The recent occurrences of fast food employees striking across the nation to raise their wages to $15 an hour brings to the forefront of political discourse the real value of a worker, a topic of discussion that has been missing in mainstream media for far too long. This discourse can get ugly sometimes, though, when people who are against raising the minimum wage use personally charged arguments in an attempt to validate their points. They might say, “I worked for $7.25 an hour, and if I can do that so can others!” or “Why should we pay McDonald’s workers $15 an hour? Their jobs are so easy; half of them don’t speak English anyway, and sometimes they get my order wrong!” These sorts of statements, or others displaying similar animosity toward fast food employees, are nothing more than loud, condescending, and useless noise. They tend to come from right-wing political commentators, but in all fairness, what else can you expect from them anymore?
The fact that most Americans still don’t see the benefits to raising the minimum wage for full-time employees (not just fast food employees, either) is a sad one indeed. We’re a massive country of 300 million people, but we underestimate our potential all the time these days. It’s probably because we’re often so prejudiced toward people who don’t look, dress or talk exactly like us. Still, if we put our biases aside for just a moment and consider what might come about if the minimum wage was increased to $15 an hour for every worker, we might discover that our priorities are more similar than they are different.
Americans don’t like to see too many people living on government assistance, and it’s a shared value among conservatives and liberals that “hard work pays off.” If this is so agreed upon, then what is the deal with full-time minimum wage workers not being adequately paid? Does it make any sense that they need government assistance to supplement their lack of a living income? No, it really doesn’t.
What does make sense, though, is for their employers; most notably multinational chains such as Walmart and McDonald’s, to pay them living wages of $15 an hour so they wouldn’t need to rely on revenue from taxpayers to support themselves (and often times, their families).
Want to know how much the taxpayers are subsidizing the wages of low-income workers? Between welfare, food stamps, and government-backed health care, nearly $7 billion (according to a 2013 report released by the University of Illinois and University of California-Berkeley Labor Center). No, the “b” is not a typo; we actually are spending that much on people being screwed over by their bosses. Considering how this could all be fixed by having companies pay their workers living wages, it’s worth brainstorming for just a second what else the government could use that $7 billion for instead. Oh, I’ve got it. How about an interstate high-speed rail system? That infrastructure could appropriately stimulate the economy through job creation and innovative commerce.
Anyway, the argument that raising the minimum wage would hurt the economy is outdated and misguided. There is no proof that this will happen; unemployment rates have never increased when the minimum wage was increased in the past. This is because instituting a greater cash flow for low-income workers results in higher rates of consumer spending in local economies, thus allowing more opportunities for businesses to hire because of an increase in customers. That is basic economics. So basic, in fact, that a student majoring in landscape architecture can understand it.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a report in February of this year stating that roughly 900,000 people would be lifted out of poverty by raising the minimum wage to the level President Obama has advocated for at $10.10 an hour. That’s great, but in my opinion, it’s a conservative rate for a minimum wage hike. Still, it is better than no increase at all. While I will continue advocating for $15 an hour, I can imagine it’ll take some time for the average politician to grow up and do so, as well. But, I am willing to find middle ground and support any candidate who promises to raise the minimum wage. And how wonderful would it be for the puppet politicians against raising the minimum wage to find themselves unemployed this upcoming November? I’m talking to you, Scott Walker.
Tony is a junior majoring in Landscape Architecture. Do you agree that it is time to raise the minimum wage? Is $15 an hour too high? Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com
