Real Faces of the Minimum Wage

Remember, more than eight out of 10 workers affected by a minimum wage hike are adults.

The Dirt

When it comes to the Right and the minimum wage, it's not all malted milks and sock hops. There's also their much-beloved fantasy of the minimum wage as "racist."  Seriously. It's a dirty argument to make -- but then, there's a lot of money at stake.

Roy Edroso is one of a hardy band of writers whose beat includes the ever-growing body of "right-wing lit." (We owe them a debt of gratitude. They go spelunking in the dark caves of the human spirit so that we don't have to.) Edroso points us to Jonah Goldberg's assertion that the minimum wage's original backers were racists who supported it specifically because it harms black people.

Bizarrely enough, this is a common right-wing strategem. The Wall Street Journal even calls an increased minimum wage "The Minority Youth Unemployment Act." While it's touching to note The Editors' new-found solicitude toward nonwhite kids, they're ignoring the fact that the vast majority of minimum-wage workers aren't "youth."

They aren't minorities, either. Awkwardly enough for race-baiters like Goldberg and the Journal, most minimum-wage workers are white. There are more minorities among minimum-wage earners (who are 57.9 percent white) than in the overall workforce (which is 67.9 percent white). But that doesn't support the "race" arguments against raising the minimum wage.

The Trip

Neither do the economic analyses, unless you rely on the highly selective economic studies employed by the Journal and other anti-minimum-wage advocates.  Some rely on "meta-studies," or analyses of earlier studies, which selective pick and choose from earlier works. Others rely on the work of economists with a pronounced ideological bent to the right.

The short answer to their job-creation argument is this: The minimum wage has dropped 30 percent in real dollars since 1968. Where are the jobs?

Meanwhile, the right keeps projecting its liquid illusions onto the walls of their political reality like a low-rent psychedelic show in " well, in 1968, when the minimum wage was much higher and the economy was doing much better than it is today. (The official unemployment rate that year was 3.6 percent.)

Here's another mind-bending image: We're told that raising the minimum wage would harm small companies -- but most low-wage employees work for large corporations.

We're also told that employers can't afford to raise their pay, but these corporations are experiencing record-level profits. (We deal with these last two arguments in greater detail here.)

And so the debate rages on, fueled by the cheap hallucinogenic deceptions of the corporate-funded right. Corporate profits continue to soar. CEO pay keeps skyrocketing. Suburban skylines are being reshaped by the megamansions of our New Gilded Age.

And meanwhile the Real Faces of the Minimum Wage -- the mothers, fathers, the young and the old -- struggle to survive and raise their children in an increasingly harsh world, far from the media spotlight and invisible to the powerful interests arrayed against them.