“This Is A Moral Issue”

April 18, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Barbara Ehrenreich was an early supporter of John Edwards’ debacle of a 2008 Presidential campaign, seduced by the populist message without realizing the messenger was hollow, that he had all of the slickness of Bill Clinton without any of the prodigious political gifts. But she’s been right about so much regarding the fear of falling in America, and long before the disruption of the Internet Age or the recent economic collapse. While doing an Ask Me Anything at Reddit to promote her new book, she answered a couple of questions about minimum wage. The exchanges follow.

__________________________

Question:

Do you think we’re getting any closer to minimum wage being a living wage as well?

Barbara Ehrenreich:

Well, there’s a lot of talk about raising the minimum wage and I think it will probably happen. That’s something most people agree with. The opposition is coming from, well, Republicans, employers, and especially the so-called hospitality industry like restaurants and hotels which employ a lot of low-wage people. But even if we get the national minimum to about $10.50 an hour which Obama’s talked about, that’s not going to be a living wage in most places. The living wage that you need for various cities, states, etc. is something that is constantly being calculated by a group at MIT for example, and they do it by reason. They give you the amount you need for a bare-bones existence for various family sizes, and certainly where I am sitting in Northern Virginia, $10.50 is not going to do it. It would need to be more like $20 an hour.

Question:

What do you think of raising the minimum wage and if you think it should be raised why wouldn’t it create a surplus of labor?

Barbara Ehrenreich:

This is the argument that is made all the time against raising the minimum wage, that it will lead to unemployment. There is no empirical evidence for it. Obviously if we raise the minimum wage to the living wage, there might be some difficulty, but you can look at places like the state of Washington, which has one of the highest minimum wages in the country, and compare its economy to that of Idaho, right across the border, and Washington does better.

I would say to that argument is: I don’t care. This is a moral issue. If you are paying people less than they can live on, you are in effect expecting them to make a charitable contribution TO YOU. If someone says “Well I’m a small business person, and I can’t afford to pay more than $8 an hour” then maybe you don’t have a business plan. You have a plan to exploit the desperation of certain people. With all this talk of a minimum wage, how come there is so little complaint when we see a CEO or hedge fund manager when they add $10 million to their pay? Yet we don’t. We get all bent out of shape going from $7 to $10 an hour. And that’s crazy to me.•

Tags: