A new organization called the Fairness Project officially launched last Thursday with seed money from the SEIU-UHW, a large union in California. Their goal: to gather $25 million dollars to push the #FightFor15 initiatives currently gaining signatures in Maine, California, and Washington D.C. They also hope to improve the image of unions in general across the United States, which they believe will further the struggle against income inequality.
Meanwhile, in an issue of the New York State Register released last Tuesday, the N.Y. Department of Labor published the process by which the state’s fast food workers’ minimum wage would be raised to $15 incrementally over the next six years. As a part of the report, the NYDoL said:
“It is anticipated that the phased-in implementation, savings related to reduced turnover, and sales and productivity growth, along with a small price increase, will alleviate any negative impact on jobs…While there are many studies that examine the impact of minimum wage increases on jobs, the various findings are inconsistent and inconclusive; some studies suggest a decrease in employment and others an increase. The United States Department of Labor has stated that minimum wage increases have little to no negative effect on employment as shown in independent studies from economists across the country.”
Naturally, the Business Council of New York State objected almost immediately, with spokesman Zack Hutchins accusing the NYDOL of having “virtually dismissed the testimony of the employers and their representatives” in favor of the USDOL’s statement on minimum wage increases:
“We’ve never seen this dramatic of an increase and we don’t know what impact it’s going to have, but it’s fairly easy to assume it’s going to have some sort of a negative impact,” he said.
Why It Might Not Matter: Conservative Storytelling Beats Out Science
“It’s fairly easy to assume.” That’s what Hutchins said. Assume? Why would we assume? We don’t have to assume. We have data. Lots of it — Seattle has been producing evidence by the ream ever since they raised the minimum wage to $11.50 in April. The “problem” New York’s fast-food restaurants are facing with the proposed wage hikes is currently being solved by real-world businesses, and they’re coming up with graceful real-world solutions.
The problem is that one side of the minimum wage fight that vacillates between ignoring the data and deliberately abusing it, and they have the backing to make sure that the stories they tell get on the media while the facts are ignored or hacked up for storytelling purposes.
Ignoring the Facts
Hutchins, along with the vast majority of conservative politicians, think tanks, and many economists, base their assumptions on the work of a few schools of economic thought that have been disproved for decades but persist primarily because they’re very well-funded. (Assumption: It’s easy to be well-funded when you tell the government to do the things that the 1% want you to do.)
Every single one of the major conservative economic schools of thought says the same thing about the minimum wage going up:
“When wages rise, jobs are lost due to decreased profitability, and inflation occurs due to increased spending.”
The problem being, neither of those claims are true, and the data have proved it over and over again — but the people who spout these claims aren’t interested in the data, because they have assumptions that they value more than science or evidence.
Abusing the Data
Of course, there are definitely people out there who aren’t politicians or think tanks that are on the payroll of the 1% — and certainly those people would love to have some data that back up their support of the conservative economic agenda.
The problem is that they can’t find any real-world data except by twisting the data, so we end up with news stories about Seattle’s restaurant industry suffering the “biggest restaurant job losses since the Great Recession” that are rapidly debunked not just by bloggers exposing the chicanery behind the claim, but also by reality itself, seeing as just weeks after that job losses post hit the news, Seattle posted the largest month-to-month job gains in history within the restaurant industry.
The other common form of data abuse comes in the form of anecdotal evidence posing as data. The news about minimum-wage workers asking to get their hours cut so they could stay on welfare, for example, began its life as one small-time story about a few medical caregivers who were concerned that the increase in wages would knock them out of their subsidized housing and into Seattle’s notoriously expensive housing market.
Their employer understood perfectly, saying:
“This has nothing to do with people’s willingness to work, or how hard people work. It has to do with being caught in a very complex situation where they have to balance everything they can pull together to pull together a stable, successful life.”
Storytelling vs. Science and How to Win a Political Fight with a Conservative
Unfortunately, in the end, the science is irrelevant, because the human brain doesn’t care about data.
The human brain cares about the story that it tells itself about the world, and as long as the liberals in America insist on tackling the issue within the conservative frame (by, for example, arguing that “burger flippers really are worth it,” or that “a $15 minimum wage won’t destroy the economy”) we’re going to lose. Trying to address an opinion with contradictory facts only strengthens that opinion.
What we can do — what the Fairness Project, the NYDOL, and the entire #FightFor15 is trying to do, whether they realize it or not — is change the story from one that is centered on what is “fair” or “just” (which conservatives care a lot less about) to one that is centered on what The Authority Says (which conservatives care quite a bit more about).
How? By making a higher minimum wage not a story about a struggle between welfare queens and captains of industry, but a has-been issue that’s already been decided and is simply the law.
(Featured image courtesy of Bob Simpson at Flickr, available under a Creative Commons license.)
