This week we've seen an entire new battlefront open with the fight for a Living Wage. In more than 150 cities arond the nation worker protested yesterday for a $15 Minimum Wage arguing that most of the people (over 3/4th) at these jobs are over 20 years old. Many of them have families, they are trying to make-ends-meet under the most difficult situations possible. People doing these jobs are below the poverty line.
Working and still below the poverty line.
But then they have to listen to claptrap like this from Rafael Cruz arguing that the "Average Black doesn't understand the Minimum Wage".
Conservative activist Rafael Cruz argued that African-Americans need to be “educated” to oppose minimum wage laws, citing the work of a Black conservative member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Buzzfeed reported.
“Jason Riley said in an interview, Did you know before we had minimum wage laws, Black unemployment and white unemployment were the same? If we increase the minimum wage, Black unemployment will skyrocket,” Cruz said during a speech to the Western Williamson County Republican Club in Texas last month. “See, he understands it, but the average Black does not.”
He says Black unemployment
will skyrocket? It will? The
Black Unemployment Rate is already 10.7%, more than double that of Whites 5.3%. For young males like Michael Brown in cities like Ferguson that unemployment rate is nearly
50% for young black men.
This is a fact that's been true since the Census Bureau began tracking this data in 1954, so regardless of what Lou Dobbs claims, you can't
blame this low jobs rate on Obama for not focusing on jobs, it's been like this since before he was born. But still people like Rafael Cruz seem to believe that the one thing Black People need to find more jobs, is to keep getting paid
peanuts for those jobs.
Naturally Rafael didn't come up with this on his own. This Trope has been a long time flogging horse of the like of
Thomas Sewell.
Most nations today have minimum wage laws, but they have not always had them. Unemployment rates have been very much lower in places and times when there were no minimum wage laws.
Switzerland is one of the few modern nations without a minimum wage law. In 2003, "The Economist" magazine reported: "Switzerland's unemployment neared a five-year high of 3.9 percent in February." In February of this year, Switzerland's unemployment rate was 3.1 percent. A recent issue of "The Economist" showed Switzerland's unemployment rate as 2.1 percent.
Most Americans today have never seen unemployment rates that low. However, there was a time when there was no federal minimum wage law in the United States. The last time was during the Coolidge administration, when the annual unemployment rate got as low as 1.8 percent. When Hong Kong was a British colony, it had no minimum wage law. In 1991 its unemployment rate was under 2 percent.
As for being "compassionate" toward "the poor," this assumes that there is some enduring class of Americans who are poor in some meaningful sense, and that there is something compassionate about reducing their chances of getting a job.
Yes, that's exactly what it "assumes". Or rather doesn't.
Sewell doesn't provide links, or charts that show long term trends, only cherry picked examples from when Hong Kong was still a British Colony. But if Sewell's argument is true it should be easy to see an almost direct correlation between those countries with high unemployment rates and those with higher minimum wages. That is his premise right? That regardless of outliers and other obvious economic factors it should be a fairly clear link, yes?
It's kinda not.
Just at glance taking the top five highest minimum wage countries, Australia, Luxemborg, France, Ireland and Belgium as you can see below when it comes to their rates of unemployment, they're literally all over the map.
If you add the next five highest minimum wage countries Netherlands, New Zealand, Canada and UK (with the US at number 11) you get about the same thing [although the lower chart leaves out Canada & New Zealand].
It's easy to knock down claims such as Cruz's and Sewell which those trusty 'ole things I like to call - "Facts". That's not the real issue. The point is to examine this odd and disconnected fantasy that Rafael and Sewall wants to live in. They're twisting facts and history to maintain and justify unrestrained corporate greed. Greed that hurts the nation and even the international economy in the long run.
When CEOs and Wall Streeters get $Million bonuses immediately after committing acts of mortgage fraud that got them fined $17 Billion, tanking our economy, costing many of us our middle class jobs and lifestyles, they argue that they still deserve them for "job retention". When people working two or three minimum wage jobs take to the streets to try and help improve their lives - people like Cruz, and Sewell, executives at the Koch Bros call it "Fascism".
In an audio recording published by The Undercurrent, Richard Fink told the gathering of conservatives in California — a conference called “American Courage: Our Commitment to a Free Society” — that people who felt like victims lost meaning in life and turned to totalitarian political ideologies. Raising the minimum wage, he claimed, would cause people to lose their jobs and lose their meaning in life, giving fascism a fertile ground to grow in.
Getting better pay, enough that you can go without public assistance as
McDonald's and Walmart advise their employees to do, makes you a "Fascist".
You just can't make this stuff up. You just can't.
They will say just about anything to keep the gravy train rolling for those at the top, usually right after they've put all their front line workers, and sometimes customers, under the wheels.
This video graphs the link between Union Membership, Worker Rights, the Minimum Wage and shared prosperity from the 1920's, during the great depression, until now. http://www.epi.org/...
The correlation we don't see nationally, or even internationally between the minimum wage and unemployment we see perfectly between the percentage of people in unions, earning a decent wage, and the middle classes share in the overall nation's prosperity.
Cruz wants us to believe, that he believes, that the Black/White job gap was non-existent before the Minimum Wage was established, which was in 1938 in the middle of the Depression. At the time the Unemployment Rate was 19%, which was actually an uptick from the previous rate of 16.9% in 1936, down from a high of 23.6% in 1932.
In chart form that looks like this.
Now some of this is estimated because as I stated above the Census Bureau didn't always track these numbers however Rafeal would argue that, but of course, unemployment went "through the roof" the next year
except that it just plain didn't. It dropped five points in 1940 to 14.7%, and then another ten points with the advent of WWII to just 4.7% in 1942 and was only 1.7% by 1944. He claims the unemployment rate for Blacks and Whites was the same
during the depression and also
during the middle of Jim Crow?
Is that the slightest bit credible? Does it sound believable?
Here's one source, which doesn't seem to think so. http://www.britannica.com/...
The Great Depression of the 1930s worsened the already bleak economic situation of African Americans. They were the first to be laid off from their jobs, and they suffered from an unemployment rate two to three times that of whites.
...
In early public assistance programs African Americans often received substantially less aid than whites, and some charitable organizations even excluded blacks from their soup kitchens.
This intensified economic plight sparked major political developments among African Americans. Beginning in 1929, the St. Louis Urban League launched a national “jobs for Negroes” movement by boycotting chain stores that had mostly black customers but hired only white employees. Efforts to unify African American organizations and youth groups later led to the founding of the National Negro Congress in 1936 and the Southern Negro Youth Congress in 1937.
Virtually ignored by the Republican administrations of the 1920s, black voters drifted to the Democratic Party, especially in the Northern cities. In the presidential election of 1928 African Americans voted in large numbers for the Democrats for the first time. In 1930 Republican Pres. Herbert Hoover nominated John J. Parker, a man of pronounced antiblack views, to the U.S. Supreme Court. The NAACP successfully opposed the nomination. In the 1932 presidential race African Americans overwhelmingly supported the successful Democratic candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
This is the history that Sewell and Cruz wish to Whitewash. Or if you prefer, Whitesplain, to the "Blacks" so they can be
Edumacated on them. Particularly they like to stress more than a lot bogus argument that the real Civil Rights Leaders - where "Republicans" didn't cha know?
“I said, as a matter of fact, ‘Did you know that civil rights legislation was passed by Republicans? It was passed by a Republican Senate under the threat of a filibuster by the Democrats,’” Cruz told the audience. “[He said] ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ And then I said, ‘Did you know that every member of the Ku Klux Klan were Democrats from the South?’ ‘Oh I didn’t know that.’ You know, they need to be educated.”
Like many modern Conservatives, Cruz blurs the lines here between
Northern and
Southern Democrats at the time. There was a point in time when both Strom Thurman and Robert Byrd were both Southern Dixiecrats with strong segregationist ties, however those times changed. Byrd renounced his Dixiecrat and segregationist ties, Thurman
did not. Byrd remained a Democrat, Thurman - like many bigoted Southern Democrats, became a Republican and joined with 60's Republican Icon Barry Goldwater to opposed the Civil Rights programs of President Johnson.
It's hogwash, pure and simple. There were Democrats and Republicans on both sides of the issue at the time. Not so much anymore.
It's hogwash just like the argument that raising the minimum wage will costs jobs has been most recently addressed by the CBO as various proposals began float through Congress last year after the President made a push for raising the wage during his State of the Union.
They estimated that a far smaller number of workers would lose their jobs - as predicted by Sewell and Cruz - than would be lifted out of poverty by the either of the proposals they reviewed.
$10.10 Option - Jobs Lost 500,000 - Out of Poverty - 900,000
$9.00 Option - Jobs Lost 100,000 - Out of Poverty - 300,000
In either case you would have a Net Gain, and for those people lifted out of poverty an additional benefit would be a shrinking in the need for public assistance & support programs. People who make more money can afford to go pay for things out of their own pocket, including - if they chose - to purchase products and services from the very same types of companies their employed by, such as McDonald's. Greater volume for those companies, due to larger amounts of spendable cash among their customers, tends to cause them to need to retain more employees to meet that demand. Family Income for those below the proposed new rates would grow between $7.6 Billion and $16.5 Billion respectively. There's also the point that many of these workers who might be losing their jobs, are already working more than one job at a time and this change might enable them to voluntarily leave that second or third job and concentrate on their primary now that the wages from it have become more in line with their cost of living.
So in each example it can be shown that it's simply not the case that increasing wages automatically means lost jobs without any other benefits or gains. Certainly if it's done too fast or too far it can have an inflationary effect, but in today's dollars the $2 minimum wage of 1968 would be about $10.68 per hour.
We hear people say these are supposed to be your "starter" jobs. It's the place where kids learn basic responsibility, the meaning and rewards of work. It's where you're supposed to be humble, yet after the collapse first in 2001 of middle-class jobs, and then again in 2008, the ladders for upward mobility these people might have previously depended on lift them out of this job into the next one have been dashed to splinters. There is no more "next job". We have college educated kids working these jobs because when they apply for what they've actually spent $50,000 going to school to learn there are 500 other people already in line ahead of them for that same job.
Everyone says these aren't supposed to be "careers", but that's exactly what they have become.
In this segment from All In which Chris Hayes yesterday he reported on the Strikes and Walk-outs that occurred in support of a Living Wage. During his discussions with one activist, Shantel Walker, she revealed the shocker that I used for title of this post. After they discuss the difficulty of unexpected schedule changes at about the 8:00 mark. Note: She's very street. Very New York.
http://www.msnbc.com/...
Chris Hayes: Are you scared, Management knows your involved in this fight?
Walker: I rather fight for something, rather than let it go down to nothin'.
Hayes: Are other people joining this, when you have those conversations, what are those like?
Walker: We all in the same situation, we all in the same boat. We all lookin' for the same thing. We all trying to raise our families on a minimum wage and it just can't happen, not just in New York, anywhere in America.
Hayes: What do you make?
Walker: I make 8 Dollars and 50 cents. I've been with this company since 1999, it's 2014.
Hayes: You've been with.. say that again.
Walker: I've been with Papa John's since 1999. I started with the company in '99. It's 2014.
Hayes: You've been there fifteen years?
Walkers: Yes! I've been there 15 years, on and off.
Hayes: And you're making...?
Walker: 8 dollars and 50 cents. And it's a disgrace and it disgusts me. That's why I do what I do. We gotta do whatever it takes to win. I believe that we can win, I know we can win.
Fifteen Years and Still Making only $8.50 an hour? In New York? If that alone doesn't show that upward mobility in America has become a snare and a delusion, if don't know what else will. Black people already know what they need to know about the minimum wage. It needs to change.
Vyan
1:21 PM PT: One thing about all of these protests about the Minimum Wage is that it's causes Republicans to react and tell us what they really think about it. For example Eric Ericson thinks that if you're on Minimum Wage at age 30 you've Failed at Life.
“The minimum wage is mostly people who failed at life and high school kids,” Erickson said.
“Seriously, look. I don’t mean to be ugly with you people. What? So my producer from my show is in here and he's just staring at me, can't believe I said this. If you’re a 30-something-year-old person and you’re making minimum wage you've probably failed at life.”
No, second chances for you!
That's really awful news for the people in that situation who would benefit from a minimum wage increase since their average age happens to be 35.
The typical worker who would be affected by an increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour by 2015 looks nothing like the part-time, teen stereotype: She is in her early thirties, works full-time, and may have a family to support. Our analysis of workers who would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage shows:
The average age of affected workers is 35 years old;
88 percent of all affected workers are at least 20 years old;
35.5 percent are at least 40 years old;
56 percent are women;
28 percent have children;
55 percent work full-time (35 hours per week or more);
44 percent have at least some college experience.
Hear that, Eric Ericson thinks you're a Loser! Now you know.
6:38 PM PT: Video of Shantel via Youtube.
7:28 PM PT: The issue of mobility sits at the heart of the dichotomy between Ericson's Vision of personal "Failure" for insufficient Horatio Alger Bootstrappy-ness and Walker's reality of financial stagnation. In March The New Yorker tackled this issue with their article on The Mobility Myth.
Seventy per cent of people born into the bottom quintile of income distribution never make it into the middle class, and fewer than ten per cent get into the top quintile. Forty per cent are still poor as adults. What the political scientist Michael Harrington wrote back in 1962 is still true: most people who are poor are poor because “they made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents.” The middle class isn’t all that mobile, either: only twenty per cent of people born into the middle quintile ever make it into the top one. And although we think of U.S. society as archetypally open, mobility here is lower than in most European countries.
Time and time again when we look at the facts, the vast majority (70%) of those attempting to move from the lower economic classes to the middle class - Don't. An even lower percentage (80%) will fail to move from the middle economic classes into the upper class, yet time and time again we hear this
pipe dream that "anyone can make if only they
try hard enough" but the facts and history show that 70-80% of them don't.
No, you're probably not going to wake up tomorrow with Kim Kardashian's Life. Or Win a Reality/Game Show.
This isn't to say that people shouldn't try hard, but rather that the pathways to prosperity are far more narrow and treacherous than those who continue to lead us toward them as if they were a primrose path would ever care to admit. Simply because a few people can beat the odds and scramble their way up the hill from the bottom, doesn't mean that's the norm for most people because it's. simply. not.