The Real World Consequences Of The Minimum Wage

by John Hawkins | February 12, 2007 10:23 am

In Arizona, they have a minimum wage law that just went into effect last month and predictably, people are losing their jobs as a result of it[1]:

Mark Messner, owner of Pepi’s Pizza in south Phoenix, estimates he has employed more than 2,000 high school students since 1990. But he plans to lay off three teenage workers and decrease hours worked by others. Of his 25-person workforce, roughly 75 percent are in high school.

“I’ve had to go to some of my kids and say, ‘Look, my payroll just increased 13 percent,’ ” he said. ” ‘Sorry, I don’t have any hours for you.’ ”

Messner’s monthly cost to train an employee has jumped from $440 to $580 as the turnover rate remains high.

“We go to great lengths to hang on to our high school workers, but there are a lot of kids who come in and get one check in their pocket and feel like they’re living large and out the door they go,” he said. “We never get our return on investment when that happens.”

…Tom Kelly, owner of Mary Coyle Ol’ Fashion Ice Cream Parlor in Phoenix, voted for the minimum-wage increase. But he said, “The new law has impacted us quite a bit.”

It added about $2,000 per month in expenses. The store, which employs mostly teen workers, has cut back on hours and has not replaced a couple of workers who quit.

Kelly raised the wages of workers who already made above minimum wage to ensure pay scales stayed even. As a result, “we have to be a lot more efficient” and must increase menu prices, he said.

…John Weischedel, a senior at the East Valley Institute of Technology in Mesa, knows he is lucky to be making $8 per hour at an auto dealership and learning technical skills. So are most of his friends who make $9 or more per hour while still attending high school.

After the minimum-wage law went into effect, “a couple of my friends got laid off – they worked in fast food,” he said. “They’re going to wait until they’re out of high school to find other jobs.”

Liberals love taking credit for raising people’s wages, but they’re every bit as responsible for putting people out of work with policies like the minimum wage. Worse yet, the minimum wage is just one policy. Liberals have job killing policy after policy, regulation after regulation, and tax after tax that they want to impose on businesses, but they never stop to consider the damage their policies do in the real world.

Every time you impose a cost on a business, you make it less competitive. That may mean that some people lose their jobs or worse yet, that the company goes out of business and everybody loses their jobs. The liberals in the Democratic Party have trouble understanding this because they look at businesses as nothing more than piggybanks to be robbed to pay for their misguided social engineering. But, every time the Democrats blithely tinker with the market, people in the real world pay a heavy price for their foolishness.

Endnotes:
  1. minimum wage law that just went into effect last month and predictably, people are losing their jobs as a result of it: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0210biz-teenwork0210.html

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