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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 10/19/15

The Morality of a $15 Minimum

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But America decided the employment of young children was morally wrong.

The safety laws enacted in the wake of the tragic Triangle Shirt Waste Factory fire of 1911, which killed 145 workers, were also deemed "job killers."

"We are of the opinion that if the present recommendations [for stricter building codes] are insisted upon...factories will be driven from the city," argued New York's association of realtors.

But New York and hundreds of other cities enacted them nonetheless because they viewed unsafe sweatshops morally objectionable.

It was the same with the 1938 legislation mandating a 40-hour workweek with time-and-a-half for overtime, along with the first national minimum wage.

"It will destroy small industry," predicted Georgia Congressman Edward Cox. It's "a solution of this problem which is utterly impractical and in operation would be much more destructive than constructive to the very purposes which it is designed to serve," charged Rep. Arthur Phillip Lamneck of Ohio.

America enacted fair labor standards anyway because it was the right thing to do.

Over the years America has decided that certain kinds of jobs -- jobs that were done by children, or were unsafe, or required people to work too many hours, or below poverty wages -- offend our sense of decency.

So we've raised standards and lost such jobs. In effect, we've decided such jobs aren't worth keeping.

Even if a $15 an hour minimum wage risks job losses, it is still the right thing to do.

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Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, has a new film, "Inequality for All," to be released September 27. He blogs at www.robertreich.org.

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