the not-so-invisible hand that economists like to brag about as the good side of capitalism. It's the
prisoner's dilemma applied to a massive group. The real upshot is that it keeps the sellers honest about what the minimum payment necessary to motivate them really is in the short term and encourages them to reduce their costs in the long term. Ok, the second part is a double edged sword if the seller really only manages to dump the costs on other people without them realizing it - economists have a euphemism, "externalizing," but it's stealing, plain and simple. I digress.
Ok, in the abstract that's all well and good. Let's apply this to a real world situation - employment. In this market the sellers are the people who offer their time and efforts and the buyers are the employers. As a general rule employers will be outnumbered by potential employees, so most of the time the competition is on the sellers side instead of the buyers side. Ergo people's wages, unless they're not competing with a lot of other people like when they have a specialized skill, will tend to be pushed down to cost. What is the cost of producing labor, anyway? Well, it's the amount necessary to keep your hide alive and healthy enough to do the work, for starters, including enough to handle the "unexpected" problems. That's the hard-nosed, only "I" matter economist answer, though. Given the realities of human nature, however, it's really the the amount it takes to take care of your family. This could mean your spouse and kids, or just the kids, throw in a sick parent, handicapped brother, or etc. Or it could just mean little old you.
Think about the implications of those last two sentences for a second.
That's right - those who have to support a family compete in the same labor market as those who don't. So they have to compete with people who have costs fundamentally below their own unless they dissolve their family bonds. In other words, the free market economy the corporate wingers dry hump and pay lip service to is fundamentally 100% anti-family. It puts psychological pressure on those who are able to earn a living to abandon their family in order to get a job. Even when demand for labor goes up, those who cannot afford to work for less will be the last ones hired and, because they cannot afford a pay cut, the first ones fired.
Granted, a family doesn't necessarily have to get by on one income. The spouse can work. Older kids can work. People can work more than one job. This reduces the pressure for the family to outright disintegrate, but it robs those in the family of the thing that they need to devote to each other to keep their family bonds intact: time spent together. For the family as a unit it's a deteriorate or die proposition.
There are remedies for this problem. The minimum wage sets a floor that is supposed to prevent competition in the labor market from cutting the throats of families. Universal healthcare also removes a huge competitive disadvantage from our families in the labor market. Public education not only gives a leg up to the children in working class families in the future but also helps their parents compete in the labor market right now - it makes it so they don't have to pay as much to get their kids an education and, I hate to admit it, provides "baby sitting". I'm certain that everyone can think of more.
There can be reasoned debate over how high to set the minimum wage - enough for a family with 2 or 3 average children to survive is certainly one level that sounds reasonable. Nobody who values families can debate the necessity of it being somewhere around that level, however.
The reason I bring this up is because we haven't done enough to point out this key concept - that the minimum wage protects families from having to compete with single people who don't have to support a family and therefor can not only work for less but can also devote more time and energy to training and the job. I mean, this ties in to every issue that those who claim to focus on families care about. We need to stress that to drive a wedge between the fundamentalist foot soldiers who claim to support families and the corporate interests that supply the money in the Republican power machine.
So, the question is how do we sell this in quick sound bites with the proper framing?
Final thought: what is the #1 reason for divorces? Answer: money. I wonder if that could be related to this...