My client is a lifelong Republican – and he supports a minimum-wage rise
Alongtime client of mine, a lifelong Republican, an ardent supporter of Donald Trump, said something very unusual to me the other day. He said: “I support a national $15-an-hour minimum wage.”
This comment kind of seemed out of character. My client runs a 100person manufacturing firm. He is very conservative in his opinions. He hates “big government”. He opposes the regulations and spending supported by Democrats. He’s a good person, a smart business owner and a fair employer. He strongly feels he should be in charge of his employee’s wages, not “some bureaucrat in Washington”. He would not seem to be the kind of person that you would think supports a higher federal minimum wage.
So why does he? Is this some form of latent altruism? Is it because he wants more pay equality and better income distribution? No, those are not the main reasons. For him, a business owner, it’s all about competitiveness. A $15 per hour federal minimum wage would “simply level the playing field”, he says.
My client’s business depends on hourly workers. It is located in New Jersey, where the state minimum wage is already $10 per hour ($2.75 higher than the national level) and slated to go up to $15 within the next three years. Like the business owners there – and other states bracing for similar increases – he’s struggling to adjust his cost structure. He has to do this because he’s at a serious competitive disadvantage.
That’s because most of my client’s competitors aren’t located in New Jersey. They’re located in Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky and Louisiana. Or Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
These are all the states where the minimum wage is equal to the federal $7.25-an-hour level. Because those companies aren’t required to pay a higher minimum wage, their cost structures are lower. Therefore, they can charge less. My client has no choice but to charge higher prices for his products in order to make a profit. This is an enormous challenge.
When people argue about the minimum wage they focus on unemployment. Some studies have found that an increased minimum wage has no impact on unemployment. Others have found the opposite. Economists have been looking at this issue for years. But unfortunately no one really and truly knows the answer as to whether or not such a legislation would help or hurt workers – or the companies who employ them.
But what has been missed in all of these analysis is parity. We live in an enormous country with hundreds of millions of people. Up until now, the minimum wage issue has been delegated to the states. Which means that there’s been a growing disparity among wages paid. Companies located in Texas can pay their workers less and, thanks to those relative lower wages, the cost of living in those areas is also less. Thanks to Covid, cloud technology, changing workplaces and a newfound appreciation among many for a better work life balance, more companies and startups are tempted to gravitate to such places.
Unfortunately, this is a big problem for all those companies in all those states (California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois. Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Virginia and Washington DC.) that have passed legislation to increase their minimum wage to $15 an hour. According to the US Census Bureau, these states are home to 3.2m companies with employees, or approximately 41% of all the small businesses with employees in the country.
Is it fair that they must pay more for their employees when their American competitors in other states pay so much less? Do you blame these companies for outsourcing work to lowercost countries just to stay in the game?
So maybe, just maybe, to fix that disadvantage, an increase in the federal minimum wage would actually be a good thing for those business owners. It will level the playing field. It will boost competitiveness. It will keep a lot of work in the United States and not overseas.
“Please,” my right-leaning client says. “Increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. It will be a boost to my business.”
Because those firms aren’t required to pay a higher wage, their costs are lower. Therefore, they can charge less
Ella Emhoff, the stepdaughter of Vice-President Kamala Harris, made her surprise catwalk debut on Thursday after becoming a fashion hit during January’s presidential inauguration.
After the announcement she had signed with IMG Models in the wake of the ceremony last month, the 21year-old daughter of Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman, walked the runway during a socially distanced New York Fashion Week presentation by the label Proenza Schouler.
“I definitely lost a little sleep the night before,” Emhoff admitted during a conversation with the label’s designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez. “I mean, I’m walking for the first time, I’m in a professional environment for the first time … It was a very epic first experience with the fashion world.”
In the digital video she walks around New York’s Parrish Art Museum in three different fashion looks.
The first saw her matching her now trademark wire-rimmed glasses with slashed grey trousers and jacket, a black pipe bag and cream colour shearling slippers. The second was a yellow tiedye swirled turtleneck top and black trousers under a black leather trench coat . The third was a black wool blazer with matching trousers. All were very different looks from her bedazzled Miu Miu coat, which went viral during the inauguration.
“For a long time when I was younger I wanted to be a designer,” she said according to CNN, “then I took it a little more seriously, I started taking courses at Central Saint Martins over two summers … It definitely exposed me to the intensity of design school.”
On her Instagram page, Emhoff is holding a raffle to win some pink striped trousers she has knitted, with proceeds going to two charities that provide outreach for black transgender women, For The Gworls and the Okra Project.
“I want to see guys, girls, people, everyone wearing striped colourful pants or my dresses,” she said as part of New York Fashion Week: The Talks. “I think that’d be great.”
When it comes to microplastics, there’s rarely good news. Researchers continue to find the tiny plastic fragments everywhere they look.
Microplastics have been found in rain, Arctic ice cores, inside the fish we eat, as well as in fruit and vegetables. New research suggests 136,000 tons of microplastics are ejected from the ocean each year, ending up in the air we breathe. They are in human placentas, our wastewater, and our drinking water.
All plastic waste, regardless of size, is detrimental to the environment, but microplastics pose a special challenge given their minuscule size (some are 150 times smaller than a human hair) and ability to enter the food chain. The result is that chemical additives and all end up in the flesh and organs of fish and humans. While the World Health Organization’s stance is that ingesting microplastics poses no known threat to human health, not everyone agrees.
“I think we know enough today to worry about it,” says Dr Douglas Rader, chief oceans scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund,pointing out that many microplastics contain chemicals linked to reproductive and hormonal disruption and cancer.
But it’s not all bad news. Some are now innovating inmicroplastic extraction, providing the basis for a touch of cautious optimism. Here is a look at several examples.
A microplastics magnet
One way to remove microplastics from water is to encourage them to clump together into compounds that can be filtered – or, in the context of the 20-year-old Irish inventor Fionn Ferreira’s work, magnetized – out.
Ferreira created a homemade ferrofluid – a magnetic mixture of oil and powdered rust – and successfully used it to remove 88% of microplastics from water samples. Ferreira’s efforts won him the top prize at the 2019 Google Science Fair. He hopes to incorporate his findings into a device compatible