Op-Ed: Minimum Wage Issue Needs Realistic Policy Solutions & Association Input

Hazel Roos, a prospective bookseller and provisional ABA member, is the owner of Paint Away, a pottery painting and glass fusing studio in Redmond, Washington. This op-ed on the Minimum Wage is adapted, with permission, from an e-mail she sent to ABA.

Recently, the American Booksellers Association launched the Minimum Wage Legislative Tool Kit. I am glad that ABA is getting in front of this issue, and I am thankful that they are providing some guidance and tools for small businesses to use in engaging their local legislatures.

As a Seattle resident and a small business owner in a city just outside of Seattle — and as a prospective bookseller and a provisional ABA member — I have had some experience with the minimum wage issue. 

A little background: Shortly after taking office in January 2014, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray made raising the minimum wage a top priority of his administration. The mayor formed the Income Inequality Advisory Committee (IIAC) to address this issue. On the mayor’s website, it stated the goal of the committee was to deliver an “actionable set of recommendations for increasing the minimum wage” in Seattle. 

Despite these assurances, the concerns of small businesses over the best way to increase the minimum wage did not seem to resonate with the mayor or the committee.

It was not for lack of trying. I feel I took an active role in the discussion. In March 2014, I attended the Income Inequality Symposium here in Seattle, which was put together by the IIAC to solicit input regarding the minimum wage increase. I engaged my local council members and the mayor’s office. I e-mailed the city council members, mayor, the mayor’s office, and individual IIAC members to get a handle on their decision process. I received a call back from Brian Surratt, senior policy advisor in the mayor’s office of policy and innovation, but no real direct answers. In addition, I put together talking points for the symposium, but time didn’t allow me to present many of the points.

When I attended the symposium, what I found was that a lot of the mayor’s staffers appeared to be already committed to raising the minimum wage and that the symposium seemed more a “show” or a front to pretend to hear concerns, rather than a genuine open-minded discussion of the pros and cons. The symposium also had academic speakers, researchers, and other impressive people speaking on behalf of income inequality and the need to raise minimum wage. There was not much balance in the symposium with regards to presenting the opposing sides. Small business owners who were invited to speak were given less time than the speakers who were advocating for the minimum wage increase. Proponents of the wage increase discussed studies showing no impact to businesses when minimum wages were increased, but their examples were misleading at best.

In the end, despite small business objections to the minimum wage legislation, the Seattle City Council unanimously passed the new minimum wage law in June 2014, and it went into effect April 1, 2015 (although the law gives small businesses time to phase in the new minimum wage in seven years). 

Now this minimum wage battle is moving to other states and cities. And, while the Tool Kit is important, more must be done. Not all small business owners are eloquent or articulate in expressing their real concerns. 

While I think small business owners should get involved in the discussion as early as possible, it would be all the more powerful if the different associations from different retail industries (ABA, American Specialty Toy Retailing Association, etc.) banded together to speak on behalf of the small business owners who are in these industries. They could articulate their members’ key concerns — especially the difficulty of dealing with an increase in operating expense, such as payroll, when it cannot be absorbed by increasing prices. 

I believe it would be far more impactful for the collective associations to speak of the importance of small businesses and their role in their local communities. And though everyone can agree on the sentiment of raising the living standards of those who are low-income earners and decreasing the inequality gap, raising the minimum wage hurts the wrong people. It does not go after big corporations and big CEOs in a real way.  

Moreover, on the policy side, at least in Seattle, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour doesn’t meet the standard of living determined by their own studies, which would be $22 an hour (per the symposium). In fact, certain low-income earners will be disqualified from receiving child-care credits and food stamps, and, as a result, the net gain of an increased minimum wage on their paycheck is minimal. For some, it will be a net loss. 

I invite ABA to consider having a bigger advocacy role in the minimum wage discussion. I know this issue is occurring in only a few cities right now (San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, and now New York City) but it is likely that all small businesses will have to face this issue, sooner rather than later. If small business associations (and their members) got involved now, feasible policy solutions to income equality would garner greater momentum, and it would provide a platform for indie owners to be heard.

Without question, the issue is complex and charged.  We all want to lift up low-income workers and close the income inequality gap, but that does not mean we must support solutions that we know are not economically feasible. We need policy that actually achieves this goal, and small business owners need their associations to help make sure our voice, our solutions, are heard. 

To be clear, I’m not against linking increases in the minimum wage to increases in the cost of living, but I am against drastic and dramatic changes in the absence of a more comprehensive approach to the issue of income inequality.  —Hazel Roos