Young, Poor and Needing a Job, Not a Raise
27th May 2015
Los Angeles is the latest large city in recent years to lift its local wage floor well above the federal minimum of $7.25. Seattle and San Francisco are already implementing $15 minimums, which likewise have been proposed in New York City and Washington, D.C. Last year, Chicago passed legislation that will boost the minimum in stages to $13 an hour in 2019, a 58% increase over five years.
The biggest backers of these measures tend to be unions, who want to reduce the supply of labor by increasing its cost. Unions call for higher minimums in the name of helping the working poor, reducing inequality, increasing purchasing power and so forth. But a union’s primary objective is to protect its members, and Big Labor’s minimum-wage advocacy primarily is in the service of pricing nonunion workers out of the labor force. The average union worker in Los Angeles earns more than $27 an hour, a wage that is easier to command when people who will work for less are too expensive to employ thanks to a mandated minimum wage.
Yeah, unions — the workers’ friend.
Politicians like President Obama and civil-rights groups like the NAACP insist that the minimum wage is an effective antipoverty tool. But most minimum-wage earners do not hail from poor households, let alone head them. Rather, they tend to be teenagers or young adults working part time. The majority of poor families in the U.S. have no workers. What they need most is a job, not a raise.