If all goes as activists plan, workers at New York’s fast-food restaurants today will walk out on their jobs in solidarity with fellow workers from 100 American cities.
It’s but the latest union-backed effort designed to raise wages by pointing to the difficulty of living on an annual income that works out to about $15,000 a year at the present federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Protestors are calling for the wage to be more than doubled, to $15 per hour.
There are two big problems with their argument. First, much is based on misinformation. As President Obama’s own Labor Department reports, only 2.9 percent of American workers paid by the hour and over the age of 25 are earning minimum wage. And the overwhelming majority of those making minimum wage are not raising families on it.
Even if they were, the $15,000 a year would not be their sole income. Between the earned-income tax credit, food stamps, Medicaid and so forth, their real income could be nearly double that. Though Big Labor prefers hikes in the minimum wage because some of its own contracts are pegged to them, increasing the earned-income tax credit is a much better vehicle for helping working families. The reason is that it underwrites the worker rather than making him or her more expensive to hire.
But the bigger problem with this strike is moral: It takes advantage of those who need the market most.
The striking fast-food workers are unlikely to realize their goal of a $15-an-hour minimum wage. The tragedy is that the activists who called them out may nonetheless succeed in sowing confusion about the only real guarantee of a better future for hard-working families: a growing economy that creates opportunities to move up and forces employers to compete for workers.