Playing The Race Card On Minimum Wage Laws In Alabama
Smart piece at City Journal by Coleman Hughes, contesting the notion that Alabama's ban on cities setting local minimum wages is -- as Stanford law professor Lucas Guttentag deemed it -- a "modern-day tool of racial subjugation," used by white politicians to perpetuate"economic inequality and racial oppression."
The idea that it's racist for a state to ban local minimum wages makes little sense. For one thing, the law affects all low-skilled workers in Alabama, regardless of race. Yes, in majority-black Birmingham, this means that the law will affect more blacks than whites, but in other states with the same laws, the racial impact is reversed. In Idaho, for instance, the state ban on city-specific minimum wages hits more whites than blacks, because Idaho's population is 91.3 percent white and only 0.6 percent black. On the whole, 24 other states have laws similar to the one passed in Alabama, including states such as Utah and Oregon, where blacks make up less than 2 percent of the population. The same reasoning that led Guttenberg to say that the law discriminates against blacks in Alabama should lead him to charge that the law discriminates against whites in Idaho, Utah, and Oregon.More importantly, the op-ed presents raising the minimum wage as if it were a benefit rather than a tradeoff. It's true that workers who keep their jobs gain from higher minimum wages, but workers who get laid off--or never get hired in the first place because their employers can't afford to pay higher wages--are hurt by the law. The idea that raising the minimum wage tends to increase unemployment is uncontroversial among those who study economics. For instance, among the 166 economists surveyed by the University of New Hampshire in 2015, 83 percent agreed that raising the minimum wage would increase youth unemployment, and 76 percent agreed that it would decrease the total number of jobs available.
The burden of minimum-wage laws falls most heavily on young, low-skilled workers. It's often assumed that raising the minimum wage helps struggling adults make ends meet, but only 5 percent of minimum-wage-earners are adults. Most are youths with few skills and little experience, whose ability to enter the job market while young can prepare them for better-paying jobs. Blacks have historically been overrepresented in this demographic, and have thus been hardest hit by the unemployment caused by minimum-wage increases.
And he's right:
Using the "racial history of Alabama" is a poor basis for contemporary policymaking. Anyone passingly familiar with the civil rights movement knows that Alabama's history has been riddled with both tragedies and triumphs--but does that history tell us anything about which policies are best for Alabama now? The question should answer itself. Being aware of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birmingham campaign does not help us to devise the right tradeoff between increasing wages and promoting employment; nor does it tell us how racial discrimination should be legally defined. Moreover, it's cold comfort to say to an unemployed black youth living in Birmingham today that he's only out of a job because a federal court wanted to make up for what happened to his grandfather in 1960.
Who do minimum wage laws help? "Workers" made of plastic, bolts, and computer processors.
Bobby the Robot doesn't require health insurance and he won't sue you if you promote some lady robot ahead of him.
It's all part of the urban-rural divide we have going in politics. North Carolina had the same thing with the "bathroom bill." The Obama DoE reinterpreted Title IX to include transgendered individuals and mandated wider bathroom, locker room, etc. access.
So, Charlotte, being a somewhat liberal city in a conservative state, complied and mandated that bathrooms in schools be used according to the gender identity of the individual, in contrast to state law. The state legislature, dominated by rural counties with fundamentalist leanings, objected to them city folk makin' laws that ran contrary to the state's, and to God's (in their interpretation).
Cities tend to have more minorities, more homosexuals, more out-of-the-box types than rural areas do, at least openly. In states where the rural areas have significant sway in the legislature, there is a tendency to want to shut down initiatives originating in the cities that run counter to a more pastoral (and fundamentalist) way of looking at things.
Likewise, there is a tendency for those in the cities to chafe at the restrictions imposed by those backwards hillbillies from the sticks.
Conan the Grammarian at August 23, 2018 6:29 AM
I wonder what Birmingham would do, if once they set a higher minimum wage, and say a suburb like Hoover stuck with the state mandated wage? and there was a corresponding move of businesses and jobs from Birmingham to Hoover?
I R A Darth Aggie at August 23, 2018 8:10 AM
Just watch what Seattle or San Francisco does.
Conan the Grammarian at August 23, 2018 8:49 AM
Just watch what Seattle or San Francisco does.
Put up cameras at the city line and record license plates, and then sending a monthly tax notice to citizens of the city an exit fee?
Better still, putting up checkpoints and charging sales taxes on imported goods.
Hey, these socialist s--t-holes don't pay for themselves!
I R A Darth Aggie at August 23, 2018 9:52 AM
"So, Charlotte, being a somewhat liberal city in a conservative state, complied and mandated that bathrooms in schools be used according to the gender identity of the individual, in contrast to state law."
And totally failed to note that in each and every case where a female objected to an apparent male's presence, a sex offense would ruin at least one life.
Radwaste at August 23, 2018 3:25 PM
"I wonder what Birmingham would do, if once they set a higher minimum wage, and say a suburb like Hoover stuck with the state mandated wage? and there was a corresponding move of businesses and jobs from Birmingham to Hoover?"
That's pretty much already happened. Since about 1990, Birmingham and Jefferson County (the county Birmingham is in) has had Detroit levels of corruption and sorry-ass government. The county is bankrupt (literally; they declared bankruptcy in 2011), and several former mayors are in prison. The city is almost gutted, except for the areas around UAB.
There are groups of people who are trying to revitalize the city. The ironic thing is, they are probably the ones that will be hurt the most by this: the startup restaurants and microbreweries, that are trying to bring some life back to the city. Some of them will probably wind up moving to Homewood, an inner-ring suburb that is re-gentrifying and has a lot of Millennials moving in. Some of them will just go out of business.
(Local background: Hoover is a suburb of Birmingham, which despite being right on Birmingham's border, is in another county, Shelby County. In 1980 Hoover barely existed. But when Birmingham's government went bad in the 1990s, a whole bunch of people moved out to Hoover, and then the businesses followed them. Now Hoover is the sixth-largest city in Alabama, and it's pretty much self-contained; most Hoover residents rarely have any need to go to Birmingham for anything.)
Cousin Dave at August 24, 2018 6:52 AM
Think minimum wage is a good idea? Your algebra teacher is crying, loudly.
Radwaste at August 24, 2018 8:42 PM
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