Should the Minimum Wage Be Abolished (i.e. Reduced to $0.00)?

Overview/Background

1. The vast majority of economists believe the minimum wage law costs the economy thousands of jobs. The most fundamental principle of economics is 'supply and demand'. In the case of labor, this means that the supply of workers goes up as wage goes up, and the demand for workers by employers goes down as the wage goes up. For example, imagine a janitorial job was advertised for hire. If the wage is $100 per hour, thousands of people would want the job. If the wage was $1 per hour, you probably wouldn't find anyone to do it. Conversely, if the government forced the employer to pay at least $7 per hour, the employer might decide not to hire a janitor at all, instead opting to have other staff pick up the duties. Thus, a job would be lost because of the minimum wage. Another example is restaurant employment. A manager might have $10,000 in her monthly budget to hire bus persons. If the wage is set at $7 per hour, the manager may only be able to hire 10 bus people instead of 15. Setting a mandated wage limit disrupts market forces of supply and demand. Just because there is no minimum wage doesn't mean companies can pay whatever they want. Would you work a dishwashing job that paid 25 cents per hour? Would anyone? If they raised the wage to $4 per hour, they might be able to hire a high school student. Consider some highly skilled jobs such as accountant, lawyer, and engineer. Do these people make $5.15 an hour? Obviously, the answer is no. Market factors of supply and demand determine how many jobs are available and what each job would pay. In summary, as the minimum wage goes up, the number of people employed goes down. When the minimum wage goes down, the number of people employed goes up. Keep in mind: the minimum wage only applies if someone is employed.
   
   
2. Teenagers, workers in training, college students, interns, and part-time workers all have their options and opportunities limited by the minimum wage. Over 95 percent of minimum wage jobs are taken by the groups named above. You cannot make a living and support a family on a minimum wage job. These jobs are typically positions requiring little or no training that can be filled by almost anyone. Many students, part-timers, and other young workers are willing to take much less than minimum wage, especially if it is a fun or educational job. We all know that having a paying job when you're young teaches values such as discipline, hard work, and responsibility. It teaches young workers how to handle money and deal with other people. Thus, as a society we want to maximize the number of young people that work, even if it's for small wages. In fact, earning low wages provides extra motivation to go to college or acquire advanced job skills by some other method. Raising the minimum wage to $7 or more will definitely help some people trying to support a family, but it will hurt the group that holds almost all minimum wage positions. It will simply mean fewer low-skill jobs for those that actually need them. However, in some cases, this downside of the minimum wage can be minimized by applying a multiple-wage structure, allowing a lower minimum wage if you fit into one of these groups. In 2009, thanks in large part to a higher minimum wage, brought the national teenage unemployment rate to record highs--over 25%!
   
   
3. A low-paying job remains an entry point for those with few marketable skills. Almost no one wants to work a minimum wage job for the rest of their lives. We all want the higher paying and more interesting jobs. But how do you get one? Even if you've acquired a college or technical degree, you may not be able to get the job you want. The most common question in a job interview is "What experience do you have?" Jobseekers are then faced with the no-win situation "I can't get a job without experience, but how can I get experience without a job?" If you allow businesses to pay smaller entry wages, they will offer more opportunities to jobseekers with no experience. Thus, it's a win-win situation. The business can take on additional workers for a reasonable price. The jobseeker can gain valuable experience that can be used to get a decent, high-paying job later on. In the next decade we face a major shortage of highly skilled workers in technology, health care, and other complex fields. We need to provide people as many opportunities to learn and gain experience as possible.
   
   
4. Abolishing the minimum wage will allow businesses to achieve greater efficiency and lower prices. Anytime you give businesses more flexibility, you will increase efficiency and lower prices. Let me give you some examples. Say a McDonald's franchise has a budget of $70 per hour to pay worker wages (without considering benefits and taxes). If that McDonald's must pay $7 per hour, it can hire 10 workers. If it must only pay $5 per hour, it can hire 14 workers. If you go to get a burger, in which situation are you more likely to get it faster? Consider the same situations for a Wal-Mart. In which case are you most likely to find an employee that can take you to an item or answer questions? Thus, businesses can be more efficient and provide better customer service with a lower wage. Another example: imagine three competing coffee shops. All three need to make a certain profit margin to stay in business and make their effort worthwhile. So they all will lower their prices as much as possible while still covering that necessary profit margin. If one of them tries to charge more, customers will simply go to the competitor shops. Now assume the minimum wage is eliminated and each shop can now reduce labor costs by 25 percent. If each doesn't reduce its coffee prices by a proportional amount, it will lose customers to the other two competitors. So by lowering the minimum wage, the public now has to pay less for their espressos. This is obviously a simplistic example, but the principle applies to all businesses. A company cannot simply charge whatever it wants for a product or service. It must always charge a reasonable multiple of its cost; otherwise, it is heading for bankruptcy.
   
   
5. When you force American companies to pay a certain wage, you increase the likelihood that those companies will outsource jobs to foreign workers, where labor is much cheaper. There has been a lot of attention lately on the subject of job "outsourcing", where U.S. companies hire foreign workers instead of Americans. When businesses outsource American jobs, they're not doing it because they hate America; they're doing it because they're trying to cut costs. When you increase the price of labor in America, you create an additional incentive for businesses to hire Canadian, Mexican, or other foreign workers. The best way to stop outsourcing of jobs is to provide the best conditions for doing business in America. A minimum wage just makes things tougher for companies to do business in America.  Remember that American companies may have no choice but to outsource with the high cost in the U.S.--they may go out of business entirely if they can't cut costs to a level that's competitive with foreign competitors.
   
   
6. Non-profit charitable organizations are hurt by the minimum wage. Keep in mind that minimum wage laws apply to more than big businesses, they apply to government and non-profit organizations. Charitable organizations are among those most likely to benefit from the elimination of the minimum wage. Let's take an example. Consider a domestic violence shelter. This type of shelter normally needs workers to clean, collect & organize donations, counsel & assist residents, monitor help-lines, provide legal assistance in such things as obtaining restraining orders, and so on. Volunteers help relieve some of the duties, but it's often tough to find dedicated ongoing volunteers to do the job. After all, volunteers still have to earn a living, raise a family, etc. However, if the charitable organization were able to pay some amount, even a few dollars an hour, it would better be able to build a more steady set of workers. A non-profit organization may simply not be able to afford a $7 per hour pay rate. Thus, non-profits have only two solutions: dissolve their organizations or hire fewer people to provide the charitable service.
   
   
7. The minimum wage can drive some small companies out of business. Many people believe businesses have endless supplies of cash and can easily withstand minimum wage increases or other cost increases. Unfortunately, that's simply not the case. Over 90 percent of businesses fold within the first few years. Every time there is a recession, thousands of businesses go under. Restaurants, which pay wages at or near the minimum wage level, have the highest rate of failure of any business type. Anytime you increase the costs of businesses, you push them closer to the edge. Let's take an example. Imagine a small neighborhood hardware store. This hardware store isn't going to have the logistics and economy of scale advantages of say, Wal-Mart; thus, it must charge more. It probably makes up the price difference with better service. When you raise the minimum wage, it increases the operating costs for that hardware store even more. Thus, it must raise it's prices to cover costs. Eventually, prices get so high that customers conclude that shopping there isn't worth the additional cost. Slowly, the local hardware store is driven out of business.
   
   
8. A minimum wage gives businesses an additional incentive to mechanize duties previously held by humans. Most businesses, especially in the manufacturing and retailing area, have many mundane tasks that need to be done, such as running a cash register or tightening a bolt on an assembly line. One of the reasons the manufacturing sector has not been part of the job recovery is that businesses have found it's much cheaper to use machines to do tasks that were previously done by people. Whenever businesses automate any task, they usually must spend a lot of upfront money and time in order to save down the line. Because of the minimum wage, spending the upfront time & money seems more worthwhile. For example, Wal-Mart is in the process of adding automated check-outs to almost all of its stores. Thus, all those cashier jobs will disappear. Imagine what would happen if the minimum wage was raised to $8-10 or more, as some politicians want. Do you think Wal-Mart will be more willing or less willing to add more automated checkouts?
   
   
9. Cost-of-living differences in various areas of the country make a universal minimum wage difficult to set. Obviously, $7.15 an hour isn't enough to support a person who lives in the cities of New York, Washington, or Los Angeles. However, it may be more than enough to support people living in rural areas or small towns. What is it real estate agents always say about real estate values? Location, location, location. That is why a 1-bedroom rundown apartment in the city may cost 5 times as much as a well-kept 3-bedroom apartment in a small town. And of course, housing is only a small part of the cost of living. Consider how much more gas costs for a commuter than it does for a small town worker who can walk to work. The list goes on. Thus, a $7 minimum wage may be more reasonable in New York, but it would be ridiculously high in certain small town and rural areas.
   
   
10. Elimination of the minimum wage would mean more citizens and fewer illegals would be hired for low-pay hourly jobs, leading to greater tax revenues and less incentive for illegal immigration. There are several low-paying jobs such as housekeeper and nanny that are often filled by illegal immigrants. The employer doesn't want to pay a citizen the higher rate along with required employer payroll taxes, so they hire someone off the books, e.g. at $5 per hour. For such a position, there are no federal, state, or social security taxes withheld. Thus, overall tax revenues for the country are reduced. If you eliminate the minimum wage, you therefore increase revenues. Also, with fewer jobs available for illegals, there is less incentive to break the law and come to the country in the first place.
    
    
11. The minimum wage creates a competitive advantage for foreign companies, providing yet another obstacle in the ability of American companies to compete globally. The U.S. trade deficit increases every year, which means we're exporting less than we're importing. In an increasingly global economy, it's important to give American companies every chance to turn out the cheapest and best products. A minimum wage only applies to workers in the United States; foreign companies can pay what they want. There are two direct components that go into the price & quality of a product -- raw material and labor. Thus, when you set a minimum cost level for the labor component, you cause a competitive disadvantage in two ways. First, the cost per hour of direct labor potentially goes up. Second, in some cases, you force companies to hire fewer workers, which may affect the quality of the final output. Add it all up and American companies must work harder to compete with foreign companies, which in the long run costs us jobs, profits, and prestige while damaging the reputation of American products. One of the reasons we have such a major trade deficit (where outflows of goods & services exceeds inflows) is the competitive disadvantages to business such as the minimum wage.
    
    
12. The minimum wage law is just another example of government condescendingly controlling our actions and destroying personal choice. Citizens do have the ability to say no to a lower wage. Why is it that politicians continue to insist that we're too stupid to take personal responsibility for our own lives? If someone offers us $1 per hour to wash dishes, my guess is that 99.9 percent of us would emphatically say no. But for some reason, politicians think we need a law to say businesses can't even make that offer. Has there ever been a time in your life where you thought, "I'd do that job for free!". Maybe that job is Playboy photographer or it's practice assistant for the Green Bay Packers. Maybe it's a job you know would look great on a resume but can't get because you lack experience. Personal choice and freedom is what this country is supposed to be built on, so why should we do anything to limit that?