Miller/Harken Minimum Wage Debate

As I was writing this blog, I kept trying to make it into two distinct stories. On the one hand, the debate surrounding the minimum wage for food service workers. On the other, the rising price of food due to several forces, including recent inclement weather. As I gradually tried to tease apart these two issues, the more hooks they established in each other and I realized these narratives are inseparable. You can’t tell one story without the other.

The first story I want to tell is the decline of the food service worker. Food workers are often the most underpaid segment of our labor force and are comprised of the largest population of undocumented workers. This is an incredibly vulnerable segment of our work force, and often the target of some of the most egregious injustices. The secondary federal minimum wage for tip earning food service workers serves only to further punish and destabilize this population. The secondary minimum wage currently stands at $2.13/hour. Consider that over 60% of tip earners are women and we begin to see the far-reaching implications of this kind of grinding poverty.

The Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkley started the conversation about raising the minimum wage, especially for tip earning workers. The backlash from opposing parties was immense and venomous. The mounting mantra was; if you increase the minimum wage, the price of food will rise. If the price of food goes up then we are punishing the very population we were trying to protect/empower.

Whether or not the federal minimum wage goes up, the price of food is going up. It becomes a messy “origin story” argument, where each side accuses the other of being the egg. However, the Food Labor Research Center, after intensive surveying, found that raising the federal minimum wage (for tip earners as well) to $9.80 over three years would have a negligible impact on the price of food.

We find that while the Miller/Harkin bill would provide a 33% wage increase for regular minimum wage workers and would more than double the wages of tipped workers over the same period, retail grocery store food prices would only increase by an average of less than half a percent over the three-year phase-in of the new minimum wage, and restaurant food prices would increase by less than one percent per year. This increased cost of food, both away and at home, would amount to about 10 cents more per day on average for American households over the three-year period (Dime a Day Report).

The greatest argument the opposition uses to keep the minimum wage depressed is that increasing minimum wage would increase the cost of food so severely it would negate any impact felt by the very people the act was made to protect. The report has now debunked that as myth, as untruthful proselytizing by stakeholders of the status quo.

And that takes me to the second part of the story; the rising price of food. The rising price of food is often the most striking hallmark of inflation and generally speaks to greater subcutaneous economic ills. The accelerating price of food disproportionately affects the lowest wage earners. Among the lowest wage earners, ironically, are the very people that harvest, package, distribute and serve our food. And we begin to see the dizzying and circuitous nature of the food system beast.

After the crop season of summer 2012, the United States saw the price of food begin to rise. Even the extension of the Food Bill wont protect us from the worst of the price hike do to record droughts and temperature peaks. The topic has enslaved the media to predicting the rise in price of milk and worrying if they are right.

So even as food prices rise pushing against the bulwark of our hefty farm bill, the farmer sees less and less of that money. In the mid-1970s, farmers received about one-third of the consumer’s dollar spent in grocery stores and restaurants. Now it’s about 16%, according to the Farm Bureau. When the farmer sees less of the consumer dollar, the farm worker sees less.

It’s hard to imagine the food system as one discreet entity because its reaches are sprawling. The behemoth includes many disparate industries: farming, service workers, the FDA, Nestle and Pepsi, New Seasons and CSA’s. What umbrella could possibly encompass all these contrasting economies? There is danger in not recognizing the food system as a cohesive body. If we fail to find the umbrella that can cover all of the food systems we come perilously close to alienating, marginalizing and isolating the smaller players.