The problem with the ‘Fight for Fifteen’ campaign

Like the typical college student, I’ve worked a few minimum wage jobs in the past, and I know the struggle–working long hours only to get your paycheck at the end of the month and realize you’re making peanuts. And then something called FICA comes in and takes a little off the top, and you’re left with barely enough to fuel your weekly coffee habit. ‘Fight for Fifteen’ advocates complain that no one can live off of $7.25 per hour, and they’re right. But here’s the thing: no one was ever meant to.

Jobs like lifeguarding, waiting tables, or working fast food have a long history of going to people like me: college or high school kids supported by their parents, just looking to make a few extra bucks or to help get themselves through school and onto a higher-paid career path. In recent years, however, there’s been a pattern of minimum wage earners getting older. According to the US Center for Economic and Policy Research, just 12 per cent of minimum wage workers were teenagers in 2013, compared to 27 per cent in 1979, with a rise in minimum wage employment for people between the ages of 25 and 64. So when we complain that workers aren’t being given a “living wage” and suggest raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, we’re ignoring a more pressing issue: Why are adults stuck with these jobs in the first place?

The Fight for Fifteen comes from the idea that minimum wage employment is something you should be able to live off of, a notion that would’ve sounded strange in the seventies, but is now commonplace as more and more adults find themselves stuck behind the glass of a drive-through window. Instead of looking for a quick, easy, and most likely temporary solution like dramatically raising the minimum wage, we should examine the institutional factors that contribute to the rising age of minimum wage workers.

The same set of data from CEPR pinpoints a change in the makeup of workers, as well. In 1979, around 40% of minimum wage employees were high school dropouts, compared to just 20% in 2014, and about twice as many workers had college degrees in 2014 than in 1979. What does this mean? It means that much of our minimum wage working class is overqualified, that there’s a rise in workers with an education and a college degree falling back on minimum wage jobs, which is a scary thing. It suggest that what we have is a labor issue, where college graduates are struggling to find employment in their desired fields. Instead of raising the minimum wage so that people can live off of it, we should be working to investigate the factors that cause people to have to in the first place. Let’s go back to the notion that minimum wage jobs are for teenagers, and find a way to get our older, more educated American citizens out of McDonalds and into jobs where they can succeed, instead of giving them more money for doing the same amount of work employees have been doing for decades.

Raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour is like putting a band-aid on a cut that needs stitches. It might stop the bleeding for a bit, but in the long-run, it’s simply biding time instead of actually solving the problem. In certain states, particularly poorer ones with a high number of minimum wage workers, dramatically raising the minimum wage could actually be harmful. For companies that would have to more than double the wages for hundreds or thousands of employees, price-increases would be a necessity, often on goods that minimum wage workers, themselves, are purchasing. These price-increases could then decrease demand for the product, resulting in job loss for these employees. The possible results of a minimum wage increase are contested by economists, which is why many of them suggest slight, closely-monitored increases, say to $10 an hour, on the state level. It’s a little less sexy than an all-out federal doubling, but then caution has never been the strength of the Fight for Fifteen movement.

So here’s the bottom line: minimum wage jobs suck. I know. I’ve been there. And it’s tempting to want to rally around an easy solution and a catchy slogan, especially one that puts more money in your pocket. But the economy is a complex institution with no shortcuts and no quick fixes, and the reality of the minimum wage situation in our country is much more complicated than many would have you believe. If we really want to make things better for our lowest earning Americans, we need to make slow, careful increases to their wages while investigating ways to stop the growing dependency on minimum wage jobs, rallying around government officials whose focus is on things like job creation and improvement of public education, not quick, easy fixes to complex institutional issues.