Minimum Rage

I remember minimum wage.

Oh, sure - in high school, I made $2.90 an hour. And my first 'real' job out of college, interning at KSTP-AM, paid $3.35 - this, back when my rent was $110 a month, was something of a livable wage. Sort of.

I've flirted with awful money over the years. When I left nightclubs, I worked for $7 an hour as an essay grader, and $6.50 as a document coder. This, with two kids and another one on the way.

All of this apropos the Strib's biennial shamefest on the Minimum Wage.

First, the qualified kudo; unlike many stories on the subject, the Strib's piece provides counterpoint of its own...:

Consider Peggy Rasmussen, who has owned the 55-seat Countryside Cafe in Medina on the outskirts of the metro area for 30 years. Her 22 workers serve breakfast and lunch. With no alcohol, the cafe is far from a high-margin business.

Rasmussen provides health insurance to help reduce employee turnover and pays those who bus tables $6.50 an hour, dishwashers between $7 and $8 an hour and cooks from $10 to $13.50 an hour. Waitresses and waiters receive the $5.15 minimum, but can take home more than $100 in tips on busy weekends.

Increasing the minimum wage, she said, could cost her business about $20,000 in raises. "People say: 'Just raise the prices and it will all work out,' but working-class people will only pay so much," said Rasmussen, who has testified against raising the minimum wage at the state Capitol. "Smaller places up north who can't afford to come down and speak on the issue would be devastated."

...which is, I suspect, the first many minimum wage activists have heard about this side of the subject.

The untold story on the minimum wage; anyone who's not a recent high school or college graduate, and is past the mid-twenties, who is still earning minimum wage is probably operating under some sort of constraint, usually self-imposed; they dropped out of high school, they have a criminal record or some sort of psychological or chemical impairment, or they simply avoided learning any job skills that are marketable for more than the minimum.

Example: we learn that Sonny Benettie, the main subject of the story, is in his mid-fifties. He has issues.

In many ways, Benettie is already devastated. He has no permanent address and hops between friends' couches.

"Affordable living is out of the question when you're making six bucks an hour," he said.

Benettie grew up in rural Mississippi, served as a Marine in the Vietnam War and has lived in the Twin Cities for 25 years. He has been a dishwasher at a local college and worked for various hauling companies over the years.

When his ex-wife lost her sales job because of a department store closing in the late-1990s, "the bills piled up sky-high" and so did the tension. He was convicted of fifth-degree domestic assault in 2001 and spent a year in prison in Faribault. With a felony on his record, a steady job is hard to find.

Kristina Diamond, a coordinator at Labor Ready, says Benettie is one of their hardest-working and most reliable day laborers and gets strong evaluations from the companies using their service.

A chunk of the money he earns is garnished to provide child support. When there's no work and he falls behind on those payments, his driver's license can get revoked -- miring him in a downward spiral.

Benettie said shame, guilt and disappointment in himself keep him from visiting his daughter as much as he'd like.

"It's very painful to have a 9-year-old and not be financially able to ... do the things she'd like to do," he said. "Rather than letting her down, you just don't call or go over. It's painful, very painful."

Y'see, there's a great story here; the domestic abuse industry creates a lot of ex-felons in this state - it's a scandalously easy system to get sucked into. The familyl court system pretty much chews up low-skilled, low-income guys like Benettie and spits them out; the child support system takes what it wants and leaves, for men like Benettie, very little at the end of the day; there's an underclass of men in Minnesota that can never get dug out of poverty, no matter how hard they work (as, indeed, Benettie seems to). Assuming Benettie's ex-wife has a similar story, the welfare system is probably involved, and there's a system there that needs to have a light flipped on, working hand-in-glove with the child support system while actively encouraging dependence on it. There are four different systems that need exposing!

But the Strib doesn't tell any of those stories. It tells the story of the minimum wage - which won't even serve as a band-aid for any of the systems that do need fixing. Our education system turns out low-skilled people, or an amazing number of dropouts; they have children they can't afford, frequently as teenagers before they've learned any marketable skills; the women trying and failing to earn enough money to raise families on the kinds of jobs they can get with "teenage mom" skills; going on welfare to make ends meet; child support chasing down the fathers - frequently barely employable themselves - and garnishing much, sometimes nearly all, of the income to reimburse welfare; who go on to raise children who know nothing but the system they grew up under, who grow up to repeat the cycle.

Oh well. Maybe someday.

Doug from Bogus Gold has an excellent point or two in his post on the subject.

Posted by Mitch at March 28, 2005 06:06 AM | TrackBack