Fight for 15

by | Aug 27, 2015 | News

f-4-15Momentum has increased a degree or two over the last month. The Service Employees took the “fight” global, – shelling out some serious change to bring foreign legislators and union leaders to Brazil to protest McDonalds. San Antonio proposed to raise the minimum wage for city employees to $13. The University of California stated their intention to raise the minimum to $15 for all employees and contract workers. And last but not least, New York City passed a minimum of $15 for fast food workers. Let’s take a moment to point something out here – “fast food workers” – not all minimum wage workers (to include those in retail, custodial, clerical and landscaping industries). Nope, just fast food workers. The interesting thing is that even those that support an increase in the minimum wage are having to make concessions with the reality of it. Harry Holzer, economist and professor at Georgetown, believes in a higher wage but says $15 takes it too far:

But I have much more serious worries about a $15 an hour minimum wage, which constitutes a wage increase of 50% to 100% in most places..(.)..In a city like Washington D.C. where unemployment among those with a high school education or less is at a worrisome 15%, jobless rates will almost certainly rise. Many employers will be very reluctant to pay high wages to workers whose skills – including the ability to speak English, in the case of many immigrants – are so modest. A likely result would be not only increases in unemployment but also drops in formal labor force activity (where workers work or search for legal jobs) and perhaps some growth in undocumented work among immigrants.

Tia Koonse, a researcher at the UCLA Labor Center, agrees saying “there is no question that some employers doing things legally now might be tempted to start breaking the rules.” So many of them already do. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that in 2014, roughly 1.7 million U.S. workers were illegally paid less than the federal minimum wage. The Department of Labor simply can’t keep up. One recent DOL study estimated that in New York and California alone there are 560,000 violations of the minimum wage law every week, $33 million in lost income. According to a Congressional Budget Office report filed last year, even a $10 minimum wage would do more harm than good. Policy analysts predicted that raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour would “raise wages for 16 to 14 million people while eliminating half a million jobs.”

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