N.Y. Minimum Wage Boost Gaining Support

Rafael Turan learned a hard economic lesson when he came to New York City from Mexico five years ago: Employers were happy to give him work as a dishwasher, but at an hourly rate of pay so low he could not possibly support his family.

And that was even if his bosses were willing to pay the $5.15 hourly minimum wage required by law. If he worked full time at that rate, he would earn $206 a week.

“How can you pay rent here when wages are so small?” he asked after speaking at a rally earlier this month to urge support for an increase in New York’s minimum wage to $7.10 an hour. “People raise rents and they raise subway fares. When do they raise wages?”

At a time when New York is suffering an economic downturn -- with rising unemployment, factories closing upstate and thousands of young people leaving the region for better jobs elsewhere -- a battle to raise the state’s minimum wage has been gathering strength among labor leaders, activists, politicians and clergy members.

Many think that it is unconscionable that an affluent state like New York offers residents the same minimum salary as Arkansas, West Virginia and other poorer states.

People working full time at the minimum wage gross $10,712 annually. And many of these employees -- like clerks, gas station attendants, security guards and dishwashers -- live below the poverty line, according to federal statistics. An estimated 10 million to 12 million people nationwide earn this wage.

“We believe poverty destroys more lives than war,” said James Forbes, senior pastor at Riverside Church in Manhattan, which hosted this month’s rally. “So this question of the minimum wage is as much a moral issue as an economic one.”

Efforts to raise basic pay in the Empire State have failed for five straight years, but some proponents think that the pressures of an election year and anxiety over the economy have increased the potency of such “safety net” issues.

On March 1, the Democrat-controlled state Assembly passed a bill to increase the wage to $7.10 an hour by 2006.

Attention now is focused on the Republican-run state Senate, where there appears to be enough support for passage. Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno has previously blocked the measure from coming to a full vote, and it was not clear whether he would do so this year. If he does permit action, it will probably not be until June, when New York approves its budget.

The proposed increase would apply to nearly 700,000 New Yorkers who earn less than $7 an hour, according to an economic study of the minimum wage issue by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank based in Albany and New York City.

Of those New York workers affected, more than 70% are adults, including a large number of immigrants and single working parents, the study found. Many now earn salaries below the federal poverty level, which is $18,400 for a family of four.

“I don’t know how she keeps things together,” said Erica Betit, referring to her sister, Rachel, who works 10 to 12 hours a day as a clerk for $6.82 an hour at a chain store in Troy, near Albany. “I help her with child care, but she still needs food stamps for her family. She’s trying to raise three young children.”

States are free to set minimum wages higher than the federal government’s $5.15 rate, which has not been raised since 1997. Twelve states and the District of Columbia have done so, including California ($6.75) and several states bordering New York, like Connecticut ($7.10), Massachusetts ($6.75) and Vermont ($6.75).

“Sometimes an issue comes to a head and people finally decide to do something about it,” said Mario Cilento, spokesman for the New York AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest state labor federation, which is lobbying for the increase. “The outcome is still not clear, but this year there is a sense of movement.”

A key change, Cilento noted, is that more Republicans are speaking up in favor of a wage increase.

Critics of an increase argue that it will hurt the people it is designed to help. They think that employers who are forced to pay higher wages would simply lay off more workers. Moreover, critics say, many low-income workers get other public benefits -- ranging from tax credits to food stamps -- that put additional money in their pockets.

“The fact is that when the minimum wage goes up, jobs disappear,” the New York Post said in an editorial this month. “Harsh, yes. So’s life.”

As the debate grows in Albany, some advocates think that it may become a potent issue for members in each party, not only in New York but also in other states.

In Wisconsin, legislators are debating a minimum wage hike to $6.50 an hour.

“This is an issue Republicans can embrace,” said Dan Cantor, executive director of New York’s Working Families Party, which is spearheading the fight in New York for a higher minimum wage. “We’re not raising taxes. This is all about wages, not public benefits.”

Even if a bill were to pass, Gov. George E. Pataki could veto it. He, like Bruno, has long opposed New York raising the minimum wage on its own, saying the federal government should take the lead in hiking the $5.15 hourly wage.

So far, however, there is little indication of that happening. Asked if President Bush favored or opposed legislation that would raise the federal wage, a White House spokesman, Ken Lisaius, said: “The president will continue to work with members of both parties on matters pertaining to the federal minimum wage.”

Small-business owners and farmers have traditionally formed the core of the opposition to raising New York’s minimum wage, and this year’s battle is no different.

“I think the pressure to do this is a classic case of politicians cut off from the real world, the real economy out there,” said Mark Alesse, who heads the New York chapter of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, the nation’s largest small-business advocacy group. “I can’t think of a worse thing for us to do here economically.”

Many New York businesses are already losing jobs to other states, he said, and the simple arithmetic of raising the state’s minimum wage speaks for itself.

“If I have a bakery with 10 employees, raising the wage could cause me to add some $45,000 in payroll costs, not to mention workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance, and my response would be to lay people off,” he said. “Why on earth would government promote such a self-destructive jobs policy?”

This argument has been persuasive for many years, but it has increasingly come under fire from economic experts.

In their 1995 book, “Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage,” economists David Card and Alan B. Krueger examined the impact of raising the minimum wage in California, New Jersey and other states, and found no statistical evidence that doing so cut the number of jobs.

“When New Jersey increased its minimum wage to more than $5 per hour in early 1992,” they wrote, “we found that the increase ... seemed to occur with no loss in employment -- even among fast-food restaurants, which many observers view as the quintessential minimum-wage employers.”

Turan, the dishwasher, said people who earned the minimum wage would remain trapped in poverty as long as state minimum wage rates remained low. He would like to graduate from college someday, but doubts that his long hours and low wages will ever allow that.

“I don’t have a future unless I earn more money,” he said. “When will that happen?”