The question was posed by Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "What is your position on the minimum wage? Should we have it?
Scott Walker's response: "Well, I am not going to repeal it, but I don't think it serves a purpose."
Watch the video, look at his facial expression at around 35-36 seconds when he says, "I don't think it serves a purpose." That statement, that facial expression, tells you all you need to know about Walker and his contempt for the working poor of Wisconsin. Later in the video, at about 2:19, he goes on about flipping burgers at McDonald's and how he did not expect to make $15 an hour doing it. I am Scott Walker's age, and I worked at McDonald's when I was in high school flippin' burgers. I made $3.35 an hour. After a month on the job, I got a raise to $3.45 an hour. I would have gotten another 20 cents an hour, but I was told I did not smile enough to warrant it (you try to smile while wearing brown polyester and are covered in french fry grease).
Walker obviously does not care about the working poor, or the middle-class. It is time to show him the door and elect Mary Burke. Please give $3 to help Wisconsin become Scott-free.
Jump below the fold for more.
Chris Rock said it best in the above Saturday Night Live sketch:
I used to work at McDonald's making minimum wage. You know what that means when someone pays you minimum wage? You know what your boss was trying to say? "Hey if I could pay you less, I would, but it's against the law."
It was 1982 when I was working at McDonald's. It was my second job; my first one was a paper route, but with only 24 subscribers on my route, I was only making about $20 every two weeks, so off to McDonald's I went. The minimum wage at the time was $3.35 an hour, and after my first raise I was making $3.45 an hour, which works out to
$8.50 an hour in today's dollars when you account for inflation.
Assuming Walker was just as good at burger flippin' as I was, I'm assuming he was also making $3.45 an hour. So both he and I were earning the equivalent of $1.25 more an hour than today's current minimum wage. That was pretty good money for a teenager back in the '80s.
However, in the intervening years a few things have changed in our economy. Wages have stayed stagnant, tipped wages are still at the ridiculously low $2.13 an hour, and we have changed from being a manufacturing economy to a service economy. The high-paying middle-class jobs that existed when Walker and I worked at McDonald's are gone. You are not going to be able to get a job that pays much over minimum wage with only a high school education today. If you need to support a family on that wage, you will need to work two or three jobs.
The last time I was in a McDonald's I did not see any teenagers working there. I saw adults, and the data backs up my observations:
Based on analysis of federal government data, only about 30 percent of fast-food workers are teenagers, say Janelle Jones and John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. In studying the Current Population Survey for 2010-12, they also found that more than 36 percent of fast-food workers over the age of 20 had children.
Walker is wrong an out of touch on minimum wage. He claims he does not want to focus on the wage floor, that he wants to focus on the higher-paying jobs. The problem is, there are not enough of those high-paying jobs available.
Contrast this with what Mary Burke has said about minimum wage:
"Governor Walker, in standing in the way of raising the minimum wage, basically is ensuring that people have to be dependent on government programs," Burke said. She added that an increase in the minimum wage "leads to people being able to support themselves and their families."
Burke gets it. She understands that a low minimum wage costs
all of us money. Large corporations can get by paying such a low wage knowing that what they fail to pay their employees will be subsidized by the taxpayer in the form of public assistance benefits. I, for one, am tired of subsidizing the McDonald's and Walmart's of the world. As they have not seen fit to pay their employees a living wage, it is time for the the minimum wage to be raised, indexed to inflation, and renamed as the living wage.
Walker does not care about the working poor or the middle class. It is time to show him the door and elect Mary Burke. Please give $3 to help Wisconsin become Scott-free.