Having just finished Senator Edward M. Kennedy's latest tome "America - Back On Track" just last night I was not surprised to see a diary here at Kos (which I will not link to as it does more harm then good) on the subject of Minimum Wage (MW) which I just might have agreed with, in timbre if not in tone, just yesterday.
Typically I might have simply dropped a few threads at the above mentioned nameless diary but so many people seemed to suffer from the exact same misconceptions about MW that it seemed as if it were more of an Urban Legend then simple wrongheadedness and worthy of a diary entry.
More below the fold but first a disclaimer - I do not know anyone personally that works for MW, and that includes the workers - from the servers to the dishwashers - at a friends restaurant, but then again he is atypically fair minded and generous for the industry. This ignorance led to some pretty widely held, based on the comments at the above-mentioned nameless diary, misconceptions about the MW debate which I can hopefully help to debunk.
The book itself "America - Back On Track" is a quick read of only 200 pages, and while I can not heartily endorse it as a "great read" or a "progressive manifesto" I do recommend it for it's content, just like Dave Sirota's latest venture "Hostile Takeover", as a reference tool.
Considering myself fairly well read most of the content, which is conveniently separated by subject matter, was known to me, until I flipped open the section on Minimum Wage. Some of my own misconceptions, and I hope yours, were simply blown away.
Urban Legend #1
Most MW workers are teenage kids working the summer for gas money (or some other variation of the pimply faced kids theme).
"Opponents also claim that increasing the MW won't help working families, because only teenagers earn the MW. In fact, almost two-thirds of such workers are adults. A third are working family mothers. More than a third are the sole breadwinners in their family."
Seems pretty straight forward and even though it flew in the face of what I believed about the MW workers, remember I don't know anybody that works for MW, it didn't really concern me that much until I put some numbers to the words. I searched for a while on the web and couldn't find any clear numbers so I decided to extrapolate my own.
According to the latest statistics from the "United States Department of Labor - Bureau of Labor Statistics" there are currently 143.7 million people currently employed in the U.S. Of these 143.7 million workers approximately 9 million are MW earners and that translates (going by the 2/3's quote of Sen. Kennedy) to approximately 6 million FAMILIES that somehow "scrape by" on $13,000 a year before, and $10,712 after taxes.
That bears repeating - 6,000,000 FAMILIES, not "Lil' Jimmy" the bag boy, with an average of 3 members, is living on $10,712 a year! That translates to 18,000,000 people, of which approximately 9,000,000 are relying on single mothers, and approximately 9,000,000 more are relying on a single earner.
Urban Legend #2
An increase of $1 or even $2.10, as Sen. Kennedy suggests, wouldn't matter to those MW families that much.
"...An increase to $7.25 an hour, which I favor but which the Republican Congress continues to reject, would increase the annual pay of a full-time (MW) worker by $4,400 a year, or about $85 a week, and bring it to within 6% percent of the poverty level again.
Think what that income would mean. It could pay for more than a year of groceries, or nine months of rent, or a year and a half of heat and electricity, or almost two years of child care, or full tuition at a community college. It could have helped more than 490,000 workers in the Gulf region after Hurricane Katrina"
Is there any reasonable person here that can still honestly maintain that an increase in pay of 70% for MW workers would have NO impact on their lives? $85 extra a week means an extra meal out to me, and not a particularly fancy one, but to 18,000,000 MW earners and their families it is the difference between desperation and hope, between choosing, in many cases, to eat or pay the bills.
"America - Back On Track" goes on to further debunk Urban Legends about MW such as - MW increase equals less jobs and hurts the economy, and a MW increase results in inflation which hurts middle income workers - but you'll just have to read the book (or wait for the movie:-), I'm not licensed to give away all it's secrets.
In my ignorance I truly believed that the MW debate was a non-issue and that since I, the world traveler that I am, didn't actually know anybody that subsisted on $10,712 a year for a an average family of three then just how many many people would it affect? Now I know better, at least 18,000,000, that's how many.