8-24-06, 9:02 am
Under pressure from an increasingly dissatisfied electorate, Schwarzenegger changed his mind on the issue despite sharp opposition from California Republicans.
AFL-CIO blogger Mike Hallaccused the governor of using the issue as a 'political football' in an election year.
An estimated 1.4 million California workers will benefit from the pay raise by 2008. This victory for workers in California comes on the heels of minimum wage increases in Massachusetts, Louisiana and Michigan.
Congressional Republicans ensured that a Democratic proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $7.25 would not pass by attaching it to an extremely unpopular proposal to repeal of the estate tax and other measures that would hurt low-wage workers. The Republican majority in Congress has refused to raise the minimum wage for ten years in a row.
Because of this Republican stubbornness, close to 20 states are either considering legislation that would raise the minimum wage or are expected to have ballot initiatives that would do so if passed.
Republican opposition to raising the minimum age is often mired in inaccuracies. Anti-minimum wage pundits argue that a minimum wage raise wouldn't affect that many people, most of whom, they misleadingly claim, are teenagers who simply don't need the money. They also argue that raising the minimum wage would force businesses to cut jobs.
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics compiled by the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute (EPI), these claims are simply wrong. Most minimum wage earners, in fact 75 percent of them, are 20 and over. Many hundreds of thousands have families, and the majority of minimum wage earners take in more than 50 percent of their household income.
For most of the individuals and families, poverty wages do not allow them to purchase the basic necessities that well-off opponents of raising the minimum wage take for granted.
Additionally, more than 8 million working people nationally would be positively affected by a raise in the federal minimum wage to just $7.25.
There is also a growing pile of evidence that shows fears about job losses are simply misplaced. EPI has conducted a number studies of low-wage job markets. The most recent examined Florida's economy in 2005 a year after that state voted to raise its minimum wage and the national low-wage job market in 1998, one year after the last time the federal minimum wage was raised. In both cases, there were no discernible signs of job losses as a result of the raise in the minimum wage.
In the state of Washington, where voters in 1998 adopted a ballot measure to tie minimum wage increases to inflation, job losses that occurred mainly in conjunction with the Bush recession of 2001, were in high paying industries like manufacturing and had more to do with Republican federal trade policies that favor outsourcing, not in low-wage sectors, which remained relatively unaffected.
In fact, many economists believe that better pay in the low-wage job market may reduce employee turnover rates by providing more economic security. In turn, job-training and related expenses for small business owners may also be eased.
--Reach Joel Wendland at
