Saturday, March 29, 2014

Creative Writer: Raising the Minimum Wage is a Women's Issue

Reagan Jackson received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington and her MA in International Education from SIT Graduate Institute and is a writer, artist, activist, and "international educator."

She has published three collections of poetry God, Hair, Love, and America., Love and Guatemala, and Summoning Unicorns: A Collection of Poetry and a children's book Coco Coco LaSwish: A Fish from a Different Rainbow..

She writes that raising the minimum wage is a women's issue:
I never considered the Fight for 15 to be a “woman’s issue.”

Then just days before International Women’s Day and a full week before the National Fight for 15 day of action earlier this month, I found myself at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in the presence of a diverse group of women activists that made me think again.

Living in Seattle perhaps you’ve seen the red and white posters popping up all over town often accompanied by the face of city councilwoman Kshama Sawant. Maybe you’ve happened upon any number of rallies and actions related to the fast food workers who are asking for more.

They’ve rallied at Westlake, flash mobbed through Capitol Hill, and had roving strikes shutting down fast food joints from Ballard to Sodo yelling: “We want change and we don’t mean pennies.”

The ask is deceptively simple: Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

For many low income Washington workers this would mean a 61% increase in pay, which sounds like a big jump until you do the math.

At $9.19 Washington State frequently boasts of having the highest minimum wage in the country (the federal minimum wage is $7.25). Assuming a standard 40 hour work week , that comes out to $19,115.20.  That is approximately $6,312.80 less than the maximum you can receive on unemployment, and almost $8,000 less than the national poverty threshold for a family of four, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau.

$15 an hour would get a full time worker up to $31,200 a year — leaving a mere $4,200 annual cushion between the minimum wage and the national poverty line. It’s not all that much but at least workers would be on the right side of the line.

Doing the math was just the bit of shock therapy I needed to help me answer the question of whether $15 an hour is really realistic? What is clear is how unrealistic it is to expect people to be able to live in Seattle on $9.19 an hour. Even without a family that would be a tough ask — but contrary to the myth that only teenagers get paid minimum wage, according to Jobs with Justice, 88% of min wage earning workers are over 20 (with a median age of 34.9).

So what does all this have to with women?

“Lower wages oppress women and hold them in captivity,” explained Rev Dr. Linda Smith Pastor of Sky Urban Empowerment and Transformation Center located in Renton.  She was one of several religious leaders and workers, self-identified women of faith who called a press conference to put Seattle on notice that being known as progressive leaders on the left coast means we can’t just publicly espouse our belief in a living wage without putting our money where our mouth is.
What Jackson doesn't discuss in her writing is basic supply and demand economics. If you raise the price of any product, including wages, the quantity demanded will fall. Raise the minimum wage and more women will become unemployed. Fewer jobs for women, quite a plan.

23 comments:

  1. Yes, let's focus on $15 an hour table scraps instead of the Federal Reserve's fiat money machine that is grinding millions into poverty.

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    1. There is no doubt that the Federal Reserve is the bigger fish in the whole crony economy however that doesn't mean the libertarian movement shouldn't expose the dangers of minimum wage and why raising it to $15 would create more problems that it supposedly solves.

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    2. The Federal Reserve is not grinding a single person into poverty.

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    3. Not to put words in Godfrey's mouth, but I believe his comment was directed to the (very) creative writer, not EPJ.......

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    4. My comment was directed at Miss Jackson and our friends among the ignorant naïve left who focus on $15 instead of banker billions.

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    5. Re: Jerry Wolfgang,
      -- The Federal Reserve is not grinding a single person into poverty. --

      Yes it is. My wages and savings are losing PP as the Fed continues to print money. That is grinding me towards poverty.

      I dare you to show me I'm lying.

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  2. Degree in creative writing is a diagnosis.

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  3. Let's make it $100 per hour! We will all be rich!
    People are really just too stupid to be free.

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    1. Let's take an policy proposal to an extreme and pretend we're making a serious argument. Lower the speed limit on the road? Let's make the speed limit 2 miles an hour! Raise taxes? Let's just require the employer to send your paycheck to the IRS!! Ban slavery? Why? It's not so bad. You get to sing songs and eat gruel.

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    2. If you had your own business and one of your employees generated $8/hour in sales, would you really keep that person and pay them the new minimum wage of $15/hour?

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    3. Re: Jerry Wolfgang,

      -- Let's take an policy proposal to an extreme and pretend we're making a serious argument. --

      Raising the minimum wage under the guise of helping (take your pick) the poor, the workers, unmarried women with children, women in general, is not making a serious argument for starters. If the minimum wage proponents pretend to turn moral arguments into economic arguments, then they're not making a serious argument for starters. All that anonymous is asking is: why so stingy?

      -- Ban slavery? Why? It's not so bad. You get to sing songs and eat gruel. --

      I don't understand why would you even bring that up. *Nobody* has made that argument. I dare you to show who did.

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    4. Jerry,

      You demonstrate well the hubris of those that think they can centrally plan for thousands, nay millions of people.

      Your "one size fits all" approach is the largest, of many, many problems with forcing rules upon others.

      Let us keep in mind that we can axiomatically say that at least 90% of those people that are pushing to force a $15/hour rate do not have employees, that includes the PhD's pushing it as well, and have never had to make payroll or the ability to successfully run a business.

      It's akin to letting the employees telling the owners what they will make, it's pure insanity.

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  4. Government has no actual ability to "raise" wages. All it can do is issue an edict that no employment shall occur at less than some fixed rate. Hence, all it can do is BAN employment, which is exactly what will occur - whatever employment we have now, we will have less of it after.

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    1. Alan's problem is that he sees the issue far too clearly and his understanding of it is not handicapped by some juvenile belief in the magic powers of government. Progressives really do not see it this way. We truly cannot see to even the *second* logical step in this process: If you require a business to pay out more in wages than that work brings in as revenue, that job will simply be eliminated. I simply want you rich guys to give me more money. What's wrong with that? I don't want to have to worry about whether my labor is worth that much, or where you're going to get that money from. It's *easy* to be a Progressive. You just make a bunch of demands about what other people should do for you and disavow all responsibility to ensure they're reasonable or possible, or even remotely attractive to anyone else. Just legislate economic scarcity away, you greedy fat cats!

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  5. I'm starting to think of the min. wage issue as a litmus test, in the same light as the drug war. I.e, if you refuse to understand the reasons the drug war is bad (political and police corruption, destruction of personal liberty, etc.) then there's not a lot I can tell you about the RATIONAL reasons for abolishing it. Now, if you refuse to understand the reasons why the min wage is a bad idea(see Alan's statement above!), then there's not a lot I can tell you about the RATIONAL economic reasons for not having a min wage.

    Honestly, I don't know how people like Wenzel or Don Boudreaux have the unlimited patience to explain to people these almost-commom-sensical ideas, over and over again. The key phrase above is "refuse to understand" because it's as if the one side is arguing from an emotional, gut level, intuitive position, and the other side is arguing from a logical position based not only on scholarship, but decades - if not centuries - of real world experience.

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    1. Doesn't help that they keep coming out with bogus "scientific" studies from organizations like Center for American Progress that shows Minimum Wage Laws helping the economy. Or coming up with ridiculous graphs showing that lowering taxes has historically been followed by recession.

      I get where you're coming from. It's exhausting poking holes in these arguments over and over again and going through the last 100 years of recessions and explaining their causes, proving that correlation doesn't mean causation. I think some people get off on being right. But people like Wenzel and Don Boudreaux do change people's minds. I was a NeoCon just 3 years ago. I voted for McCain...proudly. Why? Because he went to the Naval Academy, just like me and that movie, Faith of Our Fathers, gave me a lot of respect for him. That's how bad i was. Now i'm questioning everything. Lincoln, the right - left paradigm, democracy, Even whether what i did when i was in the Marines was really worth the risk and hardships. There is hope.

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  6. Oh, and another thing. Exactly when did it become conventional wisdom that the minimum wage should be high enough to support a family of four? If I'd suggested such a thing back in the mid 70s (when I was making the min wage of $2 per hour) I would have been laughed out of the room.

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    1. Additionally, who exactly "expects" anyone to live in Seattle on minimum wage? Whence comes the assumption that anyone is entitled to live in a locale they cannot afford? When I rented my first apartment, the landlord even did this legwork for me: we're not going to rent to you if you make less than $[x]. But even if you're renting from a landlord with a higher appetite for risky tenants, anyone who made it through elementary school oughta be able to do a similar calculation or estimate. Do not have a minimum wage job if you're married with 2 kids. Do not live in a place you can't afford, regardless of your wages.

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  7. What do you expect from a rote learning Humanities Department twit? Reason and Logic?

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  8. I think she ought to take a closer look at the 88% who are over 20 making minimum wage. Likely these are college students, the elderly who are also receiving social security or their retirement savings, kids still living with their parents, etc. Nobody does expect a person to live in Seattle, by themselves, on $9.19/hr. This isn't a symptom of a minimum wage that is too low. This is a symptom of government interventions that have reduced the availability of better alternatives. Interventions like the minimum wage.

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  9. Can somebody please tell me what ISN'T a "women's issue" anymore? To me it's an "everybody issue". If people want more unemployment or have their jobs permanently replaced with machines keep it up.

    Idiots.

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  10. Certainly we are not expected bad economic condition so should take right step to solve this problem. I think our consciousness play main role to protect that. Thanks.. federal minimum wage FLSA.net is indicate the rights of workers and reporting of the particular labor law to protect the rules of employers and employees, according to the federal and local law. We are update latest version of the law labor act that declared by the state.

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