D.C. Council approves ‘living wage’ bill over Wal-Mart ultimatum

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-council-approves-living-wage-bill-over-wal-mart-ultimatum/2013/07/10/724aab6e-e96f-11e2-a301-ea5a8116d211_story.html

by thejteam • 13 years ago

22 55 13 years ago

washingtonpost.com

autodidakto• 13 years ago

Why stop at living wage? Everyone deserves to be comfortable, no? They should pass a 'comfortable wage' bill. Heck, it should be illegal to work for anything less than $50 an hour. What we need is politicians with the leadership necessary to outlaw poverty.

dnautics2• 13 years ago

not only that, but only some employers have to pay their workers this wage. We get to pick and choose which ones must comply.

theboss• 13 years ago

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic (it's the internet)...

I'm not economist but how would this work...? It seems like an awful idea

lolwutf• 13 years ago

Hopefully you're being sarcastic?

If not, my response to that there should never be a 'comfortable wage'. Everyone needs that crappy job they hate - dishwasher, ditch digger - that pays nothing in order to motivate them to get out of said situation.

We all (most of us) worked that crappy job when we were younger, and hated it, and one of many reasons I stay motivated to provide value now is, well, because I don't want to be a dishwasher.

That's the beauty of The Market.

kaonashi• 13 years ago

What an incredibly privileged and myopic viewpoint. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.

johnrob2• 13 years ago

No matter where you are in life, there's always something a lot worse and something a lot better. I can imagine jobs much worse than washing dishes and much better than making 6 figures sitting in an office chair.

Fargren3• 13 years ago

That's disgusting. We should make sure people have the chance to suffer because suffering makes us better people? That's moralistic crap. If we have the resources to diminish suffering without causing harm, it is wrong not to do it. If all work could be automated, it would be wrong to have people who don't want to work working.

I think there is a reason for not having a mandatory comfortable wage; some people would simply not find jobs if we raised the minimum wage to a point were it becomes unprofitable to pay it. But that's the only reason for paying less. Not some BS sanctity of hard work thing.

footoverhand• 13 years ago

If 40 hours working at minimum wage is not enough to live on, shouldn't the minimum wage be raised?

Zikes• 13 years ago

Clearly there's a difference between minimum wage and living wage. What that difference is exactly eludes me, however.

codva• 13 years ago

According to this living wage calculator http://livingwage.mit.edu/, the living wage for a family of 4 where I live (suburbs of DC) is about $50K. That sounds like a lot, but actually living here there is no way we could survive on that. They only calculate $464 a month for medical for a family of 4. I'm lucky in that my wife has ridiculous health insurance through her job. When we didn't have that our share of the premium was more than that, let alone copays, OTC drugs, etc. Also, the living wage calculation does not account for clothes, school, or about 50 other things that would come up in a family with kids.

Minimum of course, is $7.25.

drcode11• 13 years ago

Why are people so eager to make it harder for poor people to get jobs by forcing price controls onto employers?

footoverhand: I want as many people to be able to work as possible. If you think it is too hard for people to live on the salaries that are available at their skill level, then by all means we can talk about improving the social safety net... but forcing companies to lay off people to maintain their salary budgets through salary controls is NOT a good way to help poor people.

bostonpete• 13 years ago

I don't necessarily agree, but couldn't this same rationale be used to argue against any minimum wage whatsoever?

thejteam3• 13 years ago

Depends. Should minimum wage be what it takes a single parent with two kids to live on or should it be what a college student looking for beer money needs to live on?

nsxwolf3• 13 years ago

I think we should have a maximum wage for software engineers... say, $50,000 a year... and have startups in the Valley pay the difference into a fund to augment the wages of Walmart employees.

EDIT: Oh, no one here likes this idea? Imagine that!

binarymax• 13 years ago

I like to think of governments as old software programs. When they are first built, they are built with enthusiasm and passion to create the next new shiny thing. After a couple hundred years, they evolve into a giant pile of organic hacks for features to satisfy their users, and changes to fix existing bugs just result in regression. This is one of those patches, and it will regress.

txttran2• 13 years ago

Why is this targeted at large retailers? If the DC minimum wage is insufficient for "living", shouldn't it be raised, instead of a somewhat arbitrary law forcing only retailers to raise their wages?

dnautics2• 13 years ago

oh, it's horrible. When I lived in the DC area, I used to volunteer for this organization: http://www.foodforalldc.org/wp/ - and I delivered food to the worst parts of the city, where people are very much unemployed and living off of far less of an income than the minimum wage. This law does nothing to help them, whatsoever.

I have no particular love for walmart besides their knack for being good at delivering things efficiently (their aggressive use of eminent domain makes me angry). But laws should be fair and applied equitably. What this law is - is nothing but political posturing, demagoguery masked in the language of helping the less well off. I wonder, do the DC council members actually lift a hand to help out the people they say they care about, when a camera's not rolling?

lettergram4• 13 years ago

I feel like I read this somewhere before... Pretty sure it was Atlas Shrugged, not the best literary work, but paints a pretty clear picture of a world where people get money they don't earn.

mkr-hn• 13 years ago

It's a good thing we don't make policy based on ideological literature. That rarely ends well.

lettergram4• 13 years ago

Yeah, like something by Thomas More or Carl Marx..

johnrob2• 13 years ago

For all of its critique, Atlas Shrugged surprisingly seems to predict where our government is headed.

lettergram4• 13 years ago

I've posted something twice citing that book and it always gets down voted, on the other hand when I state some of the ideology of the book it gets up voted (strange). Just thought i'd share.

Also, I agree it's where the government is heading. People need to learn that life is what they make it, not what is handed to them.

JunkDNA• 13 years ago

This article almost willfully leaves out a pretty crucial detail: the living wage only applies to businesses that have non-union employees. So let's be clear what this is: it's an effort to give union-run stores a labor advantage and protect them from non-union competition. Safeway and Giant foods don't have to worry about competing with WalMart or Target's rock-bottom prices[1]

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732439940457858...

thejteam3• 13 years ago

I had no idea union stores were exempt. And unless Safeway and Giant have upped their wages recently they pay quite a bit less than 12.50 an hour for new employees.

stephengillie2• 13 years ago

Safeway and Giant (and Kroger and Supervalu etc) are forced by the UFCW to pay high wages ($18/hour in Seattle), and fully fund medical insurance for every employee working more than 20 hours per month.

As a system admin, it's taken me 6 years after college to get back to the wage I made as a grocery store checker.

thejteam3• 13 years ago

The west coast stores and east coast stores must have different unions. When I worked at non-union Kmart I made more per hour than I could have made at union Safeway (east coast).

dccoolgai2• 13 years ago

The article may not have mentioned it, but the fact that there is a recognition of unions in there is not necessarily a bad thing... Those "rock-bottom prices" are just system-gaming - the real extra cost of the goods is hidden and distributed across the communities in which they operate (in the form of reduced living conditions, health care, quality of life, etc.) - all things that unions exist to protect... What is so fundamentally wrong about a community saying "no - it's not OK to try and distribute tat burden to the backs of our citizens"?

pessimizer• 13 years ago

I like the idea of the state stepping in as the union of last resort. Thanks for the detail.

imgabe4• 13 years ago

This is smart and it's just DC protecting itself. When the full-time (actually 39 hour/week, so they don't get health insurance) Wal-Mart employee making $8.25/hour still needs food stamps to live, who do you think gets stuck with the bill for that? The DC government does.

drcode11• 13 years ago

Fantasic! Now these potential Wal-Mart employees are back to making $0.00/hour. Oh, and they have to pay more for their groceries now, too.

Congratulations on a job well done, DC Council!

imgabe4• 13 years ago

Assuming Wal-Mart actually sticks to its ultimatum.

If one of the most successful businesses in history can't find a way to turn a profit in one of the most populous, affluent areas in the country while paying employees enough to live in the same area, then maybe they shouldn't be in business after all. Like the article says, Wal-Mart needs DC. DC doesn't need Wal-Mart.

CostCo has no problems here and they pay around $15/hour.

dccoolgai2• 13 years ago

DC has enough people to create a market for retailers. It is not a question of if someone sells things, but whom. The idea that if these Wal-Marts don't move in, these people won't have jobs is a fallacy: They'll just have jobs working for a more responsible employer. As a resident of D.C., I'm happy with what the council has done here.

keithpeter• 13 years ago

Thankyou for this comment.

We have just this problem in the UK (minimum adult wage around £6.20/h and 'liveable' wage put at £8.55/h by a pressure group with wide support [1].

The difference is funded through the benefit system (we have no truck with food stamps).

[1] http://www.livingwage.org.uk/

nsxwolf3• 13 years ago

There's no free lunch. The people who now won't be able to get a job will still need the food stamps to live, as well as additional government services to compensate.

_delirium• 13 years ago

There isn't any evidence that modest increases in the minimum wage increase unemployment. It's purely an article of theoretical faith that doesn't stand up empirically.

tzs• 13 years ago

If a full time job doesn't pay enough for people to live on, then they will make up the difference with government assistance (e.g., my tax money).

I'd rather see them go on full government assistance, so they can spend full time looking for a job that DOES pay enough to live on. That costs more up front, but should cost less in the long run, and since I expect to be paying taxes for a long time I care more about the long run.

D.C. Council approves ‘living wage’ bill over Wal-Mart ultimatum

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