Friday, October 11, 1996
Changes in the welfare system make it imperative that those we require to work be able to make enough to support themselves and their children.
Proposition 210, the minimum wage increase on the November ballot, would put in place one of the bricks needed to build a reformed welfare system. If California demands that parents work to support their children, a job must pay well enough to feed, clothe and house them.
The measure, supported by a coalition of labor and church groups would raise California's minimum wage to $5 an hour next March and $5.75 in March 1998. That would leave California somewhat above the recently adopted federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. It would restore the purchasing power of the minimum wage to about the level of 1988 but leave it below the levels that prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s.
Economists have argued forever about whether minimum wages help the economy or cost jobs. They do agree, however, that any job effect is relatively small.
Opponents of this measure say it would cost the state 62,000 jobs in 1998. That's in a state economy that has about 15 million people employed and is creating nearly 350,000 new jobs a year, a rate far higher than the nation as a whole. Even if the opponents are right, the price for boosting the wages of the state's lowest-paid workers would be only a marginal decline in job growth, most of it concentrated in the retail and service sector.
Foes of the increase say it's not needed because many minimum wage workers, including teen-agers, live in households above the poverty line. But the relationship between poverty and the minimum wage will become far more important in the coming years as the new federal welfare reform law requires California to move hundreds of thousands of single parents off the dole and into jobs, many of them at the bottom of the wage ladder. Proposition 210 would guarantee that a mother of two children who works full time at the minimum wage would earn about $12,000 a year, almost enough to reach the federal poverty line.
Increasing the minimum wage isn't the only thing the state must do to ensure that Californians who work hard can raise a family in dignity. But it's a necessary step ahead, one that voters should take in the absence of state government leadership in making work pay for all Californians.
Yes on Proposition 210.
[ Yes on 210 ] [ Heroes ] [ Facts ] [ Updates ] [ Endorsements ] [ Join Us! ]