Pair minimum wage with inflation

Dan Walters’ column laments the state raising the minimum wage. He says that raising the wage will force employers to use more robots and will stop employing workers.

The problem with this is that for decades employers never had to deal with inflation when it came to wages. They could invest without planning for inflationary increases every year, padding their profits easily. Minimum-wage workers had to resort to using government-support programs to stave off poverty.

The minimum wage should have been paired with inflation in the 1970s not 2022. Doing so now is just catching up and will cause a lot of financial hardships for small businesses. Even so employers should adjust because having workers in poverty after working a full work week will lead to chaos and conflict.

Thinking that employers would not use robots and other labor costs avoidance just because of wage increases is foolish. They do it because they can.The labor movement pushed hard for the advances in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. It led to much hard conflict and violence across America, which is what will happen if 80 percent of Americans are forced into poverty.

This story was originally published January 11, 2018 at 5:46 PM with the headline "Pair minimum wage with inflation."