Mar
19
Blog Post #9- Class 15
March 19, 2015 | Leave a Comment
These articles this time around bring a new perspective to the debate about the minimum wage. Firstly, it surprised me how there really is no standard minimum wage. This wage is technically supposed to be across the board but then there are restaurant workers who have their own minimum wage. To add onto that, additional bills to raise the minimum wage always come with requirements. It never targets all businesses, but rather, some businesses.
The article in Crain’s New York is an example of that. Mayor de Blasio is pushing to expand the living wage to $10 with benefits or $11.50 without. This sounds like a great boost but then the author details that it only applies to those who have an “annual revenue in excess of $50 million or with 10 or more stores nationwide”. This cheapens the bill because it will only affect some workers; not all workers. However, this may give a boost to small businesses who need to compete with the larger chains.
Then we have the restaurant business workers. They have a measly $2.13 as the minimum tipped wage. This is egregiously less than $7.25 but many people argue that restaurant workers earn their keep lavishly in tips instead. While this may be true sometimes, it doesn’t happen all the time. Tips not only depend on the server or waiter’s ability but also on things such as the environment of the restaurant, the food, or the pace of customers that day. These are the sorts of things that restaurant workers can’t control and yet that affects their wages. I think if I was a waiter living off of this minimum tipped wage, the sheer insecurity of the wage would be enough to keep me awake.
In the Forbes’ article, the author details five “myths” about inequality. I find most of them hard to accept as entirely false. For the first myth, where the author details how real income has actually increase, I question whether this income is indexed for the higher cost of living or the higher prices nowadays. For the second myth, where the author blames the poor for staying poor by not working or not having a working partner, I was actually shocked. Even though this is in Forbes, I felt that this myth was very abrasive and rude. It’s true, many people who are poor are typically not in a standard family with two full-time workers but that doesn’t discredit that the poor works just as hard. Their situation in life may have been brought down by things that stem from inequality like the lack of education or residence within bad neighborhoods. The third myth, however, I do find myself agreeing with. I think the dependence on government welfare as well as the “marginal tax” on labor when those benefits disappear with income increases is a problem that needs to be fixed. Welfare may do more harm than good in the long run. Maybe direct help to the poor isn’t what they need. Maybe they need incentive more.
I think the most interesting thing about the articles this time around is about how women struggle in this minimum wage issue brought up in the article in the Guardian. In the past we’ve divided minimum wage workers by age or household income and not really about gender. According to the author, 66% of women versus 34% of men were tipped minimum wage workers from 2010 to 2012. This is extremely imbalanced in itself but then it gets worse. The numbers are completely switched when it comes to the management: 38% of women were in management roles versus the 62% of men. What is it that attracts women to the server jobs and shy away from the higher roles? Perhaps if we raise the minimum tipped wage, it will empower the women and enable them to reach for better jobs.
