Minimum wage: It’s not just a song by They Might Be Giants

November 26, 2005

Guest Post by Morbo

So the state of Florida raised the minimum wage, and hell broke loose and the economy collapsed.

Actually, that’s not true. What happened was…nothing. Here’s what the Tampa Tribune reported recently:

Thousands of jobs would be lost if voters increased the state’s rock-bottom wage to $6.15 from $5.15, said one e-mail sent out by the Coalition to Save Florida Jobs.

Jobs would be outsourced overseas, the e-mail said. Even companies that paid above the minimum wage would be forced to raise pay for everyone, said retailers and restaurants that opposed the amendment.

Today, though, it’s hard to find much wreckage in the Florida retailing and restaurant industries, the two groups that bankrolled the Coalition to Save Florida Jobs.

Seventy-one percent of Florida voters passed the increase, and since the new minimum wage was implemented in May, retail stores and restaurants have added tens of thousands of employees.

Some of the biggest contributors to the Coalition to Save Florida Jobs have had stellar financial performances since May, including Publix Super Markets of Lakeland and Darden Restaurants of Orlando (owner of Red Lobster and Olive Garden).

Restaurant owners threw the biggest fit over the hike, which voters approved as a ballot measure, but as it turns out, many of them don’t even pay the minimum wage. Waiters and waitresses are usually exempt from such laws, since their salaries are augmented by tips. (Also, I’m still trying to figure out how the restaurants planned to outsource their wait staff and kitchen help positions.)

It’s hard to take these right-wing business groups seriously when they always reach for the most lurid rhetoric they can find. Now that their predictions of gloom and doom have not come true, what are they saying?

The same old thing — still spreading the gloom and doom. Wogan Badcock III, who, despite his name is not a villain from a Star Wars movie but in fact represents the Florida Retail Association, speculates that a blue plate special that goes for $7.95 may some day cost $14.95.

Yes, a blue plate special probably will cost $14.95 some day. After all, there was a time when they cost $1.95. But any restaurant that nearly doubles the price of any dish in short period of time and blames it on a modest increase in the minimum wage would probably find its customers going elsewhere.

Isn’t the free market great?

In fact, most restaurants raised prices just a tad, about 3 percent. And people don’t seem to mind. Floridians continue to eat out.

Perhaps as they eat they even feel a little better that the kitchen help is making $6.15 an hour instead of $5.15. I wouldn’t feel too great about that. $6.15 an hour is not much in the pricier areas of the state, but it beats no increase at all, which is what most who work for the big M.W. have seen out of the feds lately.

Those of us who work in the white-collar world like a wage increase every year. We’re disappointed when our raises are smaller than we had hoped. Our friends in the minimum-wage world deserve a hike every now and then too. They have not had one since 1997. How would you like to go eight years without a raise?

How would you like to try living even on $6.15 an hour.? We all know this is impossible. As all of our manufacturing jobs have left this country we are left with more and more people who used to make a decent living and now just survive. Wasn’t the globalization of the economy a wonderful thing for the American people? NOOOOOOOO
The US is headed for bad times. We will have the rich and then the rest of us peon’s. This is exactly what Bush,Delay and co want for us all!

  • Minimum wage is our (progressives’) “anti-gay marriage” type issue. If Kerry had stumped harder for it in both Florida and Nevada (where it also passed last year), he would have dramatically improved his chances in those two states. And of course, if he’d won Florida, he would have won the election.

    Corporate profits over the five years of Bush misrule are up near record highs. Real wages are stagnant, and for non-college grads they’ve declined. Everywhere the wage has been raised, including my state of New York, the free-market fundamentalists have predicted doom, and been dead flat wrong. In fact, the NYS sectors where the wage was most pertinent–food service, retail–grew faster than the rest of the economy in the first half of this year.

    We need to get this on every state ballot where it might play. It’s a great way to split the Republican base, as it presents the religious voters with a wonderful dilemma: support the poor, or heed their right-wing masters. As the Florida ’04 result shows, they mostly seem to go for the wage increase. It’s both good policy–increased purchasing power in poor communities, mostly stays within those communities as low-income families purchase needed goods–and good politics.

  • However we do it, we’ve got to get everyone other than the obscenely rich to begin approaching politics from their own economic interests. Call it “class warfare” if you want — I’d rather wage such a war than just lie down and lose it (or, even worse, fight for the other side). The GOP couldn’t ever win an election if it didn’t have fear-and-loathing issues to distract the poor and middle class. The numbers aren’t there for them provided people vote rationally.

  • This disinformation campaign about the “dangers to society”
    if the minimum wage were to be increased was probably
    paid for by the Association of Mercedes, Lexus, and BMW
    dealers (the brands of cars the restaurant owners I see usually
    drive up in). Plutocrats might buy fewer of these vehicles
    if business owners had to shell out sensible compensation.
    The idea that we should actually pay decent wages to workers
    seems to be another “socialist” idea that needs to be shot
    down before the masses catch on to how badly they are being
    duped by their “free market” bosses.

  • I`m waiting for the day when the people of this country finally decide to take it back.The time has come, for those who oppose this insane policy of always giving into what ever the rich want,to stand up and be counted.What the wealthy seem to overlook is the fact that even though they are sending our jobs out of the country we`re still here. When you rub an old dog`s nose in the dirt long enough,that bastard is going to bite you.There will come a day when those who have everything now,will wish to hell they had lived differently. This country is headed right in that direction,and the clock`s running.

  • If I was running a democratic candidate’s campaign, my # 1 goal would be to drive a stake throught the heart of ‘Supply side economics.’ Very simply explained, supply side economics means tax evasion for the rich. Frame it like that, and repeat it over and over a couple of million times.
    Don’t ever let a repub frame the debate. Just keep asking them why they support ‘Tax evasion for the rich.

  • The fuss about the minimum wage does not really affect many Americans. Most adult citizens or legal residents are paid about $8.00 per hour. Yet, even $11-12 per hour is hardly a living wage. The real argument should be over why more and more Americans are sitting in the lower class for life with little chance of upward mobility.　

  • So much for the old canard that a higher minimum wage must ultimately hurt workers by reducing employment. I think the most pertainent paragraph in the article is the on in which the furniture store admits that raising the minimum wage would probably not cause firings because the work would have to get done one way or another — nobody is going to close down a restaurant that is making a couple of thousand dollars in profits every night because their costs in wages goes up by several hundred due to the minimum wage rise. It simply wouldn’t make any sense. They would try and pass on the costs to their customers first, then take a hit in the profits second.

  • Anthony V. and Battlepanda,

    Correct-a-mundo…this is the standard sky-is-falling canard that is resurrected every time this issue comes up, at either the state or federal level. It is pretty much Page One of the cheap labor (i.e. Republican) playbook, and they manage to get quite a bit of mileage out of it without much review, data, or accountability…just like most all of their reality-challenged positions.

    This particular issue is a bit peculiar because it is even more larded with the vote-against-your-own-best-interests mentality. Many times, supply-side whining from the special interests, aided by booster packs from the SCLM, gets the yokels to end up concluding, “Er-yup, that makes good sense. I guess maybe I am gettin’ paid too much.”

    Good to see the good guys break through with a win every now & again…and in Florida, no less!

  • frequent flag,
    The yokels are not as dumb as you think. They voted for the minimum wage hike 70% vs 30% in a referendum. Politically speaking, the minimum wage issue is actually a sure-fire winner as well as the right thing to do. It makes me tear my hair out that more Democrats are not on this bandwagon.

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