Minimum Wage Hits $9.50 in Santa Fe

[MtnBiker]

Minimum Wage Hits $9.50 in Santa Fe
January 26th, 2006

This month, in the liberal bastion of Santa Fe, New Mexico, they are raising the minimum wage in the city to $9.50 per hour. The measure applies to all businesses with 25 or more employees.

The driving force behind this decision was Acorn, the “national community organization,” as Jon Gertner describes it in The New York Times Magazine for January 15, 2006.

Acorn has discovered that the way to win on the minimum wage issue is to cast it not as an economic issue but as a moral issue. When Santa Fe’s City Council got a round table of nine residents to “settle the specifics of the proposed living-wage law” they found that

“What really got the other side was when we said, ‘It’s just immoral to pay people $5.15, they can’t live on that.”

On February 26, 2003, the council voted to “set a wage floor at $8.50 an hour,” increasing to $9.50 in January 2006 and $10.50 in 2008 for businesses employing 25 or more people.

So liberals believe in legislating morality after all. They just draw the line at other people legislating morality.

Jen Kern isn’t just any old activist for Acorn. In a 2002 Christian Science Monitor article she’s identified as “executive director of the Living Wage Resource Center for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).”

“ACORN is a grassroots political organization that grew out of George Wiley’s National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO),” according to Discover the Networks.

“Today it claims 175,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 850 chapters in 70 U.S. cities.”

It runs schools to teach children its philosophy of class warfare. Its finances are rather murky, but it is believed to get a lot of money from labor unions to fund Jan Kern’s living wage program. In return, it usually manages to exempt union members from the minimum wage laws that it sponsors, and in 1995 sued in California to have its own employees exempted from California’s minimum wage laws. And, of course, in the 2004 election cycle ACORN’s

“get-out-the-vote activists turned up at the center of numerous reports of voter fraud, especially in the swing states of Ohio, Colorado, Missouri Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Minnesota.”

The problem with minimum-wage laws, as ACORN lawyers argued in their brief in California state courts, is that

“the more that ACORN must pay each individual outreach worker, . . . the fewer outreach workers it will be able to hire.”

Economists have done a pretty thorough job analyzing the phenomenon too, and they agree with ACORN. Writes Thomas Sowell, economist:

[M]inimum wage laws in countries around the world protect higher-paid workers from the competition of lower paid workers… the net economic effect of minimum wage laws is to make less skilled, less experienced, or otherwise less desired workers more expensive—thereby pricing many of them out of jobs.

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It will be interesting to watch how this effects the labor market in Santa Fe in future years.