A confluence of two ideas: the Democrats are not being serious about hiking the minimum wage AND Bernie Sanders makes a more formal presidential campaign announcement today. These are connected ideas.
On Sunday, I had a piece in the New York Daily News entitled, "Raise the bar on raising the wage: Up until now, Democrats have been playing a shallow and timid game" (I neither write the headlines nor, duh, decide to run pieces on a holiday weekend Sunday...):
The debate over raising the minimum wage is a phony political bidding war, not a genuine effort to provide a true living wage for millions of workers.
If Democrats were serious about fighting poverty, they would state that the federal minimum wage should reach between $19 to $20 an hour by the next presidential election, setting a minimum for states to exceed.
This is essentially
an argument I made going back almost a year: that the embrace of the $10.10-an-hour minimum wage campaign was really stupid, on the economics and on the politics. Yet, Democrats, their liberal/progressive allies/bloggers, just lapped this stupidity up--without being honest about what $10.10-an-hour meant for people...more poverty.
The economics are pretty straightforward. The minimum wage, measured by productivity, should be around $21-an-hour:
Against that backdrop, the opening bid two years ago by the Democrats in Congress and the White House was to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to a paltry $10.10. Which for a 40-hour-a-week, full-time worker laboring 52 weeks a year would mean a gross pay of $21,008, with no pension and no vacation. That still leaves a family of four below the federal poverty level of $23,850.
According to the Economic Policy Institute: “Raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016 would return the federal minimum wage to roughly the same inflation-adjusted value it had in the late 1960s.”
So, Democratic candidates, claiming to be warriors for workers, promoted a message that boils down to: “Hey, minimum-wage worker, have we got a bargain for you. Elect us so we can bring your pay right up into the modern age . . . into the 1960s.”
Which was part of the reason, when $10.10-an hour was quickly lapped by the energy in the streets for the Fight for $15, that Democrats, followed slavishly by their allies/bloggers, upped the bid to $12-an-hour.
Of course, it's a hard battle to win what is right. But:
The political elites in the Democratic Party doubtless will argue that $15, or $20, would never pass the Congress. But neither would $10.10. The whole exercise has been political — designed to embarrass a Republican Party that doesn’t even believe in a minimum wage.
So, if today’s political realities block enactment of a real living minimum wage, why not shift the conversation entirely? Be direct about the reliance of the “free market” on poverty wages to make profits. Make it clear that the goal should be $20 an hour — fast. Tie future increases to productivity, the best measure of the value of a person’s labor.
In the 1970s, women, and many men, wore a button that simply said “59¢” to signify what a woman’s pay was compared to a man earning a dollar. That button, without needing a single word of explanation, came to carry with it a powerful narrative.
A similar campaign trumpeting $20 an hour — clear, strong and consistent — would carry with it passion, a vision and a simple idea: Every human being should have decent-paying work.
Which brings me to Bernie Sanders.
Yes, listen to the Democratic party elites, the talking heads, and the Democratic primary election is over (based on the wall-to-wall coverage of visits to Chipotle and other made-for-lapping-up-coverage van rides you'd certainly think so).
It's a hard road, no doubt, to topple a machine oiled by torrents of Wall Street money. But, the basic question I think we need to ask: do you want phony, political gambit proposals that don't end poverty and, indeed, just lock it in OR do you want real efforts to end class warfare.
I think it's pretty obvious who stands for workers. And as he says: "Nobody — trust me — nobody thought I would defeat a five-term incumbent Democratic mayor...Don't underestimate me."
