Flacking for Power

This sort of thing makes me just a little bit ill:

The Senate should pass a fair and clear-cut minimum wage increase for our nation’s working poor, with no special strings attached for business.

Last year, Democratic Senators were successful in rejecting the Republican leadership’s cynical ploy to use the minimum-wage proposal as a vehicle to give tax cut pay offs to corporate special interests and the wealthiest Americans. Similar stunts must be stopped this time around. Today we are urging Senators to vote “yes” on a clean minimum wage bill in order to prevent even more business pay offs and anti-worker add-ons to what should be a straightforward piece of legislation.

Let me tell you this: the only reason that the president of the AFL/CIO wants the minimum wage raised is because that would immediately give most of his members the same raise. See, the little dirty secret you don’t know is that an awful lot of union wages are directly tied to the federal minimum wage. When it goes up, their wages go up. NOt only does that happen because it’s written right into union contracts, but also because it gives unions much greater bargaining power. By restricting the right of workers to negotiate their own pay, the federal government guarantees that unions have a stronger hand in forcing companies to pay higher wages, regardless of other economic concerns.

And we all pay for it.

Sweeney says that jacking up the federal minimum wage “…raises the wage floor for all workers”. But that’s true only for union employees. I wonder how excited he would be if Congress passed a joint resolution encouraging every state to raise their minimum wages instead? Not so excited, I’d imagine. That wouldn’t help his cause nearly as much. He’d have to go from state to state asking for something that Congressmen who are already bought and paid for by the AFL/CIO could give him in one fell swoop.

If you’re interested in the actual economics of the minimum wage, you might find this article interesting. It’s written by an economist and is refreshingly free of jargon and politics.

That, at least, is something that John Sweeney won’t give you.

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Category: The Economy and Your Money