To help jobs picture, raise the minimum wage

CNN.com ^ | May 4, 2012 | By Christine Owens

[Oldeconomybuyer]

(CNN) -- A basic premise of work in America is that your paycheck will inch up over time to reflect hard work, experience and rising living costs. But a lot of people aren't making any more this year than they did last year -- in fact, they're making less.

As April's jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows, in nominal terms, wages are going nowhere fast.

When wage growth slows, its saps the whole recovery. How are we going to reboot an economy that relies on consumption when millions of us are falling behind?

Here's one way to start: Let's raise the wage floor.

Some argue that raising the minimum wage will hurt job growth, a tired old canard trotted out every time a minimum wage proposal surfaces. The facts are otherwise: The most rigorous research over the last 15 years, including studies across state lines with different minimum wages, has found that higher minimum wages do not result in job loss, even for minimum wage increases during weak economic periods.

The sooner we improve workers' wages, the sooner we'll see the economic recovery take off and our prolonged unemployment crisis fade. For all who'd like to take home more next year, here is a raise worth fighting for.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Editor's note: Christine Owens is executive director of the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit advocacy organization for employment rights of lower-wage workers.

[dfwgator]

Christine you ignorant slut.

[SandRat]

Help the economy??? It will hurt it!!!!

[GeronL]

This person is an economic illiterate, plain and simple.

How about $500 an hour??

[rogue yam]

Oh sure.

The way to make folks buy more of something (in this case, labor) is to raise the cost of that thing.

Brilliant!

[wastedyears]

Raises in minimum wage causes an increase in expenditures for companies, and less revenue.

I did terrible in school and even I know this. What is wrong with these people?

[unixfox]

Ok princess, what shall we raise it to?

$20 an hour, $30, $40, what is it? Because apparently no matter what it’s raised to it will be too low for most of you brain dead experts.

[dfwgator]

The dirty secret is that many union contracts are tied to the level of the minimum wage.

[Lion Den Dan]

Minimum wage jobs are entry level type jobs and the workers who fill them are not worth the current minimum wage. When minimum wage is increased, those jobs go unfilled. A real economy buillder.

[wastedyears]

And there it is.

[jazusamo]

Christine is an idiot. She needs to read what Thomas Sowell has written on this for many years.

[re_nortex]

NO!

There are two major factors that keep the brakes on the economy:

1). The minimum wage.
2). Labor unions.

Abolishing the minimum wage would be a bold and very brave move but it would make America the most powerful economic engine on the planet with full employment. The minimum wage is an evil artifice for it prohibits a employer and a worker from setting an honest price. The minimum wage is simply anti-liberty.

And as for labor unions, this map pretty much says it all:

Even in these Obama-induced tough times, those states where freedom reigns are faring better than where the shackles of forced-unionism are found. The map hasn't yet been updated to reflect Indiana's status, a proud new member of the Right to Work states.

[21twelve]

“...and the workers who fill them are not worth the current minimum wage..”

A guy I know has a pizza joint. And because he HAS to pay the worthless employees a minimum wage, he feels that in order to keep his good employees around he pays them more - even though they still probably aren’t worth what the minimum wage is.

[2ndDivisionVet]

There shouldn’t be a “minimum wage” or any other government rules that apply to private sector contracts between employers and employees. PERIOD.

[onevoter]

Christine must be unbelievably ignorant with regards to the economy. Basic sense tells us that, if we give the people who stock shelves at the grocery store a raise, the cost of groceries goes up - if we give the people who work the cash register at the gas station a raise, the cost of gas goes up. In the end, neither the stock person nor the person at the register come out ahead because they are both paying more for both gas and food (as well as the rest of us who got no raise). With people like Christine shaping public opinion, it is no wonder this country is in trouble!

[wastedyears]

Indiana is already indicated as a Right-to-Work state on that map.

[re_nortex]

I beg my pardon! :-)

I just realized that the NRTW Foundation has updated the map for Indiana. I had become accustomed to the older map where this hadn't yet been done.

[Dutch Boy]

These are the same geniuses that believe they are stimulating the economy by taking money out of the economy from productive people, running it though Washington and giving it back to society’s leeches.

You might as well double the price of a product to increase sales.

Seriously, where do these people go to get educated? Were they even more dumb before going to college?

[Neanderthal]

Biography

Christine Owens joined NELP as its Executive Director in January 2008. Over her long career as a workers’ rights advocate, she has held a variety of public interest and public sector positions advancing employment rights and opportunities for women, people of color and low wage workers. In 1997, she joined the national AFL-CIO as a senior policy analyst specializing in workplace equity issues, and in 2001, was appointed Director of Public Policy. At the AFL-CIO, she worked closely with NELP and numerous national and grassroots economic policy and worker advocacy groups, along with national unions and state labor federations, to promote reforms such as minimum wage and living wage hikes, pay equity for working women, and state UI coverage expansions. Before joining the AFL-CIO, she founded and ran the Workers Options Resource Center, which coordinated the efforts of a broad-based coalition of national and community organizations to win the 1996 federal minimum wage increase.

Education
J.D., University of Virginia
B.A., College of William and Mary (Certainly not economics)

[preacher]

Many cities have a super high minimum wage called the living or livable wage. Detroit is one such city. If this article is correct Detroit ought to be paradise on earth.