William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign tried, in Time, to draw an equivalence between the push for a $15 federal minimum wage and the midcentury Selma campaign to secure the constitutionally mandated voting rights of black people.
The reasoning? Something about George Floyd, something about the coronavirus pandemic disproportionately killing black people, and the fact that both the Selma movement and the “Fight For $15” involve activists. It is one riveting non sequitur after another.
Luckily, the Senate is unlikely to pass any measure doubling the minimum wage for reasons both procedural and political. Barber, who incredibly succeeded in getting a meeting with swing vote Sen. Joe Manchin, emerged from his meeting with Manchin disappointed.
“We’re not interested in compromise — $15 is a compromise,” Barber said after meeting with the West Virginia Democrat. “What [Manchin] was suggesting would just further keep people in poverty.”
I should not have to write that there’s no equivalence between protecting an entire race’s right to vote and increasing a federal minimum wage, which only 1.9% of all workers were earning prior to the pandemic (a figure that is likely lower now). But clearly, it does have to be said, and Barber’s historical and financial illiteracy deserves a full denunciation.
For starters, the minimum wage was created with racist intent. It is an actual Jim Crow relic, a mechanism introduced by white racists to marginalize black workers from the labor force.
Second, a huge increase in the minimum wage will be a kick in the shins of employers who are already suffering from pandemic-related business restrictions. A blanket increase to $15 per hour would, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, lift 900,000 people out of poverty at the expense of putting another 1.4 million people out of work altogether.
The effect would be smaller in states such as California, where the minimum wage is already $14 an hour for larger companies. It would be devastating, however, in Manchin’s West Virginia, where the median home price is less than one-fifth that of the Golden State. This would instantly create a hiring bias against workers with fewer skills, nonnative English speakers, young people, and those with thinner resumes.
It would also cause an inflation crisis, especially in West Virginia and other low-cost regions of the U.S. As I wrote last month, a $15 wage in West Virginia is currently enough to save up a 30% down payment for a median-priced home in one year. That’s great for the worker who can get that wage, but a $15 minimum wage would cause workers’ savings to evaporate through inflation before they could benefit from the artificial boom.
Republican Sens. Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton are introducing a yet-to-be-detailed bill that, among other things, would tie a minimum wage increase to inflation. It’s one thing to oppose that in principle — there is no need for a federal minimum at all — but at least it wouldn’t create an inflationary shock to the economy.
Such an incautious approach would have already been a bad idea prior to the pandemic, when wages were rising on their own and labor markets were so tight that the majority of new workers had to be lured into the existing labor market from the outside. Now, when the divide between the temporarily laid off returning to work and the permanently unemployed is deepening, it’s a horrific idea, and one that is shameful to compare to the heroes of Selma.
