Minimum Wage - Farce or Tragedy?

Or perhaps tragic farce or farcical tragedy might be more apt descriptors. Pick one, or both.

Or perhaps tragic farce or farcical tragedy might be more apt descriptors. Pick one, or both.

Recently, the Bellingham Herald carried an article about the minimum wage in Bellingham, "Bellingham’s citywide minimum wage for 2025 is now set. Here’s what the new rate will be." *

“…from May 2025 until the end of the year, Bellingham’s minimum wage will be $18.66 an hour. The following year, Bellingham’s minimum wage will be $2.00 higher than the 2026 statewide rate, which will be announced by L&I next September.”

Should one crow or cry? To answer that, I went back to an article about the minimum wage that I had written in 2015, “$15/hr Minimum Wage - Seriously?” Permit me to quote myself:

“In order to reset the minimum wage to anything near a living wage, it must be raised to about $21 an hour TODAY [2015] which would bring it in line with the purchasing power the minimum wage represented 4-5 decades ago.”

and

“By the time 2022 rolls around, one will likely need about $25/hr to keep a family afloat in any meaningful sense, let alone make any advancement whatsoever.”

Since we have already blown past 2022, and now only $18.66/hr is coming in 2025, “cry” wins, hands down. In reality, $21.00/hr was what we actually needed a decade ago and we ain't even there yet. Obviously, the $25/hr I projected as necessary by 2022, remains inadequate in retrospect. As Simon and Garfunkel sang in “Mrs. Robinson”…"Every way you look at it, you lose." And yes, we ALL lose because as a society, we are economically dragging minimum wage employees around like a fiscal sack of potatoes, striving to get to a “just” minimum wage, but missing the mark time after time after time. Non-paradoxically, Zeno would have loved this.

Washington State and Bellingham are out in front only because most of the other state minimum wages are woefully inadequate. Click on map to enlarge.

Minimum wage workers face more hurdles than merely a wage that is grossly insufficient to live on. They lack, or cannot afford, health care or disability insurance. Vacation time is a risible non-starter. Irregular hours or part time positions do not allow them to plan their days or weeks ahead. Workplace conditions are often deplorable, dangerous, and even inhumane. In Bellingham, even a full time minimum wage worker (40 hrs per week) will only gross  $39,000 per year or just under $3,300 per month. Average monthly rents in Bellingham for a one bedroom unit is $1,500 which will suck up 50% or more of post-tax income… and that is only for the “lucky,” minimum wage workers who are employed full-time. But, lo and behold, minimum wage workers in Washington/Bellingham are doing much better relative to the rest of states.  See map at right.

Might I also posit that the minimum wage, we are told, is geared to some ambrosia-like concoction called the Consumer-Price Index (CPI). You can read about the CPI at the previous link, but most sentient beings will realize upon reading this argle-bargle that the index(es), or their sub-components, are not prepared by anyone who actually buys gas, visits a super-market, attempts to buy or rent a home, or in fact, lives in a place other than the land of Honalee. If you don't believe me do the calculation yourself:

The price relative (using a Laspeyres formula) is given by: 

where, the geometric price relative for the item-area combination (i,a) from the previous period t-1 to the current period t; the Laspeyres price relative for the item-area combination (i,a) from the previous period t-1 to the current period t; the price of item j, which is a member of item stratum i, for which a price quote is being collected in area a, observed in period t; the price of the same item j in period t-1; an estimate of item j’ s price in the base period; and item j’s weight in the base period.The product and sums in the formulas presented above are taken over all price quotes which are usable for estimation in the item-area combination (i,a). It is important that the price of each quote be collected (or estimated) in both periods in order to measure price change.

You can use the formula to keep track of prices yourself from month to month. Easy peasy, eh?

Now, before I am inundated with comments to the effect that higher minimum wages will raise the costs for businesses that will, in turn, raise the cost of restaurant meals, groceries, or whatever items depend on minimum wage workers for “affordable” pricing, I have this to say:  We need to step back and question the economic model that requires workers to toil for a pittance so that someone makes a profit.  

*My apologies to those who might face the pay wall at the Herald.   

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About Dick Conoboy

Citizen Journalist and Editor • Member since Jan 26, 2008

Dick Conoboy is a recovering civilian federal worker and military officer who was offered and accepted an all-expense paid, one year trip to Vietnam in 1968. He is a former Army [...]

Comments by Readers

D. Crook

Oct 19, 2024

You can’t name-and-shame those in power into giving it up or sharing it.  Money, space, priority…  Appeals to empathy don’t work.  Centering anyone other than those holding the power is a non-starter.  Impuning their “good-person-ness” / suggesting that they don’t deserve excess wealth more than lower-income employees deserve to live above a poverty threshold…such boldness.

I sat in Bellingham City Council chambers a couple of weeks ago watching corporate landlors cry crocodile tears in their opposition to mostly very young renters testifying in favor of putting an end to junk-fees.  How can we possibly run a business without junk fees, surprise fees, etc.?  I was amazed at some of the stories of these junk fees—truly, if anyone hasn’t learned much about these yet—it’s worth learning about.

I’ve sat at a contract negotiating table with my employer a few times over the past few decades—we get the tried-and-true “We’re in a bad budget situation” nonsense with which they start every negotiation, without fail, even as senior leadership consistently give themselves big raises.  Whatever the budget crisis, when the crisis is over, leadership alwasy finds other things to spend their money on—including a dispairing collection of pet projects that have only the loosest connection with the institution’s mission if any at all—I can’t recall there ever being an offer for cost-of-living recovery for regular staff.

Neither the City, nor my employer, seem to be able to find their way to an adequate min. wage for their lowest-income positions.  Not only less pay, but less vacation (lower-income earners need less time with their families, as it turns out.)

Where is this mythical land of stepping back and questioning economic models…?  Whose names adorne the buildings and scholarships in that place?  Does the renters union in that land get bored with all the fair and stable weather there?  Do the laborers get tired of yet another full night’s sleep without anxiety over paying next month’s rent?  It feels like in order to get there, you have to already be there.  (Take that, Xeno.)

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Dick Conoboy

Oct 19, 2024

D. Crook,

“Where is this place?”, you say. Honalee?

Also, if I gave the impression that I was trying to shame anyone into anything, that was not my purpose.  Just describing.  If someone feels guilt or shame, then so be it.

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D. Crook

Oct 19, 2024

Thanks Dick.  I didn’t mean to suggest you were trying to shame anyone—perhaps I was a bit clumsy there.  Your article got me thinking back, and I wanted to list it as one of the many tactics I’ve seen tried, but that ultimately didn’t work.

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Dick Conoboy

Oct 19, 2024

 Maybe we need to integrate emojis into our comment sections!  😊 

As long as we are not speaking about systemic changes in the world of work, all of this is just nibbling around the edges.  Same goes for health care.  Fundamental and truly revolutionary change is necessary.  It may take a collapse of the system for these changes to be made. If so, we seem to be headed there full tilt boogie. 

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Richard Verbree

Oct 19, 2024

Raising the minimum wage doesn’t do any good, it just causes higher prices and a need to raise the minimum higher and higher and higher, it’s like a paradox, it’s good to do it, but it just doesn’t work, looking back to 2015 and the $15/hr, that sure didn’t work…...even if it was $30/hr it would make a fast food meal $25 a piece and then that wage couldn’t buy anything. 

It’s like a dog chasing it’s tale, there is no replacement for getting an education and securing a skilled labor job, you can’t legislate prosperity, it will never work

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Richard Verbree

Oct 19, 2024

Also…..try being a farmer in america, you work insane hours for six months, have no idea if your crop will grow, no idea if the world market will crap out due to foreign wars or make you rich. You have no clue until the end of the season if you can pay all your bills, you live on credit lines half the year, so when I hear complaints about are highest in the nation minimum wage, I understand it, but I know that 98% of the population doesn’t understand farm operation volatility. People can google suicide rates, farmers have a high rate of suicide 

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Richard Verbree

Oct 19, 2024

I would live to see a study done that compares each states minimum wage to its own average cost of living and see which state has best ratio of cost of living compared to the minimum wage.I suspect that the states with highest minimum wages do not have the best ratio of minimum wage to cost of living. At the end of the day a minimum wage is only as good as the housing situation/food/utilities it can buy. $1 here is not equal in buying power there

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Dick Conoboy

Oct 20, 2024

Richard,

Thanks for your comments.

I don’t believe I suggested that we legislate prosperity.  I pointed out the reality of the situation with the minimum wage and, in the last paragraph of my piece, said “Now, before I am inundated with comments to the effect that higher minimum wages will raise the costs for businesses that will, in turn, raise the cost of restaurant meals, groceries, or whatever items depend on minimum wage workers for “affordable” pricing, I have this to say:  We need to step back and question the economic model that requires workers to toil for a pittance so that someone makes a profit.”

Short of that, what you mentioned about the farmers and the state by state minimum wage comparison just accentuates the extent of the systemic issues.  Escaping from the minimum wage by going to college may help individuals (who are then saddled with college debt) but someone has to pick the crops, clean the floors and wait on tables.  Tinkering with a corrupt system is just plain nonsense. 

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Richard Verbree

Oct 20, 2024

Dick, thanks for the response, raising the minimum wage or just haveing a state imposed minimum wage is an attempt to legislate prosperity. College is a choice, and college debt is a choice, there are scholarship programs and minorities’ applications are preferenced (whole other subject on racism i know) at many schools.

The capitalist system though flawed is still the best economic system in the world, the United States has proven this easily over the last 100 years with many inventions and a higher rate of prosperity than most other countries. Americans are the most giving to international and domestic non profits that benefit the entire world. Can you give an example of other countries or economic systems that have contributed to global philanthropic efforts more than this country?.Bill Gates is a great example of global philanthropy (though I don’t much care for his government manipulating tactics).

There is no use disparaging anything in life without offering ideas and/or examples of how to make it better. 

I myself complain plenty about our problems here in whatcom county, but at same time, I offer ideas for solutions and improvements for our commmunity.

Do you have a better idea for how picking crops, working in food prep or sanitation could be done better?, if so, I’m listening 

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Richard Verbree

Oct 20, 2024

Also, we have to realize that nothing in life comes easy. We also need to accept some amount of hard work when we are young and physically able to do hard work. So many great life lessons are learned from those nasty minimum wage jobs such as “I don’t want to do this forever, therefore I will seek to better myself through training and education to secure a better paying job”.

Another side effect of a high minimum wage is that less people will become doctors, lawyers, engineers because the simple burger flipping can pay pretty good with a high minimum wage. Every economic system needs skilled labor, to get that, it must pay more than unskilled work to insentivise people to get training for skilled positions.

In the USSR all lines of work payed the same by government mandate, everyone was miserable, there was no reason to better yourself because there was no personal return for your effort. I believe a higher and higher minimum wage will eventually become full on socialist economy where everything is in short supply and there are no people willing to work and the economy just stops.

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Dick Conoboy

Oct 22, 2024

Richard,

Most public universities were once tuition free or nearly so. What happened? Capitalism

The capitalist system is set up to devolve into one with low wages and wealth extraction by the 1% as we currently see.  We find ourselves now at the logical, predictable end to a flawed system. Some sort of socialist system is necessary. 

How to deal with the problems confronting us means public discussion and action. 

The notion that fewer people will become doctors and lawyers as a side effect of a higher minimum wage is nonsensical.

I have never held the former USSR’s system up as an example of a workable economic model.  Your statement is a strawman.

Minimum wage as a great life lesson is cruelty.

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Richard Verbree

Oct 22, 2024

Dick, my statement is a recent example of a different economic system which has a socialist aspect of which you just suggested we as readers consider. There is no straw man.

I noticed in your response you have no ideas to make our system better. Our current system does have some socialism in it, it is not pure capitalism.

Welfare, section 8 housing, Wic, foodstamps, social security disability are all socialist programs designed to help the less fortunate, I believe they are abused to some extent by lazy people.

Can you give me and the readers a better example on this earth of an economic model that has brought more technological innovations to all people on this planet than capitalism?

Capitalism has given us electricity, automobiles, high efficiency agriculture (cheap abundant food that feeds the world through foreign food aid), computers, AI…..the list goes on and on.

Your critism of capitalism is nonsensical because there is no better system on earth that empowers, enables and lifts up any individual that is willing to work hard and smart…..if capitalism is so bad, why are so many people wanting to immigrate illegally from Mexico to this country that has such a “horrible” economic system??

The amount of illegal immigration is one small factor that proves your premise wrong.

 

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Richard Verbree

Oct 22, 2024

Very basic logic to conclude their will be less doctors, lawyers, and engineers if non skilled labor pays the same as skilled labor. Why would anyone waste 8 years of education even if it was free if you can be a garbage collector and make the same money as a doctor or lawyer?

How could any school be free? Do the teachers teach for no pay?, is the electricity provided to schools for free.

Tuition was much less 30+ years ago, it is sad it’s so expensive now.

1 thing I’ll aggree with you on is that corporate greed is out of control last 15+ years…..we have anti trust laws, but too many politicians are bought by big corporations, so antitrust laws are ignored

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