A Republican U.S. Congressman thinks minimum wage is only for minorities and teenagers.
Appearing on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal Thursday morning, Congressman Tom McClintock was asked abut the minimum wage.
Told that Mitt Romney, who says he wants to run for president again, wants to raise the minimum wage, Rep. McClintock responded negatively. You should only raise the minimum wage, he said, “if you want to rip the first rung in the ladder of opportunity for teenagers, for minorities, for people who are trying to get into the job market for their first job.”
It’s unclear why the Congressman from California thinks “minorities” should be earning less than their white peers, but that was his statement. Does that include “minorities” with an MBA? What about “minorities” like his colleagues, say, Reps. Cory Booker, Yvette Clarke, Emanuel Cleaver, James Clyburn, John Conyers, Elijah Cummings, Keith Ellison or Sheila Jackson Lee?
If companies are forced to pay workers at least $10.10 an hour – what many want the minimum wage to be raised to – these people will be, he says “permanently unemployable.”
“If your labor is an unskilled person just entering the workforce is worth say $7 an hour at a job and the minimum wage is $10, you have just been made permanently unemployable,” McClintock said. “That first rung of the economic ladder has been ripped out and you can’t get on it. That is a tragedy,” he insisted.
“The minimum wage is that first job when you have no skills, no experience, no working history,” he said. “That’s how you get into the job market, that’s how you develop that experience, develop that work record, get your first raise, then your next raise, then your promotion.”
Of course, for untold millions, there is no first raise, then next raise, then promotion. There’s just minimum wage, for the life of your job.
And in the real world, minimum wage workers are not just the people Rep. McClintock thinks they are.
Today, 3.3 million people work for minimum wage (or less). Only one in four (24%) are teenagers – 19 years old or less. Three out of four are aged 20 years or older.
As to Rep. McClintock’s claim that the minimum wage is for “minorities,” more than three out of four (77%) minimum wage workers are white. Almost half are white women.
Rep. McClintock also is under the very false impression that the minimum wage is “not supposed to support a family.”
“The minimum wage doesn’t support a family. We all know that. It’s not supposed to support a family.”
Except, it is “supposed to support a family.”
In 1968, according to the U.S. Dept. of Labor, a “full-time minimum wage worker could support a family of three.” Today, in many parts of the nation, it’s not enough to support one person.
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Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr
Hat tip: Raw Story
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