Very minimum

With Congress unable to function, states and municipalities in growing numbers have been preempting the federal government on the minimum wage. In real dollar value, the current federal minimum wage—$7.25—is lower than it was during most of the 1960s and ’70s.

Last month voters in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota increased their states’ minimum wages—though none proposed minimums as high as $10. Illinoisans voted for a non-binding $10 wage and San Francisco voters went to $15.

Last week, the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners in Oregon voted to gradually increase the minimum wage from $11.99 to $15.

Though overshadowed by police killings protests, workers in more than a hundred cities last week demonstrated for $15 minimums.

In Nevada, Clark County Sen. Richard “Tick” Segerblom, a Democrat, will sponsor a constitutional amendment—a step toward a $15 minimum—in the legislative session that begins Feb. 2. Nevada’s current minimum wage is $8.25, or $7.25 for workers with employer-provided health insurance.

Nevada Republican figure Jim Clark wrote in the North Lake Tahoe Bonanza, “If, as Segerblom proposes, Nevada passes a law more than doubling the minimum wage, a lot of low skill workers will lose their jobs, many replaced by automation. … The effect on all of us would include cost-push inflationary pressures, making it cheaper to go to Kings Beach [across the state line in California] for a burger.”

However, the minimum wage in California has been 75 cents higher than Nevada without causing any land rush to Nevada burger joints at the lake.

In October, Mike Konczal and Bryce Covert at the Nation magazine, using statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, looked at 13 states that increased the minimum wage on January 1, 2014. Twelve of them subsequently experienced increases in employment. One—New Jersey—experienced a 0.56 percent job loss.

“Real-world evidence is reassuring,” Konczal and Covert wrote. “In 2010, three economists looked at 1,381 counties over 16 years, finding that minimum-wage hikes had no effect on employment. Other economists looked at every state-level minimum-wage increase over 25 years at times when unemployment was already high and found no evidence of an effect on job creation. Yet another group looked at the effect of state-level increases on teenagers—canaries in the coal mine of low-skilled employment—and found zero impact on their jobs.”

Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman has signed a U.S. Conference of Mayors petition calling for a $10.10 an hour wage. In October, Vice President Joseph Biden visited her city to promote awareness of the problem.

During that visit, a restaurant industry front group claimed the $10.10 minimum would cost Nevada $5,300 jobs.

Segerblom’s measure would require amending the state constitution, meaning another public vote. The public vote is not likely to offer much of an obstacle, but getting the amendment through the legislature is another matter. It would have to pass two legislative sessions, in 2015 and 2017, before going before the voters.

In 2006, Nevadans voted 68.71 to 31.29 percent to set the state minimum wage a dollar above the national minimum wage. Nevada is also one of seven states requiring the minimum wage for tipped workers.

In April this year, Segerblom was still promoting—in a Las Vegas Review-Journal essay—a $10.10 minimum for Nevada. But by August, when he filed his request for a constitutional amendment with the legislative bill drafting office, he had raised his sights to $15. Efforts around the nation to raise the minimum were coalescing around that figure.

“Two things,” he says now. “First, after I wrote the article $15 appeared to be the new $10.10, and second, it’s always good to aim high and leave room to negotiate.”

Though the 2014 Nevada Republican Party platform made no mention—positive or negative—of the minimum wage, with new Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature, an effort to hike it could face substantial opposition. It is a longstanding GOP shibboleth that minimum wages hurt business without aiding workers.

Segerblom argues that even at the higher, $8.25 rate, “a full-time minimum wage worker makes only $17,160 per year, or $330 per week. This is not enough to secure the basic necessities of life—rent, food, medical care and child care—for even a small family. … How do these families get by? Often they have to rely on private charity or public welfare.”

No one thinks the patchwork efforts at state and local levels are a particularly good idea, but dysfunction in the U.S. Senate has caused stagnation of wages. At the federal level, the Senate was unable to act on the minimum wage this year because of the “silent filibuster” obstacle that has overturned majority rule in that house in recent years, allowing minorities to block action by routinely requiring supermajorities. The most Democrats were able to muster to increase the minimum was 55 votes in the 100-member Senate.