The editorial board of Vancouver’s Columbian—a paper so knee-jerk anti-labor that it makes the Seattle Times look the Union Record—has once again come out opposing the minimum wage, regurgitating the same blow chunks of trickle-down pablum. Literally the exact same sentence in three different editorials. But it’s fascinating to see how their preface has evolved over the past 18 months.
In our view: Skills the Key to Better Pay
Proposals to hike minimum wage to $15 will eliminate jobs – and opportunities
Published: September 8, 2013… Realistically, the notion of a minimum wage is a job-killing philosophy. If forced, through legislation rather than market forces, to increase pay for unskilled workers, business owners are going to reduce their number of unskilled workers. They won’t reduce pay for their valuable employees; they won’t reduce profits; they won’t cut other expenses. No, they’ll eliminate the positions that are the most expendable.
In Our View: Minimum Wage Experiment
Here’s hoping Seattle’s gutsy move pays off — but it’s tough to not be skeptical
Published: May 6, 2014… Seattle City Councilmember Nick Licata, who sat on the mayor’s Income Inequality Advisory Committee, said: “This is an awesome victory for the 100,000 workers earning less than $15 an hour in Seattle. They will see their lives dramatically improved.” That is, if they still have a job. As The Columbian has written editorially in the past: “If forced, through legislation rather than market forces, to increase pay for unskilled workers, business owners are going to reduce their number of unskilled workers. They won’t reduce pay for their valuable employees; they won’t reduce profits; they won’t cut other expenses. No, they’ll eliminate the positions that are the most expendable.”
In Our View: Raise Skills, not Base Pay
Minimum-wage workers’ concerns valid, but hike to $12 could cost them jobs
Published: February 2, 2015… Yet there is a fine line between helping workers prosper and helping the businesses that employ them to prosper. The two ideas are not mutually exclusive, but they require some balance. As The Columbian has written editorially, “If forced, through legislation rather than market forces, to increase pay for unskilled workers, business owners are going to reduce their number of unskilled workers. They won’t reduce pay for their valuable employees; they won’t reduce profits; they won’t cut other expenses. No, they’ll eliminate the positions that are the most expendable.”
So in September, 2013 they categorically claim that the minimum wage is a “realistically… a job-killing philosophy,” in May, 2014 they allow a touch of doubt to seep in, warning it might improve workers’ lives “if they still have a job,” and now they’re willing to acknowledge that raising wages and helping businesses prosper “are not mutually exclusive.” The Columbian is still wrong to repeat their reality-denying zero sum game supply-side bullshit. But for them, this is progress!
It’ll be interesting to see where the editors are in another 18 months when Seattle and SeaTac are both prospering under their higher minimum wages, and Vancouver is still… well… Vancouver.
Correct me if I misperceive, but in 2013 the Columbian‘s response was to a $15 minimum wage, and in 2015 the response was to a $12 minimum wage.
Meanwhile, the economy generally improved between those two time periods. Unemployment in the Portland area was 7.6% in September of 2013, and it was 6.7% in December of 2014, for instance.
Perhaps take a look at the CBO projections for a national minimum wage increase to $9/hr, and to $10.10/hr, which were in the same publication. Job loss predictions by CBO were substantially greater with an increase to $10.10 than they were if the wage were increased to $9.
I suspect that if CBO were to run figures on wage increases to $12/hr and to $15/hr, there would be dramatically different predictions of job losses between those two scenarios as well. It’s the part of increasing wages that the left really doesn’t want to talk about, unless forced.
You seem to ignore the very substantial difference in effects on job losses between proposed minimum wage increases to $12/hr and to $15/hr in your post, and in addition you apparently ignore the improvements in the Vancouver area economy that occurred over a sixteen month period between events discussed in your post. It’s just possible that the differences in your target’s published perspective over that period of time – “evolution” as you describe it – are because the Columbian didn’t.
The argument that minimum wage laws kill jobs is deeply flawed. It presumes that employers pay workers what they’re “worth.” Indeed you often see the “worth” argument, frequently in conjunction with the “skills” argument. But this is false.
Employers do NOT pay workers what they’re “worth.” Wages are NOT determined by the intrinsic value or worth of labor, or how much profit the employer makes from an employee’s labor. “Worth” has little or nothing to do with wage rates.
Wages are determined by the relative bargaining power of employer and employee, which is unequal, and absent a strong union near always favors the employer. Minimum wage workers have very weak bargaining power, which results in a market failure.
It is appropriate and necessary for government to intervene in market failures so the economy can continue to function reasonably smoothly. Minimum wage laws protect workers from market failures resulting from unequal bargaining power and chronic oversupply of certain kinds of labor.
Nearly all the other Cheap Labor Conservative arguments against the minimum wage are flawed, too. Minimum wage workers are NOT “unskilled.” They have gone to school; they can read, write, and do math; to get and keep a minimum wage job, you must be able to show up for work regularly and on time, understand and follow a supervisor’s instructions, properly use tools and equipment relevant to the job; and many minimum wage jobs involve customer interaction and therefore people skills.
Conservatives, especially those who’ve had everything handed to them and never had to work in minimum wage jobs to survive or help pay their way through college, often refer to minimum wage workers as “lazy” and “unmotivated.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Minimum wage jobs often are physically demanding, hard and dirty, and unpleasant. Retail cashiers stand on their feet the entire shift. Nursing home aides and hospital orderlies lift patients and clean up their “accidents.” Custodians sweep, pick up, and carry out trash. Laborers load and unload trucks, and do the physical jobs at construction sites.
The “automation” argument doesn’t hold water, either. Jobs that can be automated have already been automated. If it’s cheaper to use a machine than pay someone $15 an hour to do a physical task, then it’s also cheaper to use a machine than pay someone $7.25 to do that task. The advantages of automation over human labor are so great that if something can be automated it WILL be automated regardless of wage rates.
Cheap Labor Conservatives tell people to go to school to get better skills. Yet they oppose education funding, criticize students for going into debt to get a degree, and have no answer for the economy’s inability to provide well-paying jobs for university graduates. How many people with degrees are working as waiters, bartenders, taxi drivers, or laborers because they can’t get jobs in their fields? By the way, these conservatives are the same crowd who demand and get tax breaks for sending well-paying manufacturing jobs overseas.
Getting back to the question of job destruction. America has, and has always had, millions of minimum wage jobs. The minimum wage has been increased many times, but we STILL have millions of minimum wage jobs. If the minimum wage destroys jobs, why haven’t these jobs been destroyed? Why, despite repeated increases to the minimum wage, do we STILL have minimum wage jobs? Could it be that Cheap Labor Conservatives are simply lying about the economic effects of raising the minimum wage?
@1 So you’re okay with a $12 minimum wage in Vancouver? The Columbian’s not. They argued against it yesterday.
Opposition to minimum wage laws flows from greed, period. It’s about some people wanting to live large on the sweat of other people’s labor.
@3
My opinion is irrelevant to my @1 post.
@4
I don’t think it was greed that caused a majority of poll respondents
http://articles.latimes.com/20.....l-20140312
to oppose an increase to $10.10. LA Times didn’t think so, either.
But their views changed when told of a recent government estimate of the effects of such an increase on poverty and employment, according to findings from the poll released Tuesday.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported last month that moving to a $10.10 minimum wage would increase the earnings of about 16.5-million low-wage workers, but also cause the loss of about 500,000 jobs.
Presented with that information, 57% of the 1,001 respondents said the trade-off was unacceptable. About a third — 34% — said it was acceptable.
Unless wanting to be able to earn enough to feed one’s family is part of a new definition of greed.
Do any of you people have friendships and relationships with folks who work for minimum wage?
the opposition is from greed AND ignorance.
the ignorance of many voters is due to the lazy dems.
for decades the dems let the real min wage slip. the 1968 min wage, federal, adjusted for inflation is like 10.50 or so today.
so going to $12 is merely restoring the cuts.
think to 1968 and prior decades….for decades hiking the min wage didn’t cost jobs and furthered the post war boom years.
this is what people don’t know. they don’t know it because the so called democratic party has not made wage restoration the central plank of their which oh omg they shoulda oughta done the last few elections. certainly here in washington state they aren’t. they didn’t make this the center of the last campaign, and today, sadly, they are not even announcing plans to run a wage bill as an initiative.
back to the jobs. the workforce today is way way more educated and productive than in 1968; add that in the inflation plus productivity adjusted 1968 min wage becomes more like 15 or 18 today.
why did we let it lag? gop stole national conversation and dems let them do it. dems cozy with corporations plus a bit of focus on identity politics. not focused on the working class. kind of abandoned them really. lack of overarching message/explanation of how we got a middle class in america, it was thru socialism like mahler says. kinda funny isn’t it that a min wage everyone knew helped an economy boom in 1968 was okay — when it was white males getting it — but today when it’s more women and poc suddenly omg, min wage kills jobs! that should be pointed out too. those workers in the boom years got it. most folks opposing it of the hannity generation got the min wage back then certainly oreilly did at carvels. but then what’s good for them is no longer good for us now! this kind of hard they are screwing you tale is just not messaged well by the dems, they don’t even TRY.
You’d have a hard time finding a Republican who could last a week working for Molly Maid, and then go back and do it for another week.
By this logic, a cut in the minimum wage means job growth. Eliminating wages altogether would mean full employment. There might be some downsides, however.
“but also cause the loss of about 500,000 jobs”
OMG! What a huge number!!
Yeah, it’s all in how one frames the question, isn’t it? I wonder what the poll results would have been if the question were rephrased to something like “will cause a temporary loss of employment that would be less than two months of average new job growth”.
@10. Great argument
I’m not very versed in economics but there are two things I’d say. The first, I can’t understand how more money in the hands of people who need to spend it is bad for the economy. That doesn’t make sense to me. Secondly, I remember very distinctly watching the fall of the Soviet Empire and thinking “The workers in America are now fucked”. We were no longer a competing ideology.
The evidence is in. Conservative editorial boards (and the conservatives who believe them) have been made too stupid by childhood vaccinations against disease.
More seriously ……….
Give the Columbian points for stumbling upon
Minimum Wage = Killing Wage
When a business pays its employees the minimum, regardless of what it takes for its employees to live, it is transferring the cost of killing its employees to everyone else.
In the discipline of economics a negative externality (also called “external cost” or “external diseconomy”) is an economic activity that imposes a negative effect on an unrelated third party.
People who work for a living (unlike Roger who unabashedly tells us he doesn’t because working doesn’t pay as well) are working to earn a wage that enables them to live.
When we pay people for work less than it takes to live, we are paying a Killing Wage.
It matters not how many jobs there are. It matters whether our brothers and sisters and neighbors can live.
Let’s stop talking about a Minimum Wage and start talking about a Living Wage and compare it to the costs of continuing to be OK with Killing Wages
@ 6 STB
How many minimum wage workers did they include in that poll?
@15 ” … (unlike Roger who unabashedly tells us he doesn’t because working doesn’t pay as well) … ”
Well, somebody on this blog has to be the Evil Capitalist. The trolls can’t do that job, because they’re too stupid, so it’s up to me. I worked my ass off for 40+ years, had so many minimum wage jobs I can’t remember them all, so I know all about it. Believe me, working doesn’t pay, and that’s not how people get money in this country. The sooner you wake up to that, the happier you’ll be. My stocks are up $6,626 today; why would I want a minimum wage job?
It’s simple math. Think about it. Let’s say some guy invests $100 million in an S & P 500 index fund. The S & P 500 index was up 1.44% today. So he made $1,440,000 today. Why would he work for $7.25 an hour? Or $15 an hour? He made over $3,000 a minute without getting out of bed. Kinda makes a mockery of the American work ethic, doesn’t it? Of course it’s not right, and I’d change it if I could, but when low-wage workers vote for the worker-hating and rich-coddling party, what can you do? Under this system, the best thing you can do for yourself is stop buying “stuff” and use your hard-earned wages to accumulate stock. It’s better to be a capitalist than a worker under our system.
Just remember this… to balance the budget in the later half of the 1990s, The Atlantic claimed over half of the 22 million jobs created by Bill Clinton were minimum wage jobs. PuddyLink verified by yellowishleakingbuttspigot from the crazed databaze.
Puddy didn’t realize being a lawyer was a minimum wage job in WA State. Thanks for the info senile schismatic IDIOT Wabbit! Glad my son chose the east coast!
Interesting poll provided by Travis. So the DUMMOCRETINS now want > $10/hour wages had no problem cheering Bill Clinton last year when his job creation legacy was $5.15/hr jobs.
Who knew?
@15,
brilliant framing. If I actually thought that Democrats and progressives cared about ensuring living wages for all workers I’d be excited about the potential. But too much of our economy and our politics depends on the maintenance and exploitation of a permanent underclass. And all economic elites share in that dependency regardless of their political leanings. If that were not the case, then by now we’d have seen sincere efforts by Democrats and progressives in blue states to crack down on employers who flout the law by exploiting undocumented workers, laughing all the way to the bank.
Doubt it? When was the last time you had your roof cleaned? Gutters cleaned? Hotel room cleaned? CAFO raised, and individually plastic wrapped Foster Farms/Kirkland Signature chicken carcass cleaned? Are any of us even remotely interested in the living standards of the people we employ to perform these tasks for us? Right. ‘Cause what we really want is cheap food, clean toilets, and cheap same-day PERGO floors in 47 stunning colors and patterns. We mindlessly use Foxcom built Apple phones to live-blog our picketing of the Nike store for the sake of sweatshop workers in Vietnam. Then head home in a rush so our $75/day “au pair” doesn’t miss the first of her three buses to Maltby.
Conservatives aren’t the only ones who like cheap labor.
@20 DistantReplay,
I appreciate the compliment, but I’m no where near brilliant. If I were allowed to describe the way I framed the issue the modifier I choose is “accurate”.
Regarding how the often used labels of “conservative” or “progressive” should be used in regards to living vice killing wages, those most frequently voicing their opinion about the need to continue with and their acceptance of killing wages label themselves as “conservatives”.
Regarding the hypocrisy of those who may be politically advocating a hire minimum wage yet choose to pay killing wages because it appears to suite their perceived economic needs at the time, I can tell you that it takes discipline, vigilance and persistence to avoid falling into that trap.
There are ways to avoid falling into the status quo of accepting paying a killing wage when we need a service, but I’ll tell you from personal experience it is difficult. It not only takes paying more, but spending time to find a fair service provider (time=money).
The hypocrisy you identified is not a reason to slow down the political movement of paying living wages, it is a very good argument for regulation to ensure the status quo changes.
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