Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI)
What would the early hours of Scott Walker's official presidential campaign be without him explaining how he hurts workers to help them? It's unimaginable, and indeed, Walker talked to Sean Hannity shortly after his campaign announcement and returned to his
favorite explanation for why he
doesn't want to raise the minimum wage from poverty levels: he wants more for Americans than the piddling minimum wage.
“The left claims they’re for American workers, and they’ve got lame ideas, things like minimum wage,” Walker said. “We need to talk about how we get people skills and qualifications they need to get jobs that go beyond minimum wage.”
Walker never seems to address why we can't have both—a higher minimum wage
and people getting better-than-minimum-wage jobs. Why it's some kind of lame insult to reason to do the thing you can do now—raise the minimum wage so that work pays enough to live on—to improve standards while you take on the bigger task of reshaping the American economy.
And that's the friendly reading. But we're talking about Scott Walker here. He doesn't want to improve wages or conditions for American workers! That's his brand—last fall, his administration said that $7.25 is a living wage. That blame-workers brand is why he's pinning the responsibility for getting past minimum wage on workers, in line with the giant myth that what's wrong in our economy is that workers don't have the skills they need to get good jobs. In reality:
If today’s labor market woes were the result of skills shortages or mismatches, we would expect to see some sectors where there are more unemployed workers than job openings and others where there are more job openings than unemployed workers. What we find, however, is that there are more unemployed workers than jobs openings across the board.
So, yeah. You're more likely to be unemployed or underemployed if you didn't go to college or don't have specialized skills, but there are
16 job-seekers for every 10 available jobs and many of the people left hanging, or stuck in jobs they'd leave if they believed better jobs were available, are highly educated, skilled workers.
Raising the minimum wage is super popular, which is why someone like Scott Walker who really, really doesn't want to raise it can't just come out and say "I care more about low-road employers than I do about working people." But that's what all his "lame" excuses boil down to.