Minimum wage is little more than Vaseline for the poor.

Recently, the North Carolina state legislature raised the minimum wage from from $5.15 to 6.15 an hour.

I do not share my fellow Democrats enthusiasm for the rate increase. All it succeeds in doing is to remove from the table an important election-year issue, and does nothing for the hardest-working members of our society: The working poor.

An extra dollar-an-hour wage increase means that a worker slaving her life away for a chain-store, will now make a whole extra eight bucks a day.

Before taxes.

Coincidentally, this is about the same cost for three 7.5oz jars of Vaseline.

So now, when a NC laborer goes to work for McDonald's, Wal-Mart or the corner convenience store - he can afford to smear some Vaseline on his rear before his employer exploits him for another day.

Do you think the language I'm using is too harsh?

Consider: At $6.15 an hour, that is about $12,792 a year.

Assume a hypothetical worker only pays $600 a month for rent, electric, water, heating and doesn't pay taxes. (Yes, I know this is unrealistically low, and that's what makes this scenario so poignantly sad.)

That leaves less than $466 a month for food, phone, child-care, transportation and Vaseline to ease the pain.

So excuse me if the comparison today is rather harsh. In my defense: 1) I don't usually use such graphic analogies. 2) If comparing minimum wage to getting exploited daily by your employer isn't an accurate analogy, I don't know what is.

Sometimes the truth transcends polite language.

$6.15 an hour does nothing to stimulate local economies, encourage savings or raise living standards.

Nothing.

If Democrats are serious about re-building the middle-class in North Carolina, they have to stop short-changing the working poor with "minimum" wages, and start working toward a "living" wage.

There is a significant difference.

Think of it this way: The human body needs a minimum of 1 liter of water a day to survive. You'll live, but how would you bathe, cook and clean the house?

If someone "raised" the minimum of water you get to 1.5 liters... does that improve your life much?

To thrive, you need at least 10 liters a day. Anything close to the "minimum" and you are living in a constant state of emergency.

Similarly, at $6.15 an hour, a worker might also survive day-to-day. But forget about healthcare, rearing children properly and helping the community. The employer has most of the power in such a relationship, and the worker is little more than a slave; with the primary difference being that the modern slave gets to choose which plantation to work at for minimum wage.

Lest anyone bring up the straw-man argument that I'm one of those liberals calling for workers to get paid more than they are worth. I say: No, no no!

If that was a solution, then why not pay everyone $100 dollars an hour?

I'm talking about making sure businesses pay the actual cost to maintain a productive employee that will not be a burden on the taxpayer. This is not a radical idea. To do anything less harms society.

A worker who is forced to sell her labor for less than a living wage needs to turn to alternative means of support in the form of public assistance, loans from friends, prostitution and drug sales.

Raising the minimum wage a measly dollar is a slap in the face to the exploited. If that's all our legislators are willing to do for the working class, then they should have just sent underpaid employees a bottle of lubricant directly. At least that way, it would have been less disingenuous.

If the politicians in Raleigh want to be helpful, they should allow cities and counties to set their own wage standards. A de-centralized policy allows communities to have a say in how much they are willing to shoulder the burden for employers who under-pay their employees.

For more information on living wages, and for the raw data behind why they are a good idea see the Living Wage crib sheet.

Read counterpoint here.

Tags: Living Wage - Minimum Wage - slave wage - North Carolina - labor - working poor - corporate subsidy

Note:

• The second image is titled: "A Mortally Wounded Brigand Quenches his Thirst"
  c. 1825
  Oil on canvas, 32,5 x 40,7 cm
  Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel

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