by James A. Bacon
I’m all in favor of people earning higher wages. I want to live in a society in which people make enough from their labors to live on without government assistance. I just don’t think that mandating a minimum wage is the way to go about it, for all the reasons that foes of the minimum wage usually cite that don’t bear repeating here. A better way to increase wages is to (a) increase the number of jobs in the economy, which would (b) give employees more options, which would (c) prompt employers to offer better wages, benefits and working conditions in order to hang onto their workforce. Crank up the jobs machine, and the wages, benefits and working conditions will follow.
This forehead-smackingly obvious formula can be seen at work in Richmond’s restaurant community. After years of sub-par economic growth following the Great Recession, competition for skilled restaurant employees in the Richmond region is finally heating up. And guess what’s happening — restaurateurs are raising wages.
Thus, we read in the Richmond Times-Dispatch today that Buz Grossberg, owner of Buz and Ned’s Real Barbecue restaurants, is bumping the starting pay to $12.50 per hour for regular employees and to $8 per hour for servers working for tips. That’s up from $8 and $6 an hour respectively.
Grossberg acted for reasons both idealistic and pragmatic. “This has been on my mind a long time, even before it became current politics,” he said. “It’s just gotten worse and worse. It’s gotten hard for people to repay their bills and see their family without working multiple jobs. … How do you attract people and keep people who can’t afford to feed their family? Pay them a living wage.”
But why did he act on his conscience now? Turns out that it’s getting harder finding and retaining talent, particularly kitchen workers, in Richmond’s increasingly competitive and crowded restaurant scene, according to other restaurateurs quoted in the article. Said Grossberg: “The people who would typically work [in the restaurant industry] are going other places.” Paying higher wages will bring them back in.
Bacon’s bottom line: It’s basic supply-and-demand economics. If the economy creates jobs at a faster rate, wages will rise faster. And how do we create more jobs? Once place to start would be to re-think some of the job-killing policies we’ve enacted over the past 15 years, starting with Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, the Affordable Care Act, EPA regulatory overreach, higher taxes, regulation of the Internet and dozens of other initiatives that collectively have gummed up the economy and slowed growth to a crawl.
Defenders of the current regulatory regime tend to blame mysterious “economic forces” beyond their control. I’m old enough to remember those who claimed the “stagflation” of the 1970s likewise was due to some mysterious change in the nature of the economy rather than the policies of Richard “We’re All Keynesians Now” Nixon and Jimmy “Gas Rationing” Carter. Then along came policies that killed inflation, deregulated major industry sectors, cut taxes and enacted and real government spending cuts, precipitating nearly two decades of job creation. The surge in jobs in the 1980s and 1990s made the minimum wage irrelevant in many parts of the country because businesses were so desperate for labor that they were paying more than the minimum already.
I do feel badly for anyone trying to make a living on the minimum wage. But the answer isn’t more of the same “social justice” economics that have created our moribund economy and depressed wages. The best social justice program in the world is a strong job-creating economy.
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