Chris Powell: Raising Conn. minimum wager is an expression of failure

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Gov. Ned Lamont, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, and state Labor Commissioner Dante Bartolomeo last week announced gleefully that Connecticut's minimum wage will increase on Jan. 1 by 3.6%, from $16.35 to $16.94 an hour, being tied by state law to the federal employment cost index. The justifications they offered were not persuasive. Indeed, they were based on false premises.

“Nobody who works full-time should have to live in poverty," the governor said, as if working full-time necessarily has some connection to the monetary value of the work.

All honest work may be honorable, but menial work -- work that can be done by anyone -- is not worth $16.94 an hour if someone can be found to do it for less. The minimum wage is government's idea of what menial work should  be worth in an ideal world, an aspiration -- well-meaning in some cases, perhaps, but mostly just government's striking a pose about its own goodness.

The governor's statement about not living in poverty is just liberal blather, especially in Connecticut, as the governor should know well. That $16.94 per hour is $654 a week, even as social-work and economic research groups long have calculated that to live decently in Connecticut a single person needs an income of at least three times as much. 

The governor's economic principle about the minimum wage is no more meaningful than everyone else's principle that it shouldn't rain on weekends.

Despite the minimum-wage increase, tens of thousands of people in Connecticut will keep working for pay well above minimum wage while  still living in or on the edge of poverty. Part of it will be their own fault, their living beyond their means, and part of it the government's. 

Lt. Gov. Bysiewicz did no better. “The minimum wage," she said, “was established to provide a fair, livable baseline of income for those who work." The lieutenant governor's pay, about $190,000 a year, is 5½ times more than Connecticut's new full-time minimum-wage salary, $34,000. If she ever did the numbers seriously, how fair and livable would minimum wage sound to her?

Bysiewicz added, “This is a fair, gradual increase for workers that ensures that as the economy grows, our minimum wage grows with it -- and that's good for everyone."

Except that the economy really isn't growing much at all. What's growing is mainly inflation, the devaluation of the money that workers earn.

At least Commissioner Bartolomeo approached this point. Raising the minimum wage, she said, “helps protect the most vulnerable earners from inflation and cost increases, and helps keeps wage gaps from widening."

Hardly. Inflation long has been underreported by the federal government, with price criteria frequently revised in the hope that people wouldn't believe the evidence of their own lives, the decline in their standard of living. Most of those voting in the last election seem to have stopped believing official inflation data. And even liberals in Connecticut acknowledge that the wage gap keeps widening.

The minimum wage was never meant to be fully supportive for a single person. It functioned as a standard of entry-level pay for the unskilled, especially teenagers, so people wouldn't be too demoralized by their first jobs and would strive to gain skills and advance. 

Today in Connecticut the need for a minimum-wage increase is mainly political -- to camouflage the declining skill level of much of the workforce, the fatherless urban underclass -- the increasing numbers of young people who attend schools without standards and graduate uneducated but who, it is hoped, remain full of self-esteem.

Connecticut has tens of thousands of job openings -- for  skilled  workers -- in manufacturing, nursing, teaching, and other fields, jobs that pay far above minimum wage, for which enough qualified applicants can't be found.

Raising the minimum wage is actually a proclamation that Connecticut has given up on a skilled workforce, a proclamation that the jobs of the state's future will be at the fast-food window -- until the robots take over.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).