$15 Minimum Wage

As I write, the Senate Parliamentarian has not yet issued her ruling on the $15 minimum wage provision proposal to be voted on this week.

If you’re reading this, you know the rest of the public details from your source of news.  I simply want to add a personal opinion about this long-standing issue.  I have a perspective that I rarely hear from any other source.  You be the judge.

The objection/rationale for low wage earners being against the the minimum wage seems very simple:  “you have a choice: low wage, or no wage”.  In other words, if the minimum wage goes up, we’ll have to lay you off, and you, worker, won’t have any income.  There won’t be business to hire you.  Too bad, so sad.

It is an attractive anti-argument: scare off the potential recipients of the benefit.

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There is another point of view that I never hear, which I offer for your consideration.

First, here’s a little background:  I posed this three years ago to a friend, a retired very high level vice-president in a major international corporation.

My friend had been gently jabbing me, a retired Union representative, about a new Supreme Court opinion, outlawing mandatory payment of union dues by non-members.  In my sector, this was called “Fair Share”.  You didn’t have to belong to the union representing the workers, but if you received union negotiated benefits (which all employees receive) the union should be able to charge non-members a fee.  I’ve been retired a long time, my recollection was that this amount was typically about 85%.  Off limits for the fee would be things like political action fees and the like.  Fair enough.

Many managements chafed at the very mention of “Union”.  It meant trouble, a certain sharing of power.

An allied victim of fair share, and thus Unions, was found to centerpiece a lawsuit which wended its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.  The suit was entitled Janus v AFSCME.  There are numerous references, including the actual U.S. Supreme Court Ruling of June 27, 2018, which you can reference by simple internet search.

The anti-union position prevailed.  Down with Unions!  Good riddance.

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Bill (not his name) and I are friends, and occasional ‘parries and thrusts’ between us, representing corporate management and union thug,  were never hostile.  My friend brought the Janus decision into our conversation – doing something of a victory lap.  He knew my career was as a union representative.  I knew his career ended near the pinnacle of one of the worlds largest corporations.  He was a very good guy.

In my turn in the conversation I laid out a simple argument:  the purpose of a union – in this case workers – is to represent the interests of the members.  In the case of a labor union, as AFSCME, and my own, was negotiating things like wages, hours and working conditions.  Other provisions, such as crew size, are management rights by universal definition.

How, I asked my friend, can a corporation be against increasing wages and benefits to workers of all kinds?  After all, isn’t the corporations objective to make money, and isn’t it necessary for the corporation to have consumers with enough money to buy its products, and thus help the bottom line of the corporation?

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My friend said, and I think he meant it as I heard and saw his reaction, that I’d given him something to think about.

It’s might seem irrelevant – he is, after all, retired and even if he bought my argument he was only one cog in the machinery of this major corporation.

But it is worthy to think about.  A living wage for all helps everyone.  Paul Wellstone said it best, years ago: “we all do better when we all do better”.

In the next day or two we’ll see how the sausage mill that is the Congress deals with this most important issue.

POSTNOTE Feb. 27:  In re-reading what I wrote, above, there is one critical point to be added.  My friend was with no question a person with far more than usual power within his sector.

Power People, like all of us, can have serious blind spots causing them to lose perspective.  They can’t imagine another comparable point of view, and any move to diminish their power is consciously or unconsciously resisted.

In an earlier blog at this space, I discussed this matter.  You can read it here, from Nov. 17, 2011: The Occupy Movement.