Against Issue 5

Why make it harder to do business?

Word came down the other day that Amazon had decided to raise its minimum wage—in this country anyway—to $15 an hour. The new minimum wage starts on Nov. 1st, and covers nearly a quarter-million employees, not counting the additional 100K or so seasonal employees who’ll be needed as Christmas approaches. Our considered editorial opinion: Hooray for Amazon! What a country! Jeff Bezos has certainly built a better mousetrap. And his company is making money hand over fist, which is what makes this such a success story. The business of America is business, as a president named Coolidge once noted. And these days you can get computers or dog food delivered to your door. Thank you, Amazon. (Somebody noted recently that all the deliveries from Amazon might be saving the U.S. Postal Service, too, which looked to be near bankrupt only a few years ago.)

That might have been the end of this feel-good story, except that Amazon couldn’t leave well enough alone. Now the company says it will start lobbying Congress to increase the federal minimum wage for all other companies, too.

It shouldn’t need to be said: Not all companies are Amazon, and not all company owners are worth north of $150 billion dollars, as Forbes claims for Jeff Bezos. We read a Time magazine article back in the summer when Amazon’s stocked jumped 2 percent on some ephemeral news of the day. And Jeff Bezos’ net worth jumped 2.24 billion—that hour.

So pointing to Jeff Bezos might not be the best strategy for those pushing a new and much higher minimum wage on Arkansas’ businesses.

Here we are in an election season again. It might not feel like it outside, but it really is fall. And in a few weeks, Arkansans will go to the polls to figure out which of these five issues to pass, and which to fend off. We’d suggest voting against Issue 5.

An editorial writer of some note once advised: Always tackle the opponent’s strongest arguments, not his weakest. So we went to the website for Arkansans For a Fair Wage, to see how they framed things. Here are a few of their featured arguments:

“The cost of groceries, housing and other basics have gone up for years. But wages haven’t come close to keeping up. No one who works full time should need food stamps to feed their family. We need to raise the minimum wage so families can feed their children without taxpayer dollars.”

Hmmm. We’d note that raising the minimum wage to $11 an hour, as this proposal would do, would almost certainly put more people out of work. Especially poorer people trying to work their way up.

If the minimum wage jumps again, employers, business owners and managers aren’t just going to eat the additional cost. Likely, they’ll fire people, or maybe just not hire replacement workers, to keep their costs down. Which, in turn, would put more people in the food stamp line.

“By gradually raising Arkansas’ minimum wage to $11 an hour, we can help hard-working people meet their basic needs. At the same time, we’ll help small businesses by putting more money into people’s pockets that they can spend on goods and services in our state.”

Help small businesses? How many small business owners have said Issue 5 would help them? Surely AFFW can come up with more than one.

“This November, Arkansas voters will get the chance to decide this issue for themselves. We have the opportunity to get wages moving again in our state for more than 300,000 residents, including almost a hundred thousand working parents. These are health care workers, classroom aides, janitors and waitresses, who put in an honest day’s work and still struggle to get by.”

We’ll take their good word for the numbers. And waitresses and janitors certainly do an honest day’s work. But why make it more difficult for them to get a job by making jobs more scarce? And keep younger people from getting minimum wage employment so they can add to their résumés, gain experience and work their way to better-paying jobs in the future?

The fact is, Arkansas’ minimum wage of $8.50 is higher than any neighboring state. As Casey Stengel used to say, you can look it up.

If Issue 5 passes, we don’t see the owner of a pizza parlor firing his whole staff. What we do see is his getting by with 10 workers instead of 12, and not filling some job positions over time. Multiply that by all the pizza parlors, movie theaters, burger joints and grocery stores in Arkansas. You see where we’re going.

This proposal would scarcely help those Arkansans who need these kind of jobs the most.

Please vote against Issue 5 in the upcoming. The folks pushing an $11 wage might have the best intentions. But we all know where that leads.