Trickle Up: Workers Deserve a Living Wage

Trickle down doesn’t work, but trickle up does.

Gilroy Chamber President Mark Turner says he’d like to see legislators run a small business to see how laws—such as an increased minimum wage—affect their ability to prosper.

How about a different model? We’d like to see all of those who are against raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour try to live on the current minimum wage of $10 an hour in California or $7.25 federally.

They would very quickly support raising it, and not just to $15, but to the $21.75 it would be if wages kept up with increased worker productivity, according to a study by the Center for Economic Policy Research. Or they might advocate keeping the minimum wage up with the rate of salary increases CEOs are taking from their companies.

For the record, the average CEO now makes $13.8 million a year, 177 times the median salary of $77,800. In contrast, the federal minimum wage amounts to $15,000 a year, or in California, $20,800 a year.

The poverty level for one person is $11,880, or $20,160 for a couple with two children. We submit that if you want to make America great again, how about making sure full-time workers aren’t living in poverty?

The Chamber chief also says that minimum wage jobs are for entry level workers, who are supposed to prove their worth and be paid more as they advance. But as you can see all over Gilroy, where retail is king, there are plenty of older minimum wage workers just trying to hang on and feed their families. Offshore, even cheaper labor has cut into their livelihoods and building a wall isn’t going to help that.

Turner argues that raising local minimum wages will force businesses to move elsewhere and crush the economy. We take the other tack: raising the minimum wage will help workers afford to shop in the stores they work for and pump more money into the economy. It’s the greatest, most practical stimulus around. Why do businesspeople support bailing out failing banks or insurance companies with trillions of dollars, while ignoring working poor who can quickly pump their earnings back into the economy?

Keeping the minimum wage so low keeps the economy stagnant for those at the bottom rungs, which these days, with a floundering middle class, is a growing segment of the labor force becoming poorer and poorer.

Sure, if businesses take care of their workers, especially those struggling the hardest to survive, there would be no need for a legislated minimum wage.

Take a look at Costco vs. Wal-Mart. Costco pays its workers an average of $20.89 an hour with good benefits. Wal-Mart pays $12.67 an hour and many of its workers qualify for food stamps, whose cost the taxpayers pick up. Costco’s stock doubles Wal-Mart’s and analysts attribute some of its higher value to a happy and productive workforce.

Wal-Mart’s owners are among the wealthiest people in the United States, but its workers are among the poorest, the ones a minimum wage was designed to protect.

Devotees of Reaganomics preach that cutting taxes on the rich will stimulate the economy and trickle down to the lowest-paid workers, something that has been proven false time and again. A more reasonable logic would dictate that paying the lowest-paid workers better will trickle up and stimulate the economy for all.