Chris Powell: New fast-food kiosks rebut promoters of minimum-wage rise

Electronic order kiosks have been installed as part of the renovation of the McDonald's restaurant on West Center Street in Manchester, Conn. There's no one inside the machine to ask if you want fries with that quarter-pounder with cheese. 

You push buttons to register your order yourself. Thereby hangs a tale that Connecticut's political class will do its best to ignore. The kiosks are the mocking rebuttal to the demands that Connecticut increase its minimum wage so that every job pays enough to support a family, demands rooted in the delusion of something for nothing, the delusion that employers can pay more than the market's judgment of the value of the work done.

The kiosks also are the mocking rebuttal to Connecticut's public school system, whose rising graduation rate is celebrated by Gov. Dannel Malloy even as half or more of the state's high school graduates fail to master high school math or English. Soon not even "careers" in fast food may be available to the uneducated and unskilled bearing meaningless diplomas. If they are lucky, their limited vocabularies will still include "cheeseburger" and "fries" and the kiosks will accept EBT cards so they won't have to figure the cost of their lunch

Since they are a reaction to government's impoverishing and dumbing down society and leaving young people unqualified for skilled work, the kiosks also may be a mocking rebuttal to Connecticut's newspapers, which have let government get away with it even though newspapers require customers who are literate, interested in civic life, and able to earn enough money to afford a subscription.

Four years ago, arguing that this impoverishment and dumbing down were damaging newspapers far more than the growth of the Internet was, this writer observed: "Newspapers still can sell themselves to traditional households -- two-parent families involved with their children, schools, churches, sports, civic groups, and such. But newspapers  cannot  sell themselves to households headed by single women who have several children by different fathers, survive on welfare stipends, can hardly speak or read English, move every few months to cheat their landlords, barely know what town they're living in, and couldn't afford a newspaper subscription even if they could read. And such households constitute a rising share of the population."

That observation drew denunciation around the world -- from Hartford, where the Courant editorialized against it  twice against it, giving it more scrutiny than the newspaper applied to the governor at that time, to New Zealand, where a columnist for the country's largest newspaper called it a lame excuse for the failings of this writer's own newspaper.

Single mothers and their negligent parenting, the scorners insisted, could not possibly have anything to do with the decline of the press. Yet now it is widely accepted that the impoverishment and neglect of children are the primary causes of their failure in school. Indeed, in testimony last year supporting the latest school-financing lawsuit in Connecticut, East Hartford's school superintendent echoed the infamous observation.

He said his schools are hobbled because 71 percent of their students are so poor that they qualify for free or discounted lunches, 15 percent have learning disabilities, 12 percent don't speak English, many need social workers to make up for parental neglect, and many are transient and disoriented, moving in or out of town or their school district during the school year as their families, most headed by single women, lose and regain housing.

Most such students, the superintendent said, never catch up. In spite of political correctness, no schools like that are going to produce newspaper readers, skilled workers, or good citizens.

 Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Conn. governor wants to put heavy fees on a constitutional right

MANCHESTER, CONN.

What if a conservative Republican state tried to put a $700 tax on abortions, purportedly to defray the costs of the state's licensing of medical personnel? Of course people would scream that the state was using tax policy less to raise money than to impair a constitutional right.

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, a liberal Democrat, is doing the same thing in regard to another constitutional right with his budget proposal to raise gun permit fees by more than 400 percent so that obtaining a permit might cost as much as $745. The governor's office says the increased fees are meant to offset the increased workload placed on the state police by increased demand for gun permits.

But this is as much nonsense as has been spouted lately by the governor's budget director, Ben Barnes, who insists that the governor's plan to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in state financial aid to most municipal school systems and to require municipalities to start contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to the state teacher pension fund every year won't risk property-tax increases. For the State Police already have computer access to state and national criminal records databases and can quickly determine whether a gun-permit applicant has a disqualifying record. The time and expense of reviewing these databases are minimal.

Since a constitutional right is involved, licensing fees should cover only actual costs and not be used to raise revenue. The governor is persecuting gun owners as much as President Trump is persecuting Muslims, the governor disrespecting the constitutional rights of the former, the president disrespecting the constitutional rights of the latter. While both the governor and the president have taken oaths to uphold the Constitution, they would prefer to pander to their hateful political bases.

THE MINIMUM-WAGE FALLACY: Woody Allen's best parody of political liberalism comes in one of his first movies, Bananas, in which the revolutionary leader who has just taken over a Latin American country and been driven mad by power declares that henceforth the national language will be Swedish, that underwear will be changed every hour and worn on the outside "so we can check," and that all children under 13 years old  are  13 years old.

The same delusion can be seen in the campaign in Connecticut and throughout the nation to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour. For mere declarations by government that wages must be higher do not guarantee that the  value produced by labor will be higher too. Raising wages by government decree easily can raise prices, but raising the market's ability and willingness to pay higher prices is something else.

The main problem behind the campaign for $15 an hour is the large number of low-skilled adults, many of them single women with children, who in recent years have displaced the young people who traditionally dominated entry-level jobs, particularly in the fast-food industry. These adults note that they cannot support their families on their low-skill incomes, as if anyone ever could. Of course most of the kids in such jobs were and are living at home with their parents or working part-time while in college and living there.

This problem is not really one of wages for the low-skilled but rather the failure of adults to learn marketable skills, and in Connecticut it's not hard to see where that problem comes from, since the state's public education system has become mostly social promotion and as many as two-thirds of its high school graduates never master high school work.

But elected officials at both the state and municipal level lack the political courage to correct these gross deficiencies. They would prefer to blame McDonald's. Besides, since the primary consumers of fast food are the poor themselves, a higher minimum wage may not be such a gift to them if it just confronts them with higher prices.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Of minimum wages, gender shifting and hypocritcal trading with China

Woody Allen's movie Bananas has a scene depicting the power madness that afflicts a Latin American revolutionary leader upon his seizure of office. El Supremo gathers his people to proclaim that henceforth the country's official language will be Swedish, that underwear will be changed every half hour and worn on the outside "so we can check," and that all children under 16 years old now are 16 years old.

Modern political liberalism increasingly evokes that scene with its belief that there are no practicalities that power cannot overcome and that merely proclaiming something makes it so.

For the great liberal causes of the moment seem to be, first, raising the minimum wage and, second, giving men who want to be women and women who want to be men the right to use the washrooms of their choice.

California and New York already are increasing their minimum wages to $15 per hour. Connecticut soon may follow. And some states, including Connecticut, have construed the sexual identity clamor as a matter of civil rights.  Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy has gone so far as to prohibit official state government travel to states that maintain ordinary sexual-identity rules, as if those rules, followed for centuries -- followed until very recently even by Connecticut itself -- were actually outrages of oppression. (Who knew?)

Economists are divided on whether minimum wages are beneficial, whether their redistribution of income is positive on the whole or whether income gains for lower-paid workers are offset by automation and declines in employment. Indeed, signing California's minimum-wage bill the other day, Gov. Jerry Brown said the minimum wage makes no economic sense, just political sense.

If the rationale for a minimum wage is accepted, the wage should be increased from time to time to match inflation, and the minimum wage has eroded badly in that respect. But then no business can survive without linking wages to productivity, and proclaiming a minimum wage of $15 per hour or any amount does not suddenly guarantee that the work done by everyone employed at minimum wage will produce that much value to an employer, or that an employer paying minimum wage will be able to recover his higher wage costs by raising prices.

And while current minimum wages surely are not sufficient to support families, as advocates of raising the minimum wage complain, many jobs don't produce enough to match what families consume. So why should the minimum wage necessarily be high enough to support a family? And what size family?

As for whether men can be women and women can be men simply by their own assertion, even the worst reactionaries and most fervent religious fundamentalists these days probably would not advocate oppression of people with sexual identity issues. The lives of such people may be hard enough already.

But has modesty, the rationale for separate-sex washrooms, really been so oppressive all this time? Certainly it never intended to be oppressive, unlike racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination. Separate-sex washrooms did not impair anyone's full inclusion in society. Maybe men who identify as women and women who identify as men would be more comfortable with the right to use the washroom of their choice, without regard to traditional rules, but what of the right of everyone else to modesty?

Anyway, like the minimum wage, the washroom issue is arguable. So a governor who, like Connecticut's, has managed to do business with totalitarian China only makes himself ridiculous with his politically correct indignation about washrooms in North Carolina and Mississippi.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Posted in Chris Powell on Monday, April 11

Richard Kirsch: An overdue fix to overtime

There are a lot of ways that businesses are squeezing worker pay. Here’s a big one.

On the one hand, millions of Americans are stuck in low-paying part-time jobs that don’t offer them enough hours.

On the other, millions more are now routinely forced to work over 40 hours a week without getting a dime for their overtime labor. In many cases, that’s because employers are paying hourly wage workers as if they were salaried professionals.

There used to be a big distinction between hourly and salaried employees. That wasn’t by accident.

In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which forced bosses to pay workers a minimum wage and time-and-a-half for any hours worked over 40 a week. That law was key to building America’s middle class.

Only a small percentage of employees — executives, administrators, and travelling salespeople, among others — were exempt from overtime.

Yet since figuring out who was eligible for overtime proved complicated, regulators settled on one rule that trumps them all: weekly salary. By having a clear rule on salary level, it’s much harder for employers to avoid paying overtime.

In 1975, for example, employers were required to pay overtime to anyone on a salary of less than $155 a week. That covered 7 out of 10 workers.

But that salary limit hasn’t kept up with inflation or changes in the workforce. As a result, many businesses have been putting anyone with even minor “management” responsibilities on salary.

For example, a federal court found that a clerk at a Dollar General store — who worked 50 hours or more a week stocking shelves and mopping floors — could be considered a salaried “manager,” since she was responsible for minding the store.

Today, if your salary is more than $455 a week — that’s just $23,660 a year — you can be forced to work long hours without any extra pay, let alone time-and-a-half. As a result, instead of 7 of 10 workers being eligible for overtime, now it’s only 1 in 10.

Last March, President Obama told the Department of Labor to modernize the regulation covering who gets overtime. “Because these regulations are outdated,” he acknowledged, “millions of Americans lack the protections of overtime and even the right to the minimum wage.”

To restore this pillar of middle-class income, regulators should once again ensure that 7 out of 10 workers are covered. That’s the best way to close the loopholes that businesses will use to cheat workers out of overtime.

To do that, the Department of Labor should set the new cap to at least $1,327 a week, or $69,000 a year. That level would do what the law was intended to do — namely, to distinguish between workers and bosses.

As a result, 10 million workers would get more money in their wallets to spend boosting the economy in their communities.

In addition to increasing the weekly salary amount, the Labor Department should modernize the rules so that the so-called “managers” at fast food restaurants, clothing outlets, and discount stores — who may be responsible for supervising their co-workers but don’t have any real executive authority — get overtime as well.

Closing the overtime loophole could also increase the earnings of millions of part-time workers. Rather than paying time-and-a-half to employees they’re currently forcing to work unpaid overtime, many businesses are likely to increase the hours worked by part-time employees who are eager to work more.

Overtime pay is key to restarting the middle-class engine of our economy. It’s past time for the Department of Labor to act.

As long as it delays, millions of workers will continue to be cheated by big businesses out of a fair share of the wealth their labor helps to create.

Richard Kirsch is a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the author of ''Fighting for Our Health: The Epic Battle to Make Health Care a Right in the United States''. He’s also a senior This was distributed via OtherWords.org.

Tagged: jobs, Labor Rights, minimum wage, overtime

David Holahan: Past time to lower the minimum wage!

  If raising the minimum wage would hurt business, as the Republican Party insists, then it stands to reason that lowering it from $7.25 an hour would help business. And since the business of America, as President Calvin Coolidge said, is business. What are we waiting for?

How about $5, perchance $3? That would be like a steroid injection for our sluggish economy. As a college student in 1970 I spent one summer working for a vegetable farmer and earned the base pay of $1.45 an hour. The minimum wage for farm workers then was lower than that for the rest of the workforce ($1.60), presumably because we could nibble fresh produce while we worked in the blazing sun or driving rain.

Business has taken so many big hits over the years it’s a wonder there are any entrepreneurs left. The compulsory six-day, 12-hour a day workweek is long gone. One of the first strikes in American history advocated for the 10-hour workday. Good times!

Child labor is now taboo, too, at least in this country. My fraternal grandfather began earning his keep at the age of ten in a Pennsylvania coal mine. Little people worked cheap and their tiny bodies and nimble hands allowed them to get into tight places where grownups couldn’t go.

Once the minimum wage was zero, zilch, nada, nil. For centuries slavery greased the wheels of commerce here and abroad. It wasn’t simply that free labor was good for plantation owners. Enslaved people represented collateral for commercial investment, profits for insurance companies, a lucrative market for New England beef and dried cod, and a potent stimulus to expanding global trade.

As hard as it will be for some readers to believe, it was the Republican Party  that  brought this business-friendly era to a screeching halt. To be fair, the “Grand Old Party” was in its infancy back then and wasn’t nearly so Grand.  It has come a long way, blindly siding with business over labor in almost every instance since, fighting tooth and nail against most of the provisions that have shaped modern labor practices.

And the GOP is still fighting – and not just against increasing the federal minimum wage for the first time since 2009. In Maine, Republicans recently tried to loosen restrictions on longstanding child-labor laws so teenagers could work longer and later on school nights (11 p.m.) and for considerably less than the minimum wage. Talk about progress!

But mainly, Republicans are pushing back against Obama et al., who are arguing that it is time to raise the minimum wage. The Democrats anti-business rant goes something like this:

• Inflation has effectively decreased the current minimum wage (which is not indexed to the cost of living as Social Security payments are) by more than 11 percent since 2009.
• To equal the purchasing power of the federal minimum wage circa 1968 would mean a current figure of $10.69, according to the Congressional Research Service.
• Lowest-wage Americans need the extra money just to survive and will spend every penny of it on goods and services, thereby stimulating the economy more than tax breaks for the rich, who already have everything money can buy.

Republicans reply pithily that businesses are people, too. If you don’t believe them just ask the U.S. Supreme Court.

My grandfather and I survived the coal mines and the farm. I went back to college. Michael Holahan was rescued from a life underground by an uncle who was a priest and put him to work for the parish.

In my grandfather’s day things were simpler and regulations were few and far between. There were states that didn’t require children to attend school but  let them  be put to work in mines and factories. Was that so bad?

David Holahan is a freelance writer who lives in East Haddam, Conn.

Raise minimum wage and strengthen economy

It stands to reason that raising the minimum wage, by putting more money in the hands of consumers who are more likely to spend their money than are members of the rich people in the investment class would improve the still weak (for most people) U.S. economy.

-- Robert Whitcomb

A rich man's warning to other fat cats

Here’s an unusual super-rich guy with a strange message for his fellow 1-percent-of-the-1-percenters.

Nick Hanauer, who made billions as an Internet entrepreneur, recently wrote an open letter to his fellow über-richies.

“The true job creators are middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us,” Hanauer declared a little while ago in Politico Magazine. “I earn about 1,000 times the median American annually, but I don’t buy thousands of times more stuff.”

America depends on a strong middle class, he says, for it’s their purchases that power the economy. To back this up, he points out that his family has three cars — not 3,000.

So, Hanauer says, it’s in the self-interest of America’s corporate and financial elites to do all they can to lift the earnings the rest of us take home — starting with a $15-an-hour minimum wage.

The old claim that paying workers more will destroy small businesses and job growth is simply not true, he says. It’s insidious, he adds, to claim that helping the rich get richer is good for the economy, but helping the poor get richer is bad for it.

“The two cities in the nation with the highest rate of job growth by small businesses are San Francisco and Seattle,” Hanauer points out, observing that they also have the two highest minimum-wage levels in the country.

For the Koch-headed ideologues who oppose having any minimum wage at all, this member of the billionaire’s club says that the soundest way to shrink government is to decrease the need for it. That will take paying decent wages so people don’t need Food Stamps, rent assistance, and other subsidies for life’s basics.

Hanauer concludes with this sobering warning to obtuse billionaires: No society can survive the glaring inequities permeating the American economy. Unless these feudal low-wage policies make way for efforts to bridge the widening divide, “the pitchforks are going to come for us.”

 Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the populist newsletter The Hightower Lowdown.  This essay was distributed by OtherWords.org.

Robert L. Borosage: Help unions help middle class

 

Labor Day is supposed to be a celebration of workers, but it’s been a long time since workers have been celebrated — or for that matter, have had a reason to celebrate. That’s because the union movement that gave us this holiday is, at least numerically, a shadow of its former self.

If we really want to give workers something to cheer about, we need to revitalize unions. It’s no coincidence that prosperity was widely shared when unions were at the height of their power in the decades after World War II, and that inequality has soared as unions have been weakened.

That’s what I conclude in Inequality: Rebuilding the Middle Class Requires Reviving Strong Unions, a new Campaign for America’s Future report. My analysis tracks the simultaneous decline in the power of the labor movement and the fortunes of middle-class workers. It makes the case in simple terms.

One chart reinforces the point. It compares union membership with the share of income going to the top 10 percent since the 1920s. When only one in 10 workers belonged to unions in the early 1930s, the richest 10 percent pocketed nearly half of the nation’s income.

Then President Franklin D. Roosevelt began a set of bold New Deal initiatives that dramatically increased the power of workers to join unions and bargain collectively. The share of workers who were unionized rose to about one-third by the late 1940s. At that point, the bottom 90 percent saw a significant increase in their share of national income.

Today, as union membership declines to low levels last seen in the 1920s, the share of national income going to the top 10 percent is rising — to levels not seen since then either.

Combine that with lackluster economic growth and you get the result chronicled in an August report by Sentier Research. As The New York Times reported, Sentier found that median incomes, when adjusted for inflation, had fallen 3.1 percent since 2009. They remain significantly below what they were in 2000.

A corporate-driven propaganda campaign has for decades blamed labor unions for saddling American corporations with burdens that made them uncompetitive in the global economy.

That has proven to be cover for dismantling the forces that kept corporations from rigging the economic rules in their favor. When corporate power was kept in check by union power, workers and corporations at least had a fighting chance to prosper together. Without that check, workers are losing. As wages erode, benefits disappear, work conditions become harsher and jobs themselves become more unstable.

The good news is that a combination of worker-activist movements and bold political leadership is setting the stage for a potential resurgence of the labor movement. In Los Angeles and other cities, newly elected pro-labor officials are making companies that benefit from local zoning or contracts pay a living wage and accept unions when a majority of workers indicate they want one.

Across the United States, fast-food worker strikes are fueling state and municipal minimum-wage increases while injecting new energy and ideas to worker organizing efforts.

President  Obama has used executive orders to raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers and require adherence to basic fair labor standards, including the right to organize. These orders could have effects that ripple through to private sector workers.

Labor Day would live up to its purpose if it not only gave workers a temporary respite from the rigors of their jobs, but also drove a national effort to empower workers once again to rebalance the economic scales so that we can rebuild a growing, stable middle class. It needs to be a day on, not a day off, in the effort to reclaim the American dream for working people.

Robert L. Borosage is the co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a center for ideas and action that works to build an enduring majority for progressive change. Distributed via OtherWords.org

James P. Freeman: What is a 'living wage'?

Like the mysterious appearance of black swans and blue moons, it was bound to happen sooner or later. The Cape Cod Times recently endorsed a position held by conservative Massachusetts state rep. Randy Hunt, who agreed to an increase in the state minimum wage that became law last month. Supporters of a mandated increase in wages (which will rise to $11 an hour in the commonwealth by 2017) might reconsider their positions given today’s fragile economy and future projections of the deleterious effects of such action locally and nationally.

Hunt (R.-Sandwich) shall be forgiven for choosing, in his words, “the lesser of two evils:” one, a pesky ballot initiative—always a wildcard for passage--in this November’s elections, that called for a swift increase of $10.50 an hour and automatic increases indexed to inflation (think of the recent gasoline tax, pegged similarly in perpetuity); or two, a higher per-hour figure with a definitive cap not tied to a gyrating Consumer Price Index, to be implemented in stages. He chose the latter.

His compromise may make sense given the coercive supreme Democrat majorities in the legislature that would have thwarted more reasonable Republican proposals but it is still bad public policy. It also does little to counter  assertions that Republicans are insensitive about the working poor. More so, it is just as bad as President Obama’s $10.10 federal minimum-wage proposal.

In 1938, at the end of progressivism’s first wave and during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second term, Congress enacted a federal minimum wage. Every president since, except Ford, Reagan and Obama, has signed into law increases, the most recent being George W. Bush in 2007; the last increase set in 2009. Last autumn, The Huffington Post reported that “progressive economists” believe that if today’s wage kept with the rate of inflation it would now be above $10 an hour.

Today’s debate centers on what Roosevelt indeed described as a “living wage.” Arguments abound on the role of government creating arbitrary and artificial adjustments. What should or should not be a floor? Given today’s prettifying pulse of progressivism, why not a ceiling? In the interests of fairness and compassion, why let market conditions  dictate such figures?

So public-policy experts now speak of a living wage that  would remove workers from poverty. Therefore, the $10.10 figure supposedly will not only lift the working poor out of poverty, but will presumably allow for continued receipt and reliance on benefits so generously distributed in today’s welfare state.

There is a fundamental flaw in this line of reasoning.

To be elevated to a lower-middle-class income bracket, a $10.10 minimum wage presupposes an hourly worker working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year. According to federal statistics, however, full-time hourly laborers work an average of 34.5 hours a week; 70 percent of all minimum-wage employees work fewer than 35 hours a week. Even government statisticians must concede that working every single week is wildly ambitious for purposes of actuarial calculations.

Despite having over $2 trillion in cash reserves, corporate America is unwilling to pay wages for what was once universally defined as a 40-hour week, let alone overtime. Government’s role should be to create conditions—incentives--favorable for increasing salaries. But the government continues to create uncertainty with its tax policy, regulatory overreach and, more recently, disrupting coverage and costs for healthcare (watch Massachusetts mandate paid sick-leave for small and medium-sized businesses).

What’s next, establishing a law forcing businesses to comply with a 40-hour work week?

In 2007, David Neumark and William Wascher cleared the din above the noise with a study published for National Bureau of Economic Research. Their research determined: “A sizable majority of the studies surveyed… give a relatively consistent indication of negative employment effects of minimum wages.”

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that raising the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 per hour rate to the president’s preferred wage will remove only 900,000 people (or 2 percent) out of poverty from the 45 million believed in poverty. Middle-income jobs from the last recession were replaced largely with low-wage jobs.

Of greater concern should be this potentially unintended consequence of government meddling: increased income of the poorest of workers will likely make them ineligible for the full amount of benefits, such as food and energy assistance. Not to mention higher payroll taxes. Such a twist may in fact negate extra hourly pay to the point of making the very increase negligibly beneficial, all to the detriment of domestic and state economies.

A new paradox exists today: jobless rates are generally declining -- as have labor- participation rates--while benefits to Americans are increasing. James P.  Freeman, formerly in the financial-services industry, is a Cape Cod-based writer.