On Feb. 18, Michael Beato wrote a highly erroneous piece about increasing the minimum wage. Today’s minimum wage is far below what it should be historically and continues to lose value every year. If the federal minimum wage had kept up with inflation, it would be about $10.75 an hour instead of $7.25. If the minimum wage had kept up with productivity, it would be $18.75. If it had grown at the same rate as wages for the top 1 percent, it would be more than $28.
In 2004, voters passed a constitutional amendment that tied the Florida minimum wage to inflation. This year the rise was $0.14 from $7.79 to $7.93, which comes to about $5.60 more for 40 hours of work, or about $290 more per year. This increased the wages of 416,000 low-wage earners and increased consumer spending by almost $63 million, according to the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute.
What Beato was talking about but didn’t mention is the Harkin-Miller bill. This bill would increase the minimum wage to $10.10 by 2015 over three years, index it to inflation and increase the tipped-worker minimum to 70 percent the federal minimum wage. For Florida, that means $2.17 more — $60 more a week for a 40-hour work week and about $3,000 more per year.
This would affect more than 30 million workers in America and generate $32 billion in new economic activity! Of those workers who would be affected, 88 percent are over the age of 20, 56 percent are women, nearly half are workers of color, and more than 43 percent have a college education.
Beato said, “Consider all of the mom-and-pop stores struggling to make ends meet.”
But he forgets that this is an ever-shrinking minority. The lions’ share of minimum-wage earners are at companies employing more than 100 workers. One of the largest, McDonalds, raked in close to $5.5 billion in profits in 2012, which is up 27 percent over the past five years. Meanwhile, taxpayers shell out $1.2 billion each year in public assistance to McDonalds’ workforce.
The majority of all public assistance recipients are people with jobs who simply do not make enough to live. The public subsidizes the high profits of these private companies because the minimum wage is not a living wage.
[A version of this letter to the editor ran on page 7 on 2/26/2014 under the headline “Beato’s minimum-wage column"]
