I’m trying to figure out how I feel about the Fight for $15. Unthinkingly, I am for it. I would rather fight for a minimum wage that is connected to an index, preferably one that provides an honest measurement of what it costs to live a fruitful life in contemporary American society, but if $15 is that number for now, then yes, of course, I support the Fight for $15.
But I have also read critiques by small business owners, political appointees, and media elites who point to [The Minimum Wage Study’s finding](https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/lessons-from-a-wage-experiment/) that Seattle’s decision to increase their minimum wage first to $13 in 2011 and then to $15 in 2016 “led to the elimination of more than 5,000 low-wage jobs” throughout the city.
The study continues, “In percentage terms, the loss of jobs was significantly larger than the gain in hourly wages. As a result, while some low-wage workers may have earned more, we estimate that the net earnings per low-wage job in Seattle fell by an average of $125 per month. For low-wage workers, this is a substantial loss.”
The study has not concluded. The researchers, a multi-disciplinary team from Washington University, will continue to watch what happens as the state’s minimum wage slowly increases to match Seattle’s. But they “expect this decline [in the gap between the state’s and city’s minimum wages will] mitigate, but not eliminate, the job and earnings losses in Seattle.”
In other words, due to its decision to increase the minimum wage to $15, the city of Seattle, in both the short and long term, saw (and will probably see) a net loss in its economy, both in terms of jobs and in terms of dollars earned.
[These are the facts](https://evans.uw.edu/policy-impact/minimum-wage-study).
In response, the researchers argue, “Just because one social experiment appears to be yielding disappointing effects to date is no reason to stop experimenting. Seattle, the state of Washington, and the nation face many challenging, long-standing social problems. Only by trying new ideas and carefully assessing their impacts can we hope to improve the social well-being of the nation.”
The question is whether we, as progressives, can accept those facts, and if so, how do we adjust our approach to them? Do we see a net decrease in jobs and dollars and say, “Oh well, let’s not raise the minimum wage to $15,” or should we say instead, “There are other reasons to raise the minimum wage”?
The economy of the future is the economy of the gig, the economy of the hustle, where money is exchanged not for time spent, but for passion put forward. Not everyone can get rich, but lots of people will earn their way.
The minimum wage increase is not for them. It’s not meant to make things easier on them. It’s a burden to them, a weight they have to carry, and they shouldn’t take it on unless they know they can handle it.
Of course an artificial raise to the minimum wage results in a net job loss! It forces hustlers to adjust to the reality of living in a moral world where people ought not to hustle people out of their time.
A minimum wage is not an economic policy; it’s a moral one. Yes, it bridles an economy, but only to stop it from running roughshod over anyone who might be underfoot. It’s a speed limit, a nod to safety and dignity, that tells the hustler to keep on hustling, but only as long as they don’t take advantage of anyone.
If you are a small business owner who cannot afford to pay a fair and reasonable cost for the labor of your employees, then you ought not to have all of those employees. The people on your staff have, literally, more rewarding things to do with their time, whether it be planting a garden, spending time with their children, or attending classes to improve their self-worth.
Yes, jobs will go away. Yes, dollars will go away. But the decisions we make with our lives have to be about more than our dollars and our jobs. They have to be about dignity and an honest reckoning of what’s at stake.
A person’s time is worth more than what the market can get for it, and a minimum wage indexed to an honest measurement of what it costs to live a fruitful life in contemporary American society helps put a dollar figure to that amount. Maybe that’s $15; maybe it’s something else. But whatever it is, I think it’s worth fighting for.
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The economy of the future is also the economy of the robot.
I am currently working with a student — in a very minimal way — to help them create a piece of software that will automate much of my current job. This is not a robot being built to replace me. It is being built to assist me, to reduce the length of time between the asking of a question and the discovering of an answer, when I do very little that a computer is not better suited to do.
The idea is that the existence of this robot will allow me and other educators to spend more time on creative problem-solving and less time on fact checking. If we are successful, this robot will reduce the amount of staff required by my employer — or at the very least, it will free several of us up to do more creative things in our jobs; without question, it will reduce the number of individual tasks that need to be carried out on any given day, and in that way, reduce the amount of labor that is required.
Ideally, of course, those who are currently laboring will see an increase not only in their efficiency, but in their product (i.e., more time focused on teaching and less time on fact finding will result in a much improved student), but this is only in an ideal world. The new robot will need to be maintained, and that will require its own concentration of labor, and so my student and I must compare whether we gain or lose in the implementation of a task for the robot to achieve.
But this is as it should be, which is why if a robot can replace you, you ought to be the one designing it, and if you aren’t able to do that, you ought to learn what else you bring the table, because someday soon, that robot will replace you.
The Fight for $15 won’t stop that, and so we need to do more. We need to help individuals discover what else they can bring to the table, or better yet, help them learn to build a brand new table and offer it for sale at the local market (metaphorically speaking, of course; robots have been building our tables for a long time now).
The Governor of Vermont and the Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Labor recently argued that, due to the findings of the Minimum Wage Study, Vermont should not increase its minimum wage to $15, and should instead invest “in workforce development, training and education” to help “workers get the skills and credentials they need to fill the hundreds of jobs that are open that pay well above minimum wage.”
While I disagree about the part on the minimum wage, I don’t disagree that we should invest in workforce development, training, and education, but I also agree with the researchers in the study, who argue for policies that include “additional funding for pre-K child education and care, K-12 and higher education, apprenticeship programs, earned income tax credits, and tax reform.”
These solutions have positive effects in both the short- and long-term. They provide a safety net for those with low to medium incomes (earned income tax credits are the third largest social welfare program in the United States, after Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), training for those who want better paying work, and investments in education to prepare both adults and children for the current and future economies.
I’ll be interested to see when Governot Scott, a fiscally-conservative governor, openly supports a specific bill that calls for an increase in the state’s investment in those areas.