This from an article in the New York Times Magazine:
Certainly most Americans do not support higher wages out of immediate self-interest. Probably only around 3 percent of those in the work force are actually paid $5.15 or less an hour; most low-wage workers, including Wal-Mart employees, who generally start at between $6.50 and $7.50 an hour, earn more. Increasing the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour would directly affect the wages of only about 7 percent of the work force. Nevertheless, pollsters have discovered that a hypothetical state ballot measure typically generates support of around 70 percent. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center actually put the support for raising the national minimum wage to $6.45 at 86 percent.
…It was then that the living-wage proponents hit on a scorched-earth, tactical approach. “What really got the other side was when we said, ‘It’s just immoral to pay people $5.15, they can’t live on that,’ ” Oppenheimer recalls. “It made the businesspeople furious. And we realized then that we had something there, so we said it over and over again. Forget the economic argument. This was a moral one. It made them crazy. And we knew that was our issue.”
The moral argument soon trumped all others. The possibility that a rise in the minimum wage, even a very substantial one, would create unemployment or compromise the health of the city’s small businesses was not necessarily irrelevant. Yet for many in Santa Fe, that came to be seen as an ancillary issue, one that inevitably led to fruitless discussions in which opposing sides cited conflicting studies or anecdotal evidence. Maybe all of that was beside the point, anyway. Does it – or should it – even matter what a wage increase does to a local economy, barring some kind of catastrophic change? Should an employer be allowed to pay a full-time employee $5.15 an hour, this argument went, if that’s no longer enough to live on? Is it just under our system of government? Or in the eyes of God?
The minimum wage in Santa Fe became $8.50 an hour in 2003, and $9.50 on January 1, 2006. Is it “The City Different” or a model? As the article notes, the initiative to raise the minimum wage in Albuquerque to $7.50 failed at the polls last October. The federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour.
NewMexiKen’s position remains as posted previously:
The federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour. It’s been $5.15 since 1997; loss of purchasing power in that time, nearly 20%. In 1997, Congressional salaries were $133,600. If the federal minimum wage was raised by the same percentage as Congressional salaries have been raised since 1997 (nearly 24% to $165,200), the federal minimum would be $6.37 an hour.