On January 1, Washington’s minimum wage rose to $8.67, the highest in the country. It’s great news for low wage earners, but according to a handful of House Republicans, it makes employers reluctant to hire unskilled and inexperienced workers. Their solution is to substantially lower the minimum wage for a vulnerable portion of the state’s workforce—the newly hired.
Representative Cary Condotta (R-12, East Wenatchee) proposes a bill that would allow Washington state employers to pay recently hired employees a training wage of 75 percent of the prevailing minimum wage, or $6.50 per hour. New hires would receive this wage for up to 680 hours—four months if working full time, quite a bit longer if working part time. Condotta and the five cosponsors (all Republicans) propose this bill to prevent “the curtailment of employment opportunities” in Washington State. Brandt Cappell, a legislative staff member for Rep. Condotta, says that it will offset the risk of hiring an inexperienced employee.
But Kathy Cummings, Communications Director for Washington State Labor Council, doesn’t agree that the minimum wage is curtailing employment. “Minimum wage earners invest all of their earnings back into the local economy,” she says. ” They aren’t buying savings deposits like higher income earners.” She says the WSLC will fight this legislation, and adds that when Washington became the first state to tie minimum wage to the cost of living, every county in the state voted in favor of it—counties these Republican legislators represent. She said, “At a time when many are struggling, they insist on paying people less for the work that they do.”
When are we going to start talking about a mandated maximum wage???
The added employment that could result from such a measure would be much less than these Republicans calculate. Many employers would simply lay off their more experienced low-wage workers in exchange for those they could pay the “training wage.” And how many of these training wage workers would be kept on the job after they worked the maximum 680 hours? I bet many of them would be out the door, on the lookout for the next “training” opportunity.
(Has it ever occurred to the Republican Party that nonsense like this will only help the Democrats in ’12?)
Why doesn’t Eastern Washington just secede so we can stop subsidizing them?
Complete bullshit!! I can tell you from experience that they will hire someone at this wage then fire them when the wage jumps. Guess what! The typical probation is six months while this wage lasts four. There’s an endless supply of employees and greed prevails.
Yes, (diety) forbid we should pay workers enough to actually live on; if they can’t make ends meet at $4.25 an hour, then either they’re lazy, siftless, goodfornothings, or else they’re too stupid to deserve a better paying job.
High minimum wages are pretty bad news, e.g.
http://www.slate.com/id/2103486/
…
I have an idea. How bout we dump our minimum wage, and then start taxing rich people instead of poor people. Deal?
Can’t wait for that super-motivated workforce to start making my food!
These are the same people who consistently argue that raising taxes of any kind during a recession is madness, because struggling families need every penny they can earn.
This would lead to cycles of hiring and firing people, only to rehire them a pay period or two later so that they can continue to pay them $6.50 an hour. This has the added bonus of discouraging unionization by keeping workers temporary. It also keeps poor people desperate and without heath insurance. Gotta love those conservative values!
How the fuck could they expect anyone to live off of $6.50 an hour in this state (on this side of the mountains)?
Watch out Seattle, here comes me and my $1040 gross a month!
Would this somehow supersede the federal minimum wage, or do these dumb fucks not know that the federal minimum wage is currently $7.25/hour?
The ones making $8.67 currently are the same ones spending >17% of it on sales taxes and the like. Guess what happens to that percentage if you make even less?
Way to try to undercut the ONLY progressive economic policy in effect in this supposedly “progressive” state.
Good luck on that wage.
Manufacturing has already turned the corner.
And WA State with its depopulating center, the dearth of immigrants since 2006 and high cost of living is probably going to experience a labor shortage more critically than the rest of the US (and the world).
@6 – Isn’t it funny how every Slate article concludes that we really need to make life even shittier for people without the luck to be paid to spew bullshit for Slate?
minimum wages promote the minimum, not the fair…
@13: Washington state is depopulating so fast compared to the rest of the country that it’s already losing -1 Congressional seats next year!
Reading that bill made me want to vomit up shit.
This bill is supposed to “prevent curtailment of employment opportunities” by lowering the minimum wage. And it stops this “job killing minimum wage” we’re lucky to have in WA by relegating 10% of small business employees to poverty level wages. That makes so much sense! Because if the poorest guy working at the shop can just get paid a little bit less, then the business can afford to… to do what exactly? That’s not enough savings to hire new people except in the 40 to 49 employee range.
As someone opposed to government-set price controls in principle, and specifically opposed to the minimum wage (it’s an unfunded mandate on business… I’d rather we just raise taxes and offer tax credits [negative taxation] for the working poor who need them), this proposal doesn’t bother me much. I don’t see a reason that part-time and full-time should have different ‘training periods’, however.
In the long run, though, minimum wages do little good or bad. Wages and prices adjust relatively quickly. It may increase the wages of one sector of society while eliminating a few jobs from others, but in the end it’s about a wash.
i really wish i could understand WHAT THE FUCK THESE ASSHOLES think when they look in the mirror at night. How can they sleep? In their world it’s perfectly reasonable for a CEO to make 350% more than the average worker and rake in billions of dollars of bonuses, but we can’t have people making $8.67 an hour. We have a recession, with unprecedented unemployment rates, but let’s make it harder and harder for anyone to make anything near a living wage. Let’s gut social services, state and federal funded community programs, arts, educations, humanities, title 9, public transportation, green energy, environmental protection/climate control, etc. etc. etc. ad infinatum. This kind of shit makes me insane.
Madcap it’s fine if you don’t care for minimum wages, that’s fine, but your comments show that you don’t know the reality of working a minimum wage job. Part time and full time would have different training periods because these things are based on HOURS worked, not weeks or months. And just like how so many companies use constant streams of temporary employees – whom they do not have to pay benefits – instead of hiring people outright – they’ll simply hire people at the training wage and deal with higher turnover to keep payroll down.
And no, wages and prices do not adjust relatively quickly. I worked at Borders Books and Music in the World Trade Center in 1996 and the starting wage there was $6.50 and raises were done in cents. Any idea what prices are like in NYC? I worked at Barnes and Noble in downtown Seattle in 2002 and their wage was $7.50 an hour. Looking at rents in Seattle (Capitol Hill, Ballard, Queen Anne) do you think people can pay rent in Seattle and afford to do anything else making $7.50 an hour. So maybe you’ll understand the point – since you need a more professional example – the median income in Seattle is about $61.000 a year while the median cost of home is half a million dollars. Wages and prices don’t just “even out.” and the working poor get fucked over more than anyone else – especially in a city like Seattle where all taxes are regressive and disproportionately fall on the backs of the poor (i.e. sales tax).
One other point is that service industry people in Seattle actually have a chance at making a living wage BECAUSE they make a higher minimum wage PLUS their tips. In states like RI, where my sister works, she makes $2.85 an hour bar tending and serving.
The entire concept of everything evening out and ending up as a wash is complete bullshit. Everything that has happened since GWB ran the country, fiscally, into the ground, and we spend billions of dollars of taxpayer money bailing out the banking industry – and all of the profits banks are posting now, while people have been unemployed for years and people are losing their homes, still, to foreclosures is a big, huge example in your face. TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS DOESN’T WORK. IT DIDN’T WORK IN THE 80s and IT DOESN’T WORK NOW.
The problem with that @18, is that the working poor then have to wait more than a year to reap any benefit, because they don’t get the extra income until they get their tax refund some 5 to 18 months AFTER they’ve earned the income, which, due to inflation, is subsequently worth less than if you’d just given them the few extra cent an hour in their paycheck to begin with.
@16,
Get your facts straight. We gained a seat.
@21- get your math straight. If you subtract -1, it’s like adding positive one. @16 was sarcastic, and correct.
@21,
Engage your sarcasm detector and engage your math skills–subtracting a negative number is…addition.
Um — why is The Stranger not required to pay you the WA state minimum wage?
@11, jobs that are covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act must pay at least the federal minimum wage. Jobs that aren’t covered by the act (they call it exempt) can actually pay less. Some states have minimum wages that are lower than the federal standard (and some have no minimum wage at all!). Anyone who wants to fuck with Washington’s minimum wage law should be deported to Mississippi as far as I’m concerned.
First we borrow so much money that it’ll take two generations to pay off. Then we cut the wages to the people who’ll have to pay it off.
Our slide to the bottom would be less hilarious without these clowns to blame for the absolute stupidity that’s causing it. Time to require a mandatory B grade in a rigorous course in the last century of Rome from all political candidates.
Republicans: the fucking assholes giving themselves pay raises while thinking that the rest of us are making too much money.
Agree with Fritz (#24 above). Thanks for your insight, but The Stranger should show their thanks too. Lowering the minimum wage is bad enough. Slave labor is worse.
Most minimum wage jobs are, by definition, those that require the least skill, so a 4 month training period is a canard. McDonald’s for example, structures each job skill, cooking, running the register, and etc, so that each function can be learned in one day. This is not to say that every minimum wage job is like that, a good bartender or wait-person needs a high level of skill but they are not really minimum wage because they earn tips. No one tips a convenience store clerk.
JVM @6, SoSea@24
Did you actually read and digest the Slate article? It suggested that the studies showing higher minimum wages were a job killer were an aberration. If higher minimum wages kill jobs why has WA had higher job growth than the rest of the country since we raised ours and pegged it to the CPI?
@24
read-up on your internship laws. They’re beeing paid in other services, such as college credits.
I doubt any of you trust fund “regressives” have ever met someone who works for minimum wage or a Republican. Now, back to your socialist workers of the world meeting.