We are all prisoners of our own life experience.   Even the fairest minded person interprets the world as if their own experience in life is a universal life experience.   This is not a moral deficiency as some would assert, but rather it is an inescapable reality of our existence.   Sure, it is easy to throw rocks at people who have a different life experience and say they should be able to see things your way. But realize as you do so, you are in fact admitting you cannot see the world through the eyes of the person receiving your rocks. Not having lived that other person’s life however, is not an excuse for not trying to imagine how things look from the other side of the rock you are throwing.

I say that in introduction to the “minimum wage” issue that has been simmering for about two years  but has not raised to a level of even a soft boil.  Over the past few years a string of news stories declare  that the US middle-class continues to slip in relation to the last generation, not just that, but are slipping behind the rest of the industrialized world.  Something is fundamentally wrong, but neither political party has a real commitment in actually doing something about it.

It is simply a fact that over the past 40 years the purchasing power of the minimum wage has steadily declined as the minimum wage does not automatically increase to keep pace with inflation.  No one is disputing that.  Also no one disputes the fact that as our manufacturing base has declined, the percentage of the workforce in very low or minimum wage jobs has increased.

When I was a teenager there were jobs that were effectively “kids jobs” because only students like me would work for the minimum wage being offered (which was worth significantly more than it is today). Fast food, grocery store check-out clerk and such jobs were entirely the province of people under 21. But during the 90’s something began to change, you began to see adults who once worked as unskilled labor in factories and warehouses began to be pushed down the economic ladder into low/minimum wage jobs.

Additionally a new ethic of management began to shift further away from holding to the implicit concept of fairness in employment. We have seen the near elimination of full time service sector employees and the rise of use of contingency workers. These people are paid minimum wage ( or very close to it) and are told they are given a weekly schedule but they don’t know they will work those days, they must call in each day to see if they are needed.    They can’t plan any other activity (or employment) that day because if they don’t call in they are fired, yet they may only actually get paid for one day in 2 or 3 in which they are scheduled.  People in such work conditions have gone from a tiny fraction of people on the margins 30 years ago to a way of life for a very large percentage of the US population.

The result of this is that there is a whole segment of our society who are employed but unable to make enough income to pay for basic needs of food, shelter and transportation.    Hence, we have seen the steady rise in working families who are on food stamps, housing subsidies and other forms of assistance.   We also have seen the massive growth of the number of people who claim disability because while a disability check may not be large, it is far more than a person working even two minimum wage contingency jobs can earn.

In this environment it is no surprise that the percentage of Americans not in the workforce is as high as it was before women entered the workforce in large numbers.

My conservative and libertarian friends suggest that these people should just get “better jobs” or “get more skills.” Yet in doing so they project themselves, their skills set and raw abilities and opportunities to people who often have none of those things.    It is no surprise that the backbone of the Republican Party are older and/or more skilled people who entered the labor market before this shift in labor practices took hold.   Thus when they oppose the rise of the minimum wage they are making the implicit assumption that people who earn minimum wage do so because they choose not to work in higher paying jobs.  Thus it is assumed these people choose to take that kind of work.  And, to be fair in 1970 that was very much the case, and in 1970 the value of minimum wage was significantly  higher and there were many many factory jobs available that paid far more.

The conservative talking heads constantly present their position that they oppose programs of income redistribution because people should work for what they get, “just like I did”.   They oppose child care subsidies, they oppose health care subsidies, they oppose mass transit subsidies, they oppose food subsidies. They oppose these things because they believe these things promote over reliance on government and discourage self-sufficiency.   There is merit in their base position on this and it is true that people can be disincentiveized to take responsibility for themselves.  Yes government programs can and do create dependence.

So what is the solution?  Jobs that pay enough to be independent.  I challenge my conservative friends to work out how someone could live, let alone raise a child, on minimum wage. Do the math, then tell me that you oppose food stamps and other supports.  Or, do the math with a minimum wage of $12/hour then argue for reducing food stamps or other supports.  What is amusing to me is even a majority of Republican voters support the raising of the minimum wage, yet their leaders and talking heads simply don’t care.

As I see it you can either support self-sufficient income via a living minimum wage OR you can support high levels of government subsidies.  Put it another way, do you want work to pay or government to pay?

The alternative to these two positions is to just admit you don’t care about anyone but yourself.

If you are fine with admitting you are morally bankrupt and don’t care about your neighbors, you must realized that in time desperate people will turn to desperate measures. The rise of fascism and communism in the early part of last century was a direct result of not caring about the masses of the poor.  Thus, I would suggest that if you care about yourself, you should choose between making work pay or government subsidies right now….. while you can.

Yes, I know there are economic models that show both an increase and decrease in net jobs based on a minimum wage hike.  All I have to say is that McDonalds won’t fire their cook because of a minimum wage hike.  Yes, you can choose what economic model you want to believe; yet to me this is an ethics issue and an issue of democracy, not one of economics.  My friends on the religious right like to make a point to say there are moral absolutes and that moral relativism is killing the country.   To give your fellow citizen a chance to live with dignity is a moral imperative well established by Jesus himself when he declared the greatest law of all was to love your neighbor as yourself.  So my conservative Christian friends; I challenge you to choose morality over convenient self-interest.   Support a significant rise in the minimum wage or a significant rise in governmental support for the poor.