Sen. Patty Murray doesn’t want to be behind Wal-Mart in establishing higher minimum wage

Taken from The David Boze Show on AM 770 KTTH.

Senator Patty Murray is prodding Senate Democrats to push for a $12 minimum wage nationally, according to a report from Seattlepi.com.

A $12 minimum wage would be more than the $10.10 plan that was put forward by president Obama, and a big increase from the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

What I love about this is you have someone in Washington state that is trying to create a blanket $12 minimum wage across the country when you can see the employment rates and the poverty levels vary pretty wildly across the U.S. Different areas have different challenges. Detroit has challenges that are vastly different than say Seattle has. Louisiana has challenges that Oregon doesn’t have. But they want this one size fits all approach.

One of the things Murray said in the report is “We don’t want Wal-Mart ahead of us.”

Wal-Mart, you’ll recall, announced that it’s hiking its minimum pay to $9 in April and $10 an hour a year from now.

Now they’re congratulating themselves on that, but it’s part of what the market does. Other competitors are coming along, they’re taking your best workers and you recognize that, then you increase the wage in order to retain the right people for the job.

If you underpay them, they’ll end up going somewhere else. They’ll work for Target or someone else who might be willing to pay them more. Target is increasing its minimum wage now because it sees what Wal-Mart is doing and it wants to stay competitive.

It’s the kind of thing where when government sees what is happening without them, all of a sudden they say we must get involved and go beyond what they’re doing. Even though it’s clearly proving that it’s not like companies are sitting along, Dr. Evil-style, with a committee trying to figure out how to keep wages low to force people into serfdom. What they’re looking at is what the market will bear.

They’re trying to figure out what the appropriate rate of pay will be, without government, without mandates, without some kind of legal pressure. You have businesses that are reacting to changing conditions in the marketplace and increasing the minimum wage, which is exactly what conservatives have described should happen and will happen with the minimum wage.

What I found ironic and tragic about this was that on the Drudge Report this week there was a big story featured about machines taking over nearly half of jobs over the next 20 years, jobs from truckers to stocking store shelves.

I thought well here we have on the front page of the aggregate news site most viewed by Americans this story about how robots and automation is going to take over a whole lot of jobs. Then we have this effort to make labor more and more expensive beyond what the market is indicating but instead going by what the government wishes. That, of course, would increase the movement toward the day where those human jobs will be taken over by something else. They’re making it even more challenging for people to get into the workforce.

Taken from The David Boze Show on AM 770 KTTH.

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