2015/04/16 – Mississippi residents converged on Jackson this month to push for a $15 minimum hourly wage and union representation for fast-food and other low-wage workers.  The movement arrived on the heels of McDonald’s executives announcing a pay increase for workers at its company-owned stores. That pay raise, however, does not extend to franchise stores, which comprise a majority of McDonald’s restaurants.

The Mississippi Alliance of State Employees Local 3570 and Communications Workers of America union is backing the “Fight for $15” campaign, with national support rolling in from the Service Employees International Union.  Organizers say the movement, which includes airport workers, home care workers and adjunct professors, among many others, targeted more than 230 cities and college campuses across the nation.

Multiply the figure indicated above by 1,000 and you’ve got over 1.7 million people in the U.S. in 2012 who were most likely beyond their college years and working a minimum-wage job.  With the average age of a first-time parent in the U.S. being 25, there is a reasonable chance of any number of those 1.7 million individuals having kids and qualifying for a “Head of Household” classification.  However, their squalid pay keeps that title from becoming official because they are forced to take their kids and move in with Grandma.

Making matters worse is the apparent decades-long expansion of minimum-wage jobs over middle-income administrative and manufacturing jobs.  According to a recent MIT study, more and more jobs are turning into Walmart-style jobs as low-standard service positions replace higher-paying industry jobs that once formed the basis of the nation’s middle class.

A report co-authored by MIT economist David Autor and economist David Dorn reveals that workers in many types of middle-rank positions, including skilled production-line workers and people in clerical or administrative jobs, have been pushed out of their jobs and forced into food-service, sales, and child-care industries, among other things.  According to MIT, the service sector grew by 30 percent between 1980 and 2005.  In fact, service occupations comprised 9.9 percent of labor hours in 1980, but today occupy 12.9 percent of labor hours, while better-paid industrial positions, like machine operators and assemblers, shrank from 9.9 percent of U.S. labor hours in 1980 to 4.6 percent in 2005.

Harsh economic realities like this are apparently working the wage-hike debate into a fury.  Hours after speaking with the MSNAACP, Cain was arrested by Jackson police officers on charges of misdemeanor trespassing, allegedly for allowing protestors to step directly onto company property at the Highway 80 restaurant.

Kimar Cain, community organizer for the Fight for 15 campaign in Jackson, joined Delta residents for a small demonstration at Tougaloo College before moving on to a bigger demonstration at a local McDonald’s on Hwy 80.

“Most of these people with me today have been working these kinds of low-wage jobs for more than 10 years, so we’re looking to get the minimum wage raised so people can finally take care of themselves and their families,” Cain told the MSNAACP.  “Inadequate pay is messing with their livelihood.”

Conservative lawmakers argue that increasing the minimum wage would lead to massive inflation.  U.S. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and Republi­can presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio argued that increasing the minimum wage would automatically lead to a rise in prices.  A National Bureau of Economic Research report found, how­ever, that a minimum wage increase in Texas had virtually no impact upon food costs in that state.

The National Employment Law Project reported in 2012 that 66 percent of low-wage workers are employed by large corporations with more than 100 workers, rather than small businesses, and that executive pay for these corporations averaged $9.4 million.  These same firms, NELP stated, also have “returned $174.8 billion to shareholders in dividends or share buybacks over the past five years.”  In other words: they’ll likely weather a wage increase.

“These people have earned that $15,” Cain said.  “I know a worker working on Highway 80 right now who busts his butt from 4 in the morning to 1 that afternoon, getting up early enough to walk from Clinton to Highway 80.  That’s a three-mile trip every morning.  That $15 could help him get a vehicle so he wouldn’t already be tired once he gets to work.  Meanwhile, that CEO is probably sitting back enjoying a vacation somewhere else – probably not even paying attention to the paperwork because that’s what the management is for.”

Cain added that there was no way any CEO works 270 times as hard as a minimum-wage worker to justify getting paid 270 times as much.

The Mississippi NAACP argues that many minimum-wage earners would normally count as “heads of households” if their finances did not force them to take their children and move in with relatives.  Note the number on the chart below indicating minimum-wage earners 25 years of age or older.

Source: MS NAACP