One of the big arguments you'll hear from low-wage employers trying to keep the minimum wage as a poverty wage is that raising it would be bad for workers because it would lead to job losses. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Jeannette Wicks-Lim, a research assistant professor at the UMass-Amherst (the H is silent, contrary to what you hear here) Political Economy Research Institute, both
challenge that claim. Wicks-Lim tells The Real News that:
One year, in 2006, we looked at Arizona state minimum wage proposal, which was a 30 percent increase in the state minimum wage. At the time, it was $5.15, and it was being proposed to be raised to $6.75. [...] And what we did is we went and we looked to see how much would this cost businesses. We looked at what are the wages of workers at the time, how many hours did they work. We added that all up. We looked at payroll taxes and how much that would go up for employers. [...]
What we found is, for the average business in Arizona, that the cost increase would be less than 0.1 percent. And so if you want to think about it in real concrete terms, businesses, by raising their prices by less than 0.1 percent, would be able to cover all the costs of a minimum-wage increase of a size of 30 percent.
Similarly, Warren pushed a restaurant owner on the numbers:
During my Senate campaign, I ate a number 11 at McDonald's many, many times a week, and I know the price on that one, $7.19. According to the data on the analysis of what would happen if we raised the minimum wage to $10.10 over three years, the price increase on that item would be about $0.04. So instead of being $7.19, it would be $7.23. Are you telling me that's unsustainable?
Meanwhile, Minnesota is considering raising its state minimum wage to $9.95 an hour, and state Rep. Jason Meta is taking a
minimum wage challenge with Working America, trying to find out a little about what it's like to live on $7.25 an hour. As we know from food stamp challenges, the fact is that you don't find out the hardest stuff when you're just doing it as an experiment for a week—you don't live with deep-seated uncertainty, don't worry about what happens if you get sick and need something you can't afford on a food stamp or minimum wage budget. But the stuff you do learn is very much worth having in the policy debate.
A fair day's wage
- Sarah Jaffe and Josh Eidelson (two of my favorite labor journalists) have an exciting new labor podcast called Belabored over at Dissent.
- Teamsters around the country are on strike at Republic Services/Allied Waste.
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All together now: Awwwww.
Last week a 10-month-old poodle-terrier mix was found tied to the railroad tracks. An engineer spotted an old man walking near the railroad tracks and noticed that the man had left something behind. The engineer was able to stop the train in time using his emergency brakes and discovered the pooch still alive. The puppy’s hero remains unidentified.
The puppy has been put up for adoption at Riverside County Animal Services.
- Reality-type TV continues to have lousy labor practices. The Writers Guild of America, West is alleging that Joan Rivers's production company and the E! Network have violated wage laws in producing the show Fashion Police:
Writers on the E! Network cable show, in which Rivers and other hosts comment on the fashion of celebrities, on Wednesday filed complaints with the state Division of Labor Standards Enforcement, alleging they are owed more than $400,000 in back wages.
The complaint follows a similar complaint writers on the show filed last week against E!, contending the cable network owed them $1.1 million in back wages.
- Hooters allegedly forces out waitress because her brain-tumor scar was ugly. I thought that Undercover Boss episode where the weenie son of the founder of Hooters was appalled to learn that waitresses in the chain weren't always treated very well was supposed to have fixed things like that. (Snark. Undercover Boss somehow expects us not to notice that the fact that everyone the undercover boss encounters is broke and mistreated might possibly point to there being widespread problems in the company as a whole, and expects us to be happy when the three or four individuals depicted get, like, a vacation, with no real changes made in the workplace.)
Education
State and local legislation