Minimum Wage, Just Wage, and Social Justice

The Anchoress has some interesting reflections.  Excerpts:

...The issue of pay disparities between the CEO of any company and it’s “front end” employees is one of those fights I leave to others, like Moses; I am never sure if people are seriously suggesting there should be no difference, salary-wise, between them, or if they’re just trying to make a point. Morevoer that whole “at some point you’ve made enough money” argument is one I truly would be much more sympathetic to, if it were more broadly (and fairly) applied — meaning if it were a standard applied to athletes and artists and media-elites and not just to corporate “fat cats.” Because that sentiment is apparently not meant to be uniformly applied throughout the monied classes, I tend to doubt the sincerity of those who promulgate it.

All of that said, however, I don’t know how anyone can accept an idea that a man who has worked faithfully and industriously for 20 years, at any job, should still be making minimum wage...

To keep a loyal, well-trained and dependable employee at minimum wage — the same wage paid to unskilled workers newly hired — is pretty unconscionable. The job itself might not be “worth” $15 or $18 an hour, but the intangibles that such an employee brings to the job (dependability; knowledge of policy/procedure; demonstrated sense of responsibility; did I mention dependability) should be worth $12.50 an hour or so, shouldn’t it?

Last April, the HHS Mandate-rejecting Hobby Lobby store chain — citing its Christian sensibilities — voluntarily bumped up their minimum wage scale for their employees — $13 per hour for full-timers, and $9 for part-time. They’ve done that for the past four years.

In so doing, Hobby Lobby exhibits a tendency to broad-mindedness that goes missing within our minimum wage policies, and exposes a paradox inherent therein: by dictating what the minimum wage must be, we have trained business owners to a somewhat narrow, reactionary way of thinking. Prior to minimum wage laws, a smart employer knew that he could not keep good employees without paying them their worth. Once employers were told what they “must” pay, however, it created a baseline that mentally (and perhaps emotionally) narrowed, rather than broadened an employers sense of what wage was fair or deserved. In fact “fair” and “deserved” went out the window. If all a businessman (or woman) had to do was make sure a minimum wage was being paid, what did fairness or merit have to do with anything?

And that sort of thinking, born of the good-intentions of our own government — is how we get to the reality of a 20-year employee making $8.25 an hour, and having to live a pretty hardscrabble life.

This is unjust and dehumanizing; our minimum wage laws have helped corporations see employees less as skilled humans who might have more to bring to the table, but instead as units whose predictable, mandated wages sure make it easy to budget and finagle where they can...

She goes on to excerpt an essay which indicates some of the ironies and problems with the entire project of having a minimum wage. Read the whole thing.