One of the defining issues of the election this year is the decline in standard of living for middle- and lower-class Americans.
California legislators have been talking with labor unions to remedy this in their state by raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2021.
As California state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, said in the Guardian, it isn’t a law yet, but it is a step in the right direction for an issue that Leno has been working on for a long time.
California already has one of the highest state-wide minimum wages in the country at $10 an hour, not to mention it’s $2.75 higher than the federal minimum.
Massachusetts is the only state that matches California, the District of Columbia beats them both at $10.50. It is no coincidence that these places also house some of the most expensive cities in the United States.
As the cost of living rises each year, the standard of living with a stagnant minimum wage goes down. The minimum is supposed to represent a wage on which a person can live. It isn’t supposed to be just pocket change for teenagers.
Oregon recently passed similar legislation, with minimums adjusted for rural and metropolitan areas. Portland will have a minimum wage at $14.75 by 2022. The University of Oregon’s Labor and Education Research Center found in Oregon, only 12 percent of minimum wage workers were teenagers and the average minimum wage worker was a 35-year-old woman.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found, nationally, workers younger than 25 represented only one-fifth of hourly paid workers.
Women are also statistically more likely to be paid minimum wage, or less, in an hourly paid position, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. People trying to work for a living deserve to make a wage that will allow them to do so.
Raising the minimum wage would allow demographics, like lower class women, who have struggled with a livable wage a chance at security and stability.
The most common argument against raising the minimum wage is it would be hard on small businesses and cause job loss. The U.S. Department of Labor denies these claims.
In 2014, a letter was sent to congressional representatives that was signed by more than 600 economists from the nation’s top institutions, including seven Nobel Prize winners, that a minimum wage increase would have “little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers,” and would have a “small stimulative effect” on the market as more money in low-wage workers pockets would increase their recreational spending.
A 2015 study of small business owners in the U.S. found the majority supported a increase in minimum wage for the same reasons. The gradual implementation of raising the wage accounts for the adjustment period for small businesses.
States with a higher cost of living are a great place to start in raising the minimum wage nationally, but we need to begin talking about states where poverty is the standard.
Three out of the four poorest states in the U.S.— Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia, respectively — have a minimum wage that is at or lower than the federal requirement. The workers in these states need fiscal security, and the states could definitely use that “stimulative effect.”
jordrile@indiana.edu
@RiledupIDS
