For some, minimum wage brings maximum misery

From the Albany Times Union via the Houston Chronicle:

The issue is becoming even more pivotal because job growth in this country — home health aides, food preparation workers, security guards, cashiers, teachers' assistants and nursing aides — are some of the lowest-paying, according to a February article in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Monthly Labor Review, which projected job growth from 2002 to 2012.

Author Shulman describes this as a "hollowing out of the middle," where companies such as Wal-Mart Stores pay the minimum while expecting taxpayers to take up the slack in the form of food stamps, Medicaid and other programs for impoverished Americans.

"Corporations used to look at themselves as part of a community," she said.

"I think the ethic has changed."

Click here for the rest.

The traditional neo-liberal stance on the minimum wage is that it interferes with the "laws" of supply and demand in the "labor market" (the market for the buying and selling of human beings by businesses). That is, a minimum wage forces companies to hire fewer workers--there's only so much money that a company can allocate to the paying of wages; if it is forced to pay only above a certain amount, then it can only hire a limited number of workers. Get it? Lower wages means more workers, while higher wages means fewer workers.

This may very well be true; I'm no economist. However, one can take this logic to it's extreme: if I pay my workers only one cent a day, I can have buttloads of workers, which lowers the unemployment rate. Then, everybody's doing fine. Right? Wrong, because everybody's making only one cent a day. The unemployment rate may go down, but it doesn't matter because low wages make everybody's lives suck.

This is a good metaphor for where America is now. As the quote notes above, most of the nation's new employment growth is (and has been for a long time) in the McJob sector--these are crappy minimum wage service jobs. As I once said to a dumbass Republican frat boy when I was in college, "you can't raise a family by working at McDonald's."

The minimum wage is increasingly the only way to make self-sufficient life possible for an ever increasing number of Americans: not raising the minimum wage, allowing it to stagnate, has real and painful consequences for millions of people. Economic theory be damned: this appears to be the only thing standing between us and a dreary third world existence.

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