From the Columbus Dispatch: Employers upset with increase in legal wage
DAYTON — The $3.59 Black Raspberry Cow Shake at Young’s Jersey Dairy in southwestern Ohio soon will cost a dime more. And two eggs and fixings at Granny Shaffer’s Family Restaurant in Joplin, Mo., will set diners back $6.60 instead of the $6 they now pay.
The price increases are coming to cover the minimum-wage raises mandated by voters in Ohio and Missouri in Tuesday’s elections. Four other states — Colorado, Arizona, Montana and Nevada — also approved increases in the minimum wage.
Restaurants and other businesses that employ minimum wage workers say the new mandate will squeeze their paperthin profits and result in layoffs and suffocating paperwork requirements. The workers say it will put desperately needed cash in their pockets.
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But Michael Wiggins, owner of Granny Shaffer’s in Missouri, plans to lay off two 15-year-old workers.
"They’re good kids. They’re hard workers," Wiggins said. "But I really can’t afford to do that. If I’m going to pay $6.50, I’m going to get someone with more of a skill level."
In Ohio, restaurants employ nearly 600,000 workers. The Ohio Council of Retail Merchants expects the new law to result in the loss of 12,000 restaurant and other jobs in 2007.
Young’s Dairy, a restaurant/ ice cream store near the southwestern Ohio village of Yellow Springs, employs about 300 workers in the summer, many of them high-school and college students who work part-time.
Co-owner Dan Young said he plans to hire fewer workers because the new law will require him to pay some of them as much as 62 percent more. He said he will have to raise prices and put more work on what will be a smaller pool of employees.
"It’s not a good thing," he said.
The median household income for minimum wage earners is $40,000 a year. About 15% of people making the minimum wage live in households below the poverty level. While the increase will improve wages for some workers, it will eliminate thousands of other jobs. Employers who take chances on unskilled workers with no or minimal experience will stop hiring them in favor of hiring other workers who are worth the wage they are forced to pay. The impact is disproportionately harmful to poor people. The first rung on the economic ladder has just been raised a couple of notches higher. In my estimation, these "social justice" measures might as well be called the "Poverty Enforcement" acts.
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