By Tim Nesbitt
Tim Nesbitt
Let's hear it for the values that unite us, for ballot measures that work exactly as intended and for laws that make life better for our people. Raise a glass to
. Enacted as
, our minimum wage law has produced modest but meaningful raises for low-wage Oregon workers in 11 of the past 12 years, creating a platform of stability beneath a roller-coaster economy.
Measure 25 took effect on New Year's Day 2003, when it increased Oregon's minimum wage from $6.50 to $6.90 per hour and established a formula to keep pace with the cost of living thereafter. It has since generated annual raises averaging 2.6 percent. These were not business-busting increases, nor did they appear to have any detrimental impact on low-wage employment. Quite the opposite: The number of Oregon workers affected by our minimum wage increases rose from an estimated 95,000 in 2003 to 149,700 today, according to data provided by the Oregon Employment Department.
Also, after a decade of low inflation, we can dismiss the claim that minimum wage increases take back what they give to workers by unleashing a surge of consumer price increases. If anything, minimum wage increases may have countered the even more dangerous deflationary effects of the recent recession. The case can be made that a 40 percent increase in the federal minimum wage from 2007 through 2009 helped to keep the economy from the death spiral of wage-cutting and diminishing demand that characterized the Great Depression.
If there was an unintended effect of Measure 25, it was the emergence of our minimum wage as a critical safety net in an imploding job market. The increase in 2003 affected 6 percent of Oregon's workforce. Today's increase affects close to 9 percent of Oregon workers. As employers cut pay and benefits in the recession and as lower-paying jobs predominated in our slow-growth recovery, more middle-income workers found themselves tumbling into jobs in which our minimum wage became their only protection.
I was one of the architects of Measure 25, when I served as president of the Oregon AFL-CIO. Polling told us that what resonated with voters was a values message: "Oregonians who work full-time shouldn't have to live in poverty." So we debated extensively how to quantify that standard in an hourly wage rate. Eventually, we settled on an amount midway between the federal poverty level for a family of two and a family of three, with adjustments for inflation thereafter.
It has been gratifying to see these cost-of-living raises become an accepted rite of passage to the new year for low-wage workers since then and to be able to confirm, in spite of vociferous ideological arguments to the contrary, that these raises actually benefit the workers they were intended to help. (For validation of these findings on the national level, I recommend the review of studies compiled by John Schmitt for the Center for Economic and Policy Research.)
So it is not surprising that we are now hearing calls for a higher minimum wage, such as the $15 per hour favored by voters in the Washington city of SeaTac. It is tempting to try to follow suit in Oregon. But we should remember that the success of Measure 25 was built on moderation. An increase to $15 per hour might be feasible in an airport enclave where jobs are land-locked and tied to high-value businesses, but it could be counter-productive in a larger state economy where jobs are more mobile and businesses more fragile. And it probably wouldn't pass muster with our voters. (Polling told us in 2002 that voters then were wary of an increase above $7 an hour.)
Rather, if we would like to raise our glasses to a better version of Measure 25 next year, we should ask the Oregon legislature to upgrade the minimum wage benchmark to the more realistic poverty level for a family of three. That would require an additional bump of 45 cents per hour. An adjustment of that size will not achieve economic justice for all, but it will lift more Oregon families now dependent on the minimum wage out of poverty and prove, once again, that a carefully crafted public policy initiative can create an effective bulwark against adversity in an increasingly brutal private economy.