Most Americans should be getting a raise
It amazes me when I hear near- to above-middle-class earners complain about the push to raise the federal minimum wage, which has stood at $7.25 for almost five years, including during the 2008 recession. These critics look at the $15 an hour that protesting fast-food workers have been asking for and say that's too much for someone at that level of employment. What they're really saying is that $15 an hour is getting too close to what they make and does not properly reflect the gap in education and responsibility between them and a – pardon the expression – hamburger flipper.
They're looking at the issue from the wrong end of the microscope. It's not that fast-food workers are asking for too much for what they do. An annual salary of $16,120 isn't excessive when you consider the price of goods and services in today's world. A worker with a family earning that amount would need another job if he or she were the sole source of income. A young person earning that amount and trying to go to college would have a hard time keeping up with expenses even if he still lives at home.
It's not that lower-paid workers are asking for too much; it's that workers making more are settling for too little. Wages need to be adjusted from the bottom up, with those at the very top income levels – the multimillionaires making dozens of times more than their workers – giving up some cash to compensate. While the federal minimum wage didn't budge, the average pay of CEOs rose 5.5 percent last year to more than $11 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. Yes, the trickle-down theory can work, if it's actually applied. Instead, the average Fortune 500 CEO is making 200 times more than his lowest-paid employees.
New Jersey's minimum wage rose this year, but only from $8.25 an hour to $8.38; with automatic annual increases based on inflation now required by law. Twenty-nine states have raised their minimum wages higher than the federal standard. It's time for Congress to take the bigger leap. Fears that some small businesses will have a hard time paying higher salaries are valid, but that may only be for a period of adjustment until people taking home bigger paychecks begin spending more cash as consumers. It's not just minimum-wage workers who deserve to be paid more, it's also almost everyone else.
Harold Jackson is editorial page editor of The Inquirer.