Minimum Wage, Maximum Outrage

No one should ever endure the kind of economic humiliation that comes with working a full-time job and making a less-than-living wage.

There is dignity in all work, but that dignity grows dim when the checks are cashed and the coins are counted and still the bills rise higher than the wages.

Most people want to work. It is a basic human desire: to make a way, to provide for one’s self and one’s loved ones, to advance. It is that great hope of tomorrow, better and brighter, in which we can be happy and secure, able to sleep without hunger and wake without worry.

But it is easy to see how people can have that hope thrashed out of them, by having to wrestle with the most wrenching of questions: how to make do when you work for less than you can live on?

That is why the minimum wage debate resonates so profoundly with so many: We know what it feels like to not have enough money after you’ve busted your body with too-hard work. We know the worry in parents’ eyes as they sit around a dinner table littered with more bills than dollar bills, trying to figure out whom to pay and how to save.

These scenes play themselves out in more American households than the well-dressed men and women in the marbled halls of Congress will ever care to imagine. These are the forgotten and forsaken, the just getting by on just enough. They don’t have much money to donate to a church, let alone a political campaign, and yet they yearn just the same for someone to look out for them. They struggle to make it to the polls, sometimes on public transportation, and wait hours to vote.

Raising the minimum wage won’t erase all of the problems of the poor, but it is one component, one rooted in basic dignity and fairness, of a much fairer picture of income inequality and poverty.

Most Americans understand this. According to a Gallup poll last year, 71 percent of adults (91 percent of Democrats, 68 percent of independents and 50 percent of Republicans) said they would vote for a law that would raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour on Election Day if they could.

But, as one would expect, Republicans in Congress are chafing. Some say that raising the minimum wage could hurt small businesses, though a Gallup poll in November showed that small businesses were split on increasing the minimum wage, with roughly half for and half against it. Furthermore, according to a report by the National Employment Law Project, “the majority (66 percent) of low-wage workers are not employed by small businesses, but rather by large corporations with over 100 employees.”

Others dismiss the push for increasing the minimum wage, which is being advanced aggressively by Democrats, purely as a political move.

On some level, is the focus on the minimum wage a political ploy on the part of Democrats? I have no doubt. But that doesn’t drain the proposal of its merit. Much of what occurs in Washington occurs at the intersection of political advantage and earnest intentions, and it has ever been thus. Whenever one side accuses the other of playing politics, the accusation is often laced with an envy of the other’s adroitness.

So with the minimum wage, we have an issue that’s both smart politics and compassionate policy.

Politicians do things for political ends, even things designed to help real people.

And that political haymaking is going both ways. This week, the Republican governor of Oklahoma, Mary Fallin, signed a bill banning the state’s cities from “establishing mandatory minimum wages or vacation and sick-day requirements,” according to The Associated Press.

How callous is that? And it should be noted that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “In 2012, Oklahoma’s proportion of hourly paid workers earning at or below the prevailing federal minimum wage ranked third highest among the 50 states and the District of Columbia.” The bureau reported that 7.2 percent of the hourly paid workers in Oklahoma earned the federal minimum wage or less, compared with 4.7 percent nationally.

And things have not been moving in a positive direction. The bureau also notes that:

“From 2011 to 2012, the portion of hourly paid workers in Oklahoma who earned at or below the federal minimum wage rose from 6.8 to 7.2 percent. The percentage of workers earning less than the federal minimum rose 1.5 percentage points in 2012 to 3.9 percent, while the share earning exactly the minimum wage fell 1.0 points to 3.3 percent.”

Now, if both sides are playing politics with the minimum wage to some degree, which side would you rather be on: that of the working people, who are struggling to make a living, or that of the politicians determined to block them?