A $15 Minimum Wage Is a Booby Prize for American Workers
7th April 2016
New York, San Francisco, L.A. and Seattle are at the forefront of a new urban economy, based on industries such as finance, technology and media, that generally creates jobs for the highly educated only. Virtually every region at the cutting edge of the minimum wage movement has seen a rapid decline in traditional blue-collar jobs — notably in manufacturing — which often paid well above the minimum wage, and offered potential for further individual advancement.
In these and other core cities, we are seeing something reminiscent of the Victorian era, where a larger proportion of workers are earning their living serving the wealthy and their needs as nannies, restaurant workers, dog-walkers and the like. In New York City, as of 2012, over a third of workers were employed in low-wage service jobs, a percentage that rose through the recovery from the Great Recession, according to a study by the Center for an Urban Future. The largest growth in new jobs in NYC between 2009 and 2014 came primarily in low-wage fields. Of the 401,800 net jobs the city gained over that span, 76,400 were in food services and drinking establishments, with an average annual wage of $26,200. The sector that added the second largest number of jobs: ambulatory health care, at 55,400, with an average wage of $46,200. Meanwhile at the high-wage end of the spectrum, Wall Street employment was flat, and the glitzy fields of information services and movies and sound recording added 26,000 jobs.
What a $15 minimum wage in New York and California says is, ‘Unless you are rich enough to be able to pay your servants $15 an hour, we don’t want you here.’