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Minimum Wage! Hiyah!
By Jeff Fecke | July 6, 2010
I never knew that the way to get rich in America was to become a waiter. I mean, sure, I suspected; waiters are always driving those sweet ’99 Hyundais, rolling with fat stacks of Washingtons, and spending holidays at their vacation homes in their regular homes. But still, it’s nice of Tom Emmer to come along to alert the rest of us to the dread scourge of waiters earning a living wage.
For those who’ve somehow missed it, Emmer has suggested that Minnesota should join those states that allow businesses to pay their servers $2.13 an hour if said servers make tips. Right now, Minnesota restaurants have to pay servers $5.25 if they’re a small employer, or $6.15 an hour if they’re a big one.
Now, you may note that $6.15 an hour isn’t that much. And you may realize that if you’re a typical Perkins server on a slow night, you may only be bringing in another three or four dollars per hour in additional tips. Indeed, if you live here on planet Earth, you’re probably not surprised to find out that, far from being the richest of the rich, the median server earns $9.36 an hour — about $19,000 a year. Of course, Emmer claims that waiters actually average $15.43 an hour, which is a bit better — $31,000 a year.
But Emmer is proposing a wage cut for waiters and bartenders equivalent to $8361.60 a year. Even using Emmer’s inflated statistics, that’s cutting a $31,000 a year salary to $22,638.40 — a 37 percent pay cut for people barely making a living wage. Using real statistics, the pay cut is even steeper — cutting wages 79 percent, from $19,000 a year to $10,638.40.
Why Emmer would want to cut someone’s wages by 79 percent — to literally drop servers below the poverty line — is simple. Servers aren’t rich. Restaurateurs aren’t all rich either, of course. But they’re a lot more likely to be rich than their employees. And Emmer cares very much about making the rich richer. If he has to do so by making the poor poorer, well, that’s a feature, not a bug.
Tom Emmer doesn’t mind snatching away basic protections from the working poor — from people working hard, five days a week, doing what they’re supposed to do. Indeed, he revels in it. Tom Emmer doesn’t care if you work hard. He only cares if you make a lot of money. If you don’t — no matter how hard you work — screw you.
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Topics: Election 2010, MN-GOV, Tom Emmer | 11 Comments »
July 6th, 2010 at 2:02 pm
Mr. Emmer, you know those fake $100 bills with bible verses that large groups of Christian churchgoers like to leave after racking up a big bill? Yeah, those aren’t actual money.
July 6th, 2010 at 3:13 pm
Over on SitD, Mitch wsa presenting the choice as $2.13 an hour, or nothing.
Ya know, if a hospitality business can’t do well enough to pay a living wage, albeit the federal minimums that are now the standard…….. they deserve to fail, they are not able to be competitive, shame on them.
They do NOT deserve to make their profits off the backs of people earning what a kid earns baby sitting — with the wait staff still having to pay Soc Sec. and other taxes.
Price a fair wage into the costs of your food and beverages — or go to work for someone else, big shot.
I’m sure that while Emmer is trying to lower the bottom of the pay scale, he has no intention of putting the brakes on the top end any time soon.
I wonder if Emmer ever took a look at the jobs in those states that allow $2.13 an hour. I’m betting they are hell-holes to work in.
July 6th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
Stooge – those aren’t real money, but I’m sure Emmer is confident they will help you store up riches later in heaven — and the hell with life here and now.
Kinda like Bachmann and her ersatz ‘God-given rights’, LOL.
July 6th, 2010 at 6:59 pm
“Emmer is proposing a wage cut for waiters and bartenders equivalent to $8361.60 a year” Uh, not exactly. He is not proposing cutting ‘actual’ wages, he is getting government out of the negotiations between employer and employee. Employees would be free to offer anything they wish and employees would be free to negotiate salary or choose not to work for them if they are not being paid what they are worth.
Better yet if we removed all intrusions into the free associations between employer and employee. Because 1) Freedom works best when we are, you know, actually free and 2) There would be MORE jobs and Prices for things would be lower (both of which help the poor more than the rich) If the Government would get out of our private lives.
Why doesn’t the Government just set price controls on everything we buy? is employment not simply a commodity? Of course it is, one cannot say what things are ‘worth’ becuase they are worth what people are willing to pay. That goes for all commities, including wages. Why would you tell someone they cannot take a job for $2.13 if they wanted to? would you tell them they couldn’t work at all if they are willing to work for that amount?
Bottom line is price controls are always a bad thing.
July 6th, 2010 at 7:13 pm
And while we’re at it, who’s the government to say I can’t put my daughter to work in the unventilated shirt factory down the road for $.03 an hour? Or to say that employers shouldn’t be able to demand employees work 19 hours a day with no overtime? Or that my employer should be able to make me work off the clock? In this vibrant economy, certainly the power of the market would allow me to get a great job if I didn’t like it.
All of those are cases of the government interfering in contracts. None of them are bad things. The minimum wage is part of a series of reforms that turned this country from an oligarchy to a nation with a vibrant middle class and runaway growth. It’s too bad that people like Emmer and Franklin are so determined to bring the oligarchy back.
July 6th, 2010 at 7:27 pm
Franklin – “Employees would be free to offer anything they wish and employees would be free to negotiate salary or choose not to work for them if they are not being paid what they are worth.”
Do you really believe that this is a fair negotiation between a person who holds all the power and a person who holds none of the power?
Also, people have tried to band together to freely negotiate their salary with their employer. They are called unions but you conservatives don’t like letting free people do that now do you because it provides a more level playing field between employer and employee.
July 7th, 2010 at 8:23 am
July 5th 1935, FDR signed the Labor Relations Act into law, allowing for collective bargaining aka the Wagner Act. It was enacted because during the great depression with high unemployment and rapidly declining standards of living there were problems with unfair labor practices inflicted by employers on employees.
Now, if you start from the premise that employers are always good and kind and fair and would never take advantage of anyone…..you’re an idiot and naive to boot.
If you realistically understand that there are some good employers and some bad employers, and also some good employees and some bad employees, and that pretty much all of them are going to be employed somewhere doing something, you can start dealing with reasonable and realistic laws.
Emmer’s premise – or Franklin’s – not so much. That is the cuckoo cloud world of fantasy where whoever has the money is right and loved by god and should have no impediment, not even fair and reasonable restrictions on getting richer, and whoever doesn’t deserves every evil thing that happens, including being on the bad side of the widening gap between rich and everybody else.
I’m always amused by the ultra-religious conservatives, like Grassley during the Kagan confirmation hearings, who posit ‘God-given rights” to carry guns (really? please show me THAT passage anywhere in the Bible? or any other major or minor religion’s texts?)
but seem to skate over the passage from Timothy in the new testament stating “the laborer is worthy of his hire” directing fair pay for fair work.
July 7th, 2010 at 7:55 pm
Now, if you start from the premise that employers are always good and kind and fair and would never take advantage of anyone…..you’re an idiot and naive to boot.
Exactly.
I recommend that people like Franklin try learning a little history. These “social experiments” have been tried, and they failed miserably. That’s why the government had to step in and start legislatin’. I highly recommend that Franklin read Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton before opening his mouth on this subject again.
I remember when I was in High School living in Pennsylvania, working weekends for $6/hour. It was so discouraging to bust my butt the entire weekend and still have barely enough to buy the books and CDs I wanted. I can’t even imagine what it would be like trying to pay rent and feed kids on that kind of money!
Here in Ontario, our minimum wage is somewhere in the vicinity of $12. A single person on that kind of money will still be struggling to make ends meet, but it’s possible. My husband and I managed it while I was in University (on a student visa, and therefore not legally allowed to work) with a little bit of help from my father who, in addition to paying for my tuition, also sent over an allowance of $100/month (he’s an awesome man and totally getting the best care ever when he’s old!). Even so, we were eating little more than sauceless spaghetti and still running a deficit every month (made up each April when we filed our taxes, which would cover our deficit for the next year).
I was incredibly lucky. I had a family to support me and get me through university so that I could eventually earn a comfortable living wage – but not everyone is as lucky as I am. If they are willing to work hard, everyone deserves to, at the very least, earn a comfortable living wage in exchange.
July 8th, 2010 at 7:16 am
The glibertarian wing of the Cons is consumed with hating on the waitstaff lately: http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2010/06/19/advice-for-the-lovelorn/
July 8th, 2010 at 6:32 pm
[...] Austin, on July 8th, 2010 As the story of Tom Emmer believing in $100,000 per year wait staff and suggesting we cut the minimum wage for those workers with a tip credit spirals out of control in the media and on the blogs, the various gubernatorial campaigns have [...]
July 13th, 2010 at 5:10 pm
Franklin,
First, the idea of government regulation is to prevent abuse, such as, child labor, or 80 hour work weeks for no additional pay, or.. wages which in a time of excess supply equates to virtual slave level wages (e.g. a wage at which you HAVE to work 80 hours a week just to survive).
Emmer, and the conservatives, should be ashamed. He is effectively arguing that during hard times the way to improve society is to attack the wage structure of the poorest among us. This doesn’t even begin to address the fact that the minimum wage underpins the wages the REST of us get. Let me put it another way, if this change means YOU personally will lose 60% of your base wage, are you in favor? The reason I ask is that by defining a minimum wage, we set a baseline against all other work is measured in the minds of the workforce.
Lastly (ok not quite), and importantly, shall we now start evaluating other benefits, other sources of income as part of base wages? If so, how about we start taxing capital gains realized off of stock options as normal income? Or how about we consider health benefits paid for by an employer as counting against a minimum wage too – that way, as long as the employer provides health insurance, they can get away with paying the employee nothing, hell, perhaps they even could get away with CHARGING the employee if the normal wage of the employee is less than the cost of health care, and I’ll tell ya’, if you set the min wage at $2.03 it sure as hell will be.
The bottom line is this, in the Gilded Age, a time when the United States had a vast underclass, a very very small middle class and a tiny upper class, the SCOTUS used to constantly throw out a term called “Liberty of Contract” which epitomizes EXACTLY your rant about freedom to work, or not, at the wage offered. The thing is, it was used to keep wages low and to forstall and prevent labor protections and anything akin to a minimum wage. When states (you know, using state’s rights) would set a minimum, time and again the Federal Government’s SCOTUS – those big bad activist justices, would overturn such laws.
Once FDR replaced a few dunderheads (and after a realization of what helped bring about the crash of 1929) – this staunch adherence to the idea that the poorest actually have choices about eating and stuff, the SCOTUS finally moved past this “Liberty of Contract” nonsense, and agreed to allow things like minimum wages, and labor standards, and a 40 hour work week, and you know what happened!!!????? We got the middle-class which we have today and which we’ve seen steadily shrink and die as the conservatives have made war upon it over the past 29 years under the guise of protecting the “free market” from the big bad intrusive government – except that they leave out that power, including and especially wealth, is what normally runs government, and normally, except after financial crises – it is not the waiters or the ditch-diggers screwing managment with the help of government, it is management saying there’s a free market – and then telling people that if they don’t like the wage, they can starve. Some freedom – but that’s fine, you continue to be a mouthpiece for underpaying workers relative to profits generated, and I’ll continue to show you empirical evidence after empirical evidence which supports that the greatest period of production in our history was when we had the highest business taxes and highest relative minimum wage and you know what??? Capitalists STILL invested in the US, go figure, huh?