There are moments when politicians just take your breath away.
And so it was when Chris Donovan, the House speaker and aspirant for a seat in Congress, fronted labor’s initial volley in the recurring ritual that has become the debate over the minimum wage.
Let’s start with the simple facts: The federal minimum wage is set at $7.25 an hour and Connecticut’s minimum wage is $8.25. Among our neighbors, New York and New Jersey follow the feds at $7.25 and Massachusetts is at $8.
Rather than recognize that Connecticut is already working at a competitive disadvantage, Donovan and friends pulled out the violin and made the accurate but useless case that Connecticut is a high-cost-of-living state and that a single wage earner can’t support a family on the minimum wage. Could it be that one of the factors in the high cost of living is the extra $1 an hour that has to be folded into the cost of everything sold here?
Blowing past that kind of thinking, Donovan, et al, argue that boosting the minimum wage 75 cents an hour now — and another 75 cents next year — is ‘fair.’ Then they add that building in an automatic cost of living increase is a good idea.
Apparently, news of the so-called ‘new reality’ hasn’t penetrated the Democratic caucus room. We’ve seen where automatic COLAs have led in, say, the auto industry, Social Security and in government. Only labor and the governing class seem to have missed the lesson in the collapse of the U.S. auto industry, the insolvency of Social Security and the current interest in clawing back pay and benefits from government workers.
And where is Gov. Dannel Malloy on this? He has been out of state often recently, staging an odd victory lap that’s taken him from Davos to Washington crowing about how he’s reversed the fortunes of Connecticut with a business-friendly approach. We won’t dwell on the obvious comparison to George Bush’s premature ‘Mission accomplished’ media event.
On the subject of the minimum wage, the best the governor could muster was a weak ‘I’ll watch the debate and keep an open mind.’
Now that’s a missed opportunity to match the governor’s big-stage rhetoric with his back-home action. Malloy should have come out and said a) ‘I hear you but this isn’t the moment’ and b) automatic cost of living adjustments are dead for any purpose.
He missed the opportunity to send a strong message to business and raised a red flag about just how business-friendly Connecticut really can be while so firmly in labor’s grasp.
Andrew Markowski, state spokesman for the National Federation of Independent Business, provided the classic knee-jerk business perspective that hiking the minimum wage would be a job killer and “the worst thing” for small business. Study after study has shown that’s not quite true. A gradual boost in minimum wage causes a limited short-term disruption before the marketplace adjusts.
But any disruption is unwelcome in an economy as fragile as ours.
There is a time for debating a hike in the minimum wage but this isn’t it. Let the economy rebound and put some people back to work. Let Malloy collect some hard data that supports his position that there’s a real and sustained turnaround happening. Let New York boost its minimum to $10 an hour, as labor there has suggested. Then let’s talk.
A prolonged legislative fight, even one that reinforces the region-leading $8.25 level, would be just another signal to business that Connecticut doesn’t understand the importance of establishing a competitive business-friendly environment.
The only thing worse would be a fight over, say, project labor agreements. Yes, that beast is lurking but that’s a conversation for another day.
