Living on the Edge
So let’s have a discussion about the minimum wage. Here in Ohio, it’s $8.55 per hour. The national minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. So let’s do some figuring, to find out what those numbers mean.
$8.55 an hour means a gross pay of $342 a week (for a 40-hour work week), $1368 per month, or $17,100 a year. And that’s if you’re lucky. Lucky to live in Ohio, lucky to work 2000 hours in a year, and lucky to not get sick or laid off.
$7.25 an hour, the national minimum, obviously is less: $290 per week, $1160 per month, or $14500 a year – less. But an either case, it’s not credible to call the minimum wage a “living” wage.
As a single person, to be 100% eligible for Federal assistance, you can only make $12,760 per year. So even at the national minimum wage, someone working a fulltime job (2000 hours a year) would be way “over” the poverty line. To quote the Parkland kids – I call “BS”.
Let’s say you’re paying $600 a month for rent (that’s the cheapest here in Pataskala). You manage to only eat $250 per month worth of food (that’s $62, or nine Big Mac value meals, a week). And, in many places in the United States, there is no such thing as reliable public transportation. A car, gas, insurance: maybe that’s another $150, though one minor mechanical difficulty will blow that right out of the water. So with rent, food, and transportation you’ve gone through more than one thousand dollars. And you haven’t bought (or washed) underwear, or eyeglasses, or shoes.
One Expense Away
In “real life”, neither $7.25 or $8.55 is a living wage. It’s a wage guaranteed to require something else – another job, someone to help pay for things, or going into debt. It also guarantees that the “Pathway to improvement”, the old “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” through education, isn’t available. There’s not the time, nor the money, to get that done. Living on the real minimum wage locks people into an essential struggle to survive.
What would a $15 per hour minimum wage do? Run the numbers: $600 per week, $2400 a month, or $30,000 a year. It’s a wage that allows folks to actually live, instead of just survive. It creates discretionary income, to pay for education, to put aside for retirement, to save for a future home or business venture.
In 1978 I signed my first teaching contract for $8000 a year. That small amount was able to take care of my $125 a month rent, $.75 a gallon gas, and a Big Mac value meal of $1.79 (though there wasn’t a McDonald’s in Pataskala back then). I was able to pay for further education, and drive my 1967 Volkswagen – even pay for repairs at “Mike’s”. And what is 1978’s $8000 worth in 2021 dollars: $32000. By the way, beginning teaching salary in the local school is still under $40,000 a year. Teachers haven’t made much progress over forty years in getting above a minimal wage.
Dignity of Work
Ohio’s Democratic Senator, Sherrod Brown, speaks often about “the dignity of work”. He recognizes that most Americans want to work, they want to “pay their way”. But to make that “American Dream” available, there has to be a tangible result – a living wage. We can’t define “living” as barely scraping by, one small expense away from disaster. If we want folks to have that “dignity”, then we need to establish a “floor”, a base pay that will provide that dignity. And that “floor” isn’t extravagant. It won’t, by itself, support a family. A family today requires both adults work, something that a half century ago wasn’t necessary. That’s progress, I guess.
Currently 44% of American workers earn less than a $15 per hour wage. So what does that do? It forces 8% of American workers to work two jobs. It also makes the average worker put in an extra five hours a week overtime. That’s 250 extra hours a year – or the equivalent of more than four extra weeks of work. So our 2021 era requires a big percentage of Americans to work far more than a forty-hour work week, for low wages – that’s our “American Dream”?
Our Dream
We hear apocalyptic scenario of what would happen if the United States had a $15 minimum wage. According to that vision, millions of Americans would lose their jobs, thousands of small businesses would fail, and inflation would spiral out of control. But would it?
Any change in wage and salary rules will have a negative impact on some businesses – it would be foolish to deny that. There would be adjustments. And the costs of some of those adjustments, including higher costs for goods, would be borne by those who buy those goods. So a higher minimum wage is likely to raise costs for folks who buy more stuff, those who already are making more than that minimum wage. It would cause some “income leveling”, by raising the floor for many, it would likely make those already way above that floor to pay some more.
And some Americans would lose their current jobs as businesses “sort out” a higher bottom wage. So there will be some negative impacts for some people.
But for a large percentage of American workers, a $15 minimum wage would change their lives for the better, and give them greater access to the “American dream”. It would create Senator Brown’s “dignity of work”, and also allow more Americans to have a life beyond work. That’s something many cannot have now. A $15 minimum wage would allow American workers to live for more than just a paycheck.
