Letter 2 America for March 18, 2014

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Minwage2

Minwage2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dear America,
Minwage

Minwage (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


Very little seems to get said about the irrationalism of the dogma to which Republicans like John Boehner subscribe.  As President Obama embarks on a concerted campaign to reduce the gap between rich and poor by mandating fair compensation for workers, people like Boehner continue to spin the same myths into morphologies that fit their purposes without so much as considering the rationality of doing so.  As was the case when Mr. Obama issued an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contractors to $10.10 per hour, The Speaker puled that requiring employers to pay additional wages for overtime was a "job killer," the favored shibboleth of supply-siders whenever they don't like something.  But the rationale for that claim, at least in the case of overtime pay is absurd if the goal that Boehner and his compatriots are really pursuing is  job creation.  If he would consider the issue logically, he would see that if employers would be required to lay people off if they had to pay overtime, that would create a need for more employees being paid regular wages to do the work that the overtime-eligible employees had been doing.  Thus, the effect of The President's initiative should be just the opposite of what the conservatives claim it is, and in fact, should be the very thing they claim to be seeking: more jobs for more people.  And in the bargain, there should be an increase in demand related to the increased number of people who are employed and now have wages with which to buy the goods employers are making, which should mean business growth, which in turn will generate even more jobs.  There should then be more demand for manufacturing equipment to make the goods that the newly employed people will be demanding, and more people will get hired to make those machines.  To put it simply, The President's proposal to raise the earning limit at which overtime no longer has to be paid--in other words to pay it to more people--will either put more money in the pockets of the newly eligible overtime workers, or employers will stop forcing overtime on people and hire more workers to work regular hours, and those people get to spend more time with their families, which is consistent with what is supposed to be a central tenet of conservatism: family values.  Everybody wins, and six hundred economists signed a letter to that effect published by the Economic Policy Institute, admittedly an organization funded largely by "big labor."

Of course, the conservative establishment could not be outdone, so they found a group of their own economics professors, five hundred of them in total--including a few Nobel Laureates--to say the opposite in a letter to the New York Times.  So, a total of 1,100 economists have weighed in on the increase in eligibility for overtime-wages proposed by President Obama, and I suppose that since the majority of them favored the increase...well, it was a straw poll of sorts, wasn't it?  You can bet that the National Restaurant Association, which put together the conservative economics contingent, would have found six hundred and one if they were out there, so the fact that more of the surveyed economists agreed with The President isn't completely meaningless...but almost...almost as meaningless as that de facto poll that the two sides have undertaken.  The real issue is just like the one that should dictate governmental policy on all levels regarding the minimum wage: what's fair.  How can you deprive people making just over $20,000 a year of the right to be paid overtime based on the arbitrary determination that they are "management," which is what the law now provides for.  The "assistant manager" at your favorite fast food place probably falls into that managerial category, but in reality, he is just a shift manager for the lowest rank of workers, wishing he could be more and striving toward that goal by working fifty or more hours per week, but more likely destined to keep being used by the franchise owner than he is to become one.  It's all part of the same brand of capitalism that has become dogma since Ronald Reagan sponsored the "the supply side" coming out party during his 1980 term, and the consequence has been the stagnation of wages in the shadow of burgeoning profits and concentration of wealth in the top one percent.  An irony in this on-going battle between employers and employees is that it has recently come out that some of the unemployment compensation that the Republicans have been complaining about having to fund was paid to millionaires.  That fact emerged during the consideration of the unemployment extension just passed by The Senate, now destined for a fight in The House of Representatives.  The consensus is that there will be a battle royal in The House, and that the bill to renew benefits for the long-term unemployed may not succeed there.  It will be interesting to see whether the issue of benefits for millionaires comes up, and if so, what gets said about it, in light of its embarrassing implications for the conservatives in the Republican Party hoping to take over The Senate and augment their control of The House.

To put it concisely, if it's not too late for that, an increase in the minimum wage to a level consistent in current dollars with what the minimum wage was thirty years ago is long overdue, and even the amount proposed on the federal level is less than what is being approved in at least one city in the state of Washington in which $15 per hour is the new minimum, passed by referendum, and San Francisco and other cities are considering following suit.  As to overtime, why should a person be willing to work it if he or she isn't going to be paid a differential that justifies his family having dinner without him or her every night.  Add to that the additional consumer demand that those increases represent--money earned on that level gets spent immediately--and you have a change that everyone benefits from.  So why not stop trying to support one position or the other with surveys of economists as if economics is science.  This all comes down to our opinions, and no matter what happens, everyone is going to seize on a statistic in ten years to support his claim that he told us so, so the debate will rage on no matter what we do.  Why not make life livable for a few million working people in the interim then.

Your friend,

Mike

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This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on March 18, 2014 3:22 AM.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on March 18, 2014 3:22 AM.

Letter 2 America for March 14, 2014 was the previous entry in this blog.

Letter 2 America for March 21, 2014 is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

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