|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
Minimum Wage Ripples Michael Arnold Glueck, M.D., and Robert J. Cihak, M.D., The Medicine Men The impacts of minimum wage laws on marginally productive workers are well known among thoughtful and economically minded people.
I think the voters in the states which passed ballot initiatives increasing the minimum wage in their states were not aware of the ill effects of such laws.
As Thomas Sowell writes, "Young, inexperienced and unskilled workers are especially likely to find it harder to get a job when wage rates have been set higher than the value of their productivity."
If the government mandates increased wages, workers earning the minimum wage are more likely to find themselves without a job at all than with a higher-paying job.
Yet many people cannot produce enough to earn any given arbitrary minimum wage. My 37-year-old daughter Ruth is one such person. She has been developmentally disabled since birth. She has many difficulties; for example, her speech is usually limited to a few words and a rare short sentence. Socially, she functions at about a 3- to 4-year-old's level. The same goes for her job performance.
Story Continues Below
She works several hours every weekday in a Seattle-area sheltered workshop.
She does simple assembly and packaging work. Her wage is based on productivity, essentially piecework. In a good month, she makes $100, a fraction of what minimum wage laws would require.
How does the sheltered workshop get away with flouting these laws? The answer is simple. My daughter's workshop has an official, government-issued "Exemption from Minimum Wage" certificate posted on its wall.
The law does recognize that some people cannot and do not produce enough to earn a minimum wage. Sheltered workshops exist because of this fact. But the mechanism and paperwork to qualify for an official special certificate is far from simple.
As a result, very few businesses even try.
As a consequence, minimum wage laws have extinguished all but a very few employment opportunities for my daughter.
Many years ago now, I hired an employment consultant to try to find a job for her. Without Ruth even appearing for an interview, she did get one offer of a job retrieving shopping carts from a shopping center parking lot. But because she is prone to wander off on her own, she needs 24-hour supervision; she wouldn't be safe out in a parking lot on her own.
I'd be willing to have Ruth work for a prospective employer (such as a business or institution needing food preparation help in the kitchen) for nothing, on a trial basis. After she's had a chance to show what she could do, we could negotiate a reasonable wage.
I'd even be willing to pay an employer to try to find a productive niche for her. But as I understand these laws, all these activities would be flat-out illegal, without spending a great deal of time and money seeking special certificates and exemptions, which might or might not be granted.
As Rev. Robert Sirico writes in this month's "Acton Notes," "If politicians enact legislation to coerce employers to pay more, employers often have little choice but to lay off some unskilled workers or even to close shop."
These enterprises have no chance at all to consider new hires from even less-skilled workers, such as Ruth.
Yes, minimum wage laws do protect — they protect people such as my daughter from working — and they protect unions and other workers from competition by the lesser skilled.
Minimum wage laws severely limit my daughter's opportunities for work and the self-respect that can come from productive work.
Recently the Chicago city council passed a bill to raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour. According to Sowell, "Chicago's Mayor Richard M. Daley denounced the bill as 'redlining,' since it would have the net effect of keeping much-needed stores and jobs out of black neighborhoods. Both Chicago newspapers also denounced the bill. The crowning touch came when Andrew Young, former civil rights leader and former mayor of Atlanta, went to Chicago to criticize local black leaders who supported this bill."
I hope this common-sense backlash spreads widely.
All Ruth can give me is her trust and love. What more can I ask of her?
But of you, dear reader, I ask you to remember the harm done her and others by minimum wage laws.
Editor's Note: Robert J. Cihak wrote this week's column. Contact Drs. Glueck and Chehak by e-mail.
* * * * * * Robert J. Cihak, M.D., is a senior fellow and Board Member of the Discovery Institute and a past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. Michael Arnold Glueck, M.D., comments on medical-legal issues and is a visiting fellow in Economics and Citizenship at the International Trade Education Foundation of the Washington International Trade Council.
Editor's note:
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Page 
Forward Page 
|
| All Rights Reserved © 2008 NewsMax.Com |