A Federal Pay Hike the Public Supports

John Trendler, a true conservative by his own reckoning, fumes about welfare fraud and generally frowns on government interference in the marketplace.

But when it comes to the minimum wage, the 41-year-old drug rehabilitation specialist from Philadelphia sounds a different tune. He’d like to see Congress aid the working poor by raising the federal pay minimum from $4.25 an hour. “I don’t know of anyone trying to support a family who can get by on that,” Trendler said.

Despite stiff resistance from many business lobbyists and Republican lawmakers, an increase in the federal minimum wage appears more and more likely because of an irresistible force: overwhelming public support. Recent polls show that more than three-quarters of American adults favor such a raise.

Approval cuts across all demographic lines. Even among conservative Republicans such as Trendler, 55% want to boost the standard, according to a national Times Poll last month.

“It’s striking if you’re a student of public opinion that it is so popular,” especially compared with other ways of helping the poor, said Gary Burtless, a labor economist at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington.

The main explanation is the clear symbol that raising the minimum represents. Advocates of the increase and public opinion researchers alike say that rewarding the working poor more generously for their labor appeals to the American work ethic and sense of fairness. It also dovetails with the nation’s disdain for welfare.

“Even conservatives understand that you have to set some kind of floor on wages and make work pay,” said Richard Holober, campaign manager for the Liveable Wage Coalition, a union-financed effort to put an initiative to raise California’s minimum wage on the November ballot. “In a way, it’s a very conservative approach to the war on poverty.”

Cliff Hamrick, a 48-year-old respiratory therapist from the Phoenix suburb of Glendale who calls himself a political moderate, put it another way: “The issue transcends politics. It’s a survival issue.”

The simplicity of raising the minimum is a big part of the appeal too. Whereas experts say tax credits, food stamps and other initiatives may be a more efficient way of helping the poor, those approaches are either too complicated for many Americans to grasp vividly or trigger misgivings about possible “welfare handouts” and tax break abuses.

The poor can be assisted with “much more finesse with the tax system, but then you’re raising someone’s taxes to help someone else,” said UCLA labor economist Daniel Mitchell.

Moreover, a minimum wage hike lends itself to the feeling that “I’m giving someone a pay increase and I didn’t have to pay for it,” Mitchell said.

The American public, in fact, has had an enduring love affair with minimum-wage increases.

Since the first federal minimum wage of 25 cents an hour was established in 1938, raising the standard has consistently been a popular cause, no matter the state of the economy or the political mood.

For example, when the Gallup Poll began asking people about raising the minimum wage from 30 cents to 65 cents in August 1945, the idea was favored by 56% of those surveyed. In the years since, Gallup surveyed the public on the minimum wage more than a dozen times--and every time a majority backed increasing the pay standard, ranging from a low of 59% to a high of 78%.

“It just seems perennially it’s approve, approve, approve,” said Frank Newport, editor in chief of Princeton, N.J.-based Gallup. And in a new Gallup survey taken in April and due to be released this month, support for the minimum wage appears to be “as high as ever and may be increasing,” Newport said.

That popularity apparently figured in the Clinton administration’s decision to press ahead in an election year with its once-languishing proposal to raise the minimum wage by 90 cents in two stages. The push gained momentum last month when a group of moderate Republicans rebuked their party leaders and unveiled a separate plan to raise the minimum by $1. Lawmakers say Congress could vote on the issue within a month.

To be sure, the way the question typically is posed to the public--”Would you support a raise in the minimum wage from X amount to Y amount?”--tilts the issue in a way that probably inflates the level of support.

“Increase the minimum wage? On the face of it, why not?” Newport said. “This is an example of a question that stresses the benefit, not the cost.”

Consider, for example, the minimum-wage proposition expected to land on California’s November ballot. It would raise the state’s minimum from $4.25 an hour, the same as the federal standard, to $5.75 by March 1998.

Mark Mellman, head of a Washington polling firm serving as a consultant to the coalition promoting the measure, said some of the more than three-quarters of the population who support the idea in the abstract might defect once they read ballot language containing arguments against it.

Still, Mellman said, “support has always been high, and now it’s even higher and more intense than it’s been in the past.”

In The Times’ April poll, 78% supported a raise in the minimum, up from 72% in response to a similar query in January 1995.

Mellman and other opinion researchers believe that widespread concerns about job security and stagnant wages have lifted support for the idea of an increase to historic highs. Moreover, they said, polls also suggest that two of the primary arguments raised against an increase--that it would eliminate jobs for unskilled workers who desperately need them and feed inflation--don’t sway many voters.

“McDonald’s and Burger King aren’t going to close their doors because the minimum wage goes up,” said Trendler, the drug rehabilitation specialist. Perhaps some isolated small firms would be hurt but for the most part, he said, “I don’t see where it’ll have much of an impact.”

Likewise, the argument by opponents that much of the pay raise would go to affluent teenagers rather than needy families doesn’t appear to carry much weight. Patricia Schaffer, a Michigan homemaker with five young children and another self-described conservative Republican, said she sees lots of senior citizens working at low-paying, fast-food chains.

“They deserve to be paid well,” Schaffer said. “There’s a reason they’re out there working, and it’s not because they like it. . . . Mostly it’s because they have to.”

Other voters may consider a raise in the minimum wage harmless because it seems so remote. Hamrick, the therapist from Arizona, said he earns about $35,000 a year and isn’t sure he knows of anyone who earns the minimum wage. “It’s not an issue with me,” he said.

Still, he and many other voters regard an increase as a way to wean the poor from welfare.

“Raising the minimum makes a heck of a lot of sense,” he said. “At least it promotes people working instead of not working.”

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Steady Climb

Since the U.S. minimum wage was established in 1938, it has been increased and broadened to apply to most non-management wage earners. A look at how the minimum wage has grown:

$4.25/hour: April 1, 1991

Source: Labor Department