Opinion: No, New Jersey’s minimum wage should not be hiked $1
Sunday November 3, 2013, 4:50 AM
BY STEVEN LONEGAN
The Record
Steven Lonegan, a Republican and former mayor of Bogota, ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. Senate seat in New Jersey’s special election last month. He has returned to the private sector to create a home-building business.
On Tuesday, voters will be asked not only to choose the next governor, but to vote Yes or No on a measure that would hike the state’s minimum hourly wage by $1 to $8.25. The New Jersey Minimum Wage Increase Amendment, Public Question 2, also would mandate automatic increases based on the Consumer Price Index.
MY NARROW defeat in the recent special election for U.S. Senate was a personal disappointment, and the state may be worse off because of it, but there can be no ambiguity about the consequences of Public Question 2, which would hijack the New Jersey constitution to raise costs annually for the state’s employers. I urge New Jersey voters to oppose it.
Prior to entering the political world, I owned a cabinet manufacturing business in Paterson. The work was satisfying, but equally rewarding was the opportunity I had to provide hands-on job experience for young employees. After all, it’s only because a small businessman in Union New Jersey took a chance and gave me my first job many years ago that I could even own a business.
At thousands of corner shops and boardwalk storefronts across the state, today’s Garden State leaders were once flipping hamburgers or tearing amusement park tickets. These opportunities only existed because the cost of providing them wasn’t exorbitant.
– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/opinions/minwage_no_110313.html?page=all#NJ
yes , come on look what they are making.
again – raising the minimum wage $1 is NOT the issue.
Changing the Constitution to raise the minimum wageevery year IS the issue.
Shouldn’t be in the constitution. Do you know inflexible that is? Is it better to have a job at crappy pay or no job at all?
Most businesses are small and that could be the difference between hiring/retaining help or not.
Thed.
If you want to raise the minimum wage
VOTE NO on QUESTION 2
and petition the legislature to pass a law to raise the minumum wage.
If you do not want to raise the minimum wage
VOTE NO on QUESTION 2
from pages 237-238 of Milton & Rose Friedman’s 1980 book, Free To Choose:
Another set of government measures enforcing wage rates are minimum wage laws. These laws are defended as a way to help low-income people. In fact, they hurt low-income people. The source of pressure for them is demonstrated by the people who testify before Congress in favor of a higher minimum wage. They are not representatives of the poor people. They are mostly representatives of organized labor, of the AFL-CIO and other labor organizations. No member of their unions works for a wage anywhere close to the legal minimum. Despite all the rhetoric about helping the poor, they favor an ever higher minimum wage as a way to protect the members of their unions from competition.
The minimum wage law requires employers to discriminate against persons with low skills. No one describes it that way, but that is in fact what it is. Take a poorly educated teenager with little skill whose services are worth, say, only $2.00 an hour. He or she might be eager to work for that wage in order to acquire greater skills that would permit a better job. The law says that such a person may be hired only if the employer is willing to pay him or her (in 1979) $2.90 an hour. Unless an employer is willing to add 90 cents in charity to the $2.00 that the person’s services are worth, the teenager will not be employed. It has always been a mystery to us why a young person is better off unemployed from a job that would pay $2.90 an hour than employed at a job that does pay $2.00 an hour.
The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws.
Nothing has changed to disprove this analysis
Let the markets determine the wages.
Soon there will be machines that do a better job at the fast food restaurants and automation will be the answer to higher wages for unskilled workers.
With all of the government ‘mandates’ it hurts the lower wage workers by forcing businesses to lay them off or contract out production offshore.
The result of mandatory higher wages will be fewer jobs.
If you don’t pay people to produce your products, who will be able to afford your products?
The problem is that our economy is not creating enough good jobs. Minimum wage is not a career job, it is what you do till you can land a good job. No one should be in a minimum wage job for life.
Congress is so obsessed with their fights that they forgot why they were elected.