that f/k/a’s friendly weblogging foil, the vociferously-conservative Catholic,Steven Bainbridge, opined within the past week (“Holy Week”) both on therelationship between the miniumum wage and the working poor (basically,none, he says) and on the relationship between cars and one’s religion/his dual lust for sinfully expensive cars and “driv[ing] fast on curvy roads (likeMalibu Canyon or Mulholland Drive)” [via Blawg Review #53].We don’t know if Steve’s Confessor is paying attention to his socially irresponsible speeding habits, but you can be darn sure a plaintiff’s p/i lawyer will be doing so, should Prof. B. ever be involved in a vehicular crash along Mulholland Drive, or any- where else.Tonight, we’re not going to psychoanalyze or sermonize over Steve’s fixationon Porshe 911’s and similar occasions of sin. But, we do want to focus on his April 11 post “Drum on the Miniumum Wage,” which had as its immediate provocation Kevin Drum‘s article at Washington Monthly, dated April 11, 2006). Volokh Conspiracy‘s Jim Lindgren immediately endorsed Steve’s position. We dissent on the facts. the law and the equities.
Prof. B. has joked that his ideas often provoke me (an acknowledged agnostic and ex-Catholic) into asking just what Jesus might think/do/drive. In his minimum wage post, he cavalierly concludes — based on a 2002 The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics Report — that:The BLS Report states that “Minimum wage workers tend to be young. Abouthalf of workers earning $5.15 or less were under age 25, and slightly more thanone-fourth were age 16-19.” It also says that about 2% of workers over 25 earnedthe minimum wage. This leads Prof. B to pontificate:“Sympathy for the working poor thus ought not to be a driver of minimum wage debates.”And, it leads me to wonder what Jesus’ Statistician would do with the samenumbers. You see:
48% of the “young workers” Steve is talking about are 20 or older.The study he uses does not tell us how many of them are heads ofhousehold or have dependent children, nor if they are in their firstjobs, as Steve suggests — nor whether they are trying to work whilestudying for a better-paying career. The “teenagers” in the BLSstudy are 16 to 19, and they make up 28% of all of the hourly-wageworkers who earn the fedeal minimum wage or less.Steve doesn’t give actual numbers of human beings, but the BLSdoes. There were 2.2 million hourly-wage Americans earning thefederal minimum of $5.15 or less in the 2002 report — with 1.6 millionof them making less than the minimum. 605,000 Americans underage 20 were making the minimum or less. Over 1.5 million workerswere over age 20. A million of those workers were over 25, and99,000 were over 65 years of age.More important, though, it seems that Prof. B’s Ivory Tower is so high (orhe’s driving so fast), he has failed to notice that:(1) Being above the minimum wage is not exactly an automaticticket out of the “working poor” category. In the BLS Report7.4 million persons were classified as “working poor” in 2003 —that means that they “spent at least 27 weeks in the labor force,”but still had “income below the official poverty threshold.” Theworking poor made up 5.3% of the American workforce.If age matters, you should know that more than seven million ofthe working poor were over 20 years old. If twenty-five is yourmagic number, then consider that 5.7 million of the working poor —77% — are 25 or older. [Table 2]If you were making the federal minimum wage in 2003,and managed to work 40 hours per week for the full52 weeks (you probably didn’t get any paid vacation),your annual income was $10,712. (by comparison,the average annual salary for all covered workersin 2002 was $36,764) [We have no figures on theaverage income of Porsche 911 drivers, but surelysomeone out there does.]According to BLS, “The actual poverty thresholds varyin accordance with the makeup of the family. In 2003,the average poverty threshold for a family of four was$18,810; . . . and for an unrelated individual aged 65 orolder, it was $8,825.”that the “only 2%!” of the workforce argument misses that“most employers – even minimum-wage employers – giveperiodic raises. A retail worker making $6 (or for that matter,$5.50 or even $5.16) an hour won’t be counted in those statistics.“Raising the minimum wage, however, would still cause an increase in those workers’ wages. . . . [A]ny employer large enough to have formal pay grades would also have to raise the next couple of pay grades above minimum to maintain a reasonable structure.As Glick concludes, there really isn’t much room for the claim that theminimum wage is irrelevant to the welfare of the working poor. Prof. B’sapproach gives Ivory Towers, and fast cars, a bad name. His massagingof the numbers to make a problem regarding the poor in America seemto disappear (or to be irrelevant to our political process) also has me won-dering about things such as Catholic Legal Theory (at least in its conser-vative political or economic manifestation) and its relationship to PopeDec. 25, 2005. That is a topic for another, imminent day.update (April 20, 2006): For our promised follow-up on Deus Caritas Est, see Catholic Conservatives Ignore Benedict on Political “Caritas” (April 19, 2006); for more on minimum wage, see our post poor steve bainbridge (April 20, 2006), where you’ll learn that Steve continues his focus on teens and the minimum wage, and keep removing Trackbacks from f/k/a on these topics.
potluck
Lawtigation? If you haven’t read Will Wilson’s post at AG Watch onLawtigation, you should click over there. Speaking of certain activityin Massachusetts, Will says:of future concerns, ex pending facto lawtigation is the next best option.Let the AG start suing and then work out laws that apply to the lawsuits.Can’t miss. Best litigation strategy ever.frontdoor today. It has all of the haiku (about 500 of them) selected for the onlineFlipping to the Index, I realized that virtually all of our Honored Guest poets arerepresented in the volume. In particular, tonight, I want to point out that there areday at the zoo —
the elephant’s shadow
in a small placewarm night —
a soda machine rejects
my coin“THNLogoF”yesterday’s snow —
the dog’s path
one wayunder us —
water that roared
in the waterfall
on every step
dead cicadas —
a day’s list of things to dogary hotham from The Heron’s Nest (Vol. VII, 2005)“Dog neg”