The price for unskilled labor just went up again in Washington State yesterday. $7.93 cents is the new minimum wage a Washington State employer has to pay a newly hired employee, even if they are illiterate and/or cannot speak English.
Businesses on the eastern border of the state are getting a little antsy in the pantsy.
James Randall lives in Moscow and goes to school at the University of Idaho. But for 30 hours a week, he crosses the border to work as a pizza delivery driver in Pullman, Wash.
That’s because Washington’s minimum wage is more than $2 higher than Idaho’s $5.15. And it just went up again Monday, from $7.63 to $7.93.
It applies to workers in both agriculture and nonagricultural jobs, according to the Washington state Department of Labor and Industries. And it’s recalculated each year for workers age 16 and older, based on cost-of-living increases, and is expected to reach $8.14 by 2009.
“It’s kinda hard to make ends meet,” Randall said. “I’m just glad the state of Washington has tied the minimum (wage) to inflation. That way it’s advantageous to everyone.”
Everyone with a lack of job skills, that is.
Maybe not everyone. Some businesses in Pullman say the steadily increasing minimum wage in Washington starts to make that Idaho border look a little more tempting.
“You’d like the wage to support families, but it’s also difficult for a border town,” said Pullman Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Fritz Hughes. “It’s a double-edged sword. It’s good for some folks, and on the other side, it’s difficult for some small business.”
So here we will go again, with another round of the Dems telling us that “The People” will pay more for so that employees can earn “A Living Wage” and that economic development doesn’t flounder and businesses don’t cut back on their numbers of employees under higher costs of labor.
But, of course, they’ll be lying through their teeth.
Hughes said he think the higher wage has put a damper on development on Pullman. The higher minimum wages translate into higher prices, he says — which can be tough, when there’s a town with lower prices less than 10 miles away.
Lori Meyer, who owns Simply Tanning and Nails Spa in Pullman, said she doesn’t mind paying her seven employees an extra 30 cents per hour, but if wages hit $9.50, she’s going to have to cut back and raise prices.
“As a small business, it’s going to catch up to me eventually,” she said. “If it keeps going up, I’ll have to even it out somehow.”
And the real world pops the statist’s vision of the worker’s utopia.
A small anecdote on the effects of a higher minimum wage:
Every military post of adequate size has a Burger King. Since they’re on federal property, they don’t pay property taxes, and they don’t have to collect sales tax. So their overhead is pretty much constant (if anything, overhead for the Ft Lewis BK should be slightly lower than in SC, because there’s no need to run A/C 9 months of the year.) The only major variable in determining their prices is how much they have to pay their workers.
One of the first things that I noticed when I came back to Ft Lewis, WA, from Ft Jackson, SC, is that all the combo meals cost $.50 more here than in SC. Because in SC, minimum wage is $5.15.
Businesses will find a way to adapt but the people that are the most hurt by the minimum wage (the so called “living wage”) are the entry level, teenagers with no job skills. BK will find a way to squeeze a little more productivity out of its burger making, raising prices as much as the market will bear, etc. A mandated minimum wage is a joke.