It should come as little surprise that a local advocacy group, Main Street Coalition for Economic Growth, has filed suit to enjoin the City of Madison from enacting the first phase of a multiple-step minimum-wage plan that would work to stifle the local economy. And while we recognize the legal nuances of the suit do not appear promising for the plaintiffs — claims that such ordinances cannot be enacted on a local level prove weak in light of similar laws elsewhere — we admire the implicit rationale behind their claims and hope they may somehow find a way of succeeding.
A city-forced wage increase will demand that local business owners find a means of increasing the funds available for paying their employees. There are two potential means of accomplishing this goal: pink slips and marked-up prices. Since the backers of this dangerous ordinance have long claimed that it will serve as a means of helping those with the smallest paychecks, logic would stand to reason that they are rooting for the second option — inflated price tags.
The inherent fault in this means of compensating for a mandatory bloating of the payroll, however, is that implementation on such a minute level creates an unfair advantage for local retailers working outside city limits. With Fitchburg, Verona, Middleton and other surrounding areas not being forced to implement a wage hike in unison with the Madison policy, merchants in those areas will be able to gain a competitive edge over capital retailers by maintaining lower prices.
Further complicating matters, market forces will damn local businesses before any competent owner allows this situation to play out. This means that while a choice between higher prices or firing employees may exist in the short-term, the long-term binds competent business owners to reducing the size of their payrolls. The first to go will doubtlessly be those making the least — those that is seemingly designed to help.
More troubling yet, an examination of those employees making minimum wage (or less than the $7.50 an hour the ordinance will eventually raise the wage to), especially in the downtown area, reveals not so much an underpaid slave army of bread-winners, but rather a core group of students merely looking for some spending cash in this era of bloated tuition.
So in reality it is students who are on the line as this last-ditch effort to pre-empt the economic slaughter makes its way to court. And perhaps there is no better sign of an ordinance being simply bad than when it manages to create bedfellows as strange as students and business owners.
The Editorial Board ([email protected]) consists of two juniors and three seniors, majoring in journalism, rhetoric and political science. In reality, they have the combined maturity of a freshman from Ohio and have spent more time reading the backs of beer bottles than any textbooks. They are proud to have finished an entire semester without using the word “mugwump” even once. Select members of the editorial board wish that the sex pieces hadn’t ended during the first week. Others are doubtlessly glad. At least one member of the editorial board is thoroughly indifferent on accounts of their inability to get laid. But above all else, they wish Abby and Jake well. (As if warm wishes will help their suffering.)
