Learning a legislative lesson

And at the General Assembly you have to stay on guard until the final gavel is struck – and then some.

It would now appear that a hike to the state’s minimum wage – from $6.15 an hour to $6.75 an hour – is inevitable. Both the Senate and the House approved such a measure during a last minute General Assembly session on Tuesday, July 15. And Gov. Don Carcieri said he would not veto the measure.

We hope business interests will learn a lesson from this legislation – or more specifically, how it came about.

When Gov. Don Carcieri vetoed the state budget, it sent the spending package back to the Legislature for an override.

Not only did the Democratically controlled General Assembly approve the budget override, it took the opportunity to reconsider some other items, including the proposal to boost the minimum wage. When the session originally concluded, the minimum wage proposal appeared to have died – having been passed in the House, but having been stalled in the Senate.

Labor leader George H. Nee, secretary treasurer of the AFL-CIO, is credited with having stepped up his lobbying efforts when the opportunity presented itself. There was reportedly a mass e-mail campaign and plenty of telephone calls.

Whatever the approach, it worked. Nee and other minimum wage hike proponents displayed remarkable political savvy. Their efforts are a reminder that proponents of pro-business efforts at the General Assembly must work that much harder than their pro-labor counterparts.

As for the minimum wage, we remain convinced that increasing it could not come at a worse time. While supporting a minimum wage increase may be politically correct, we see it as another Band-Aid attempt at fostering economic prosperity.

Yes, a hike in the minimum wage would present a short-term solution for some people. A number of entry-level workers would take home more dollars at the end of the week. But too many of the same workers will find themselves collecting unemployment checks instead, because their companies have cut positions in an attempt to reconcile a bottom line.

Too often the ripple effect of an increased minimum wage is forgotten – or ignored. Don’t expect companies that have a practice of hiring high school or college students to work for minimum wage to employ the same number of workers.

And in most cases, raising the lower wages at a company would mean raising all wages – and the results of that can be devastating when a business is operating on the tightest of margins.

And maybe worst of all, as a result of a rising minimum wage, existing companies could look elsewhere to expand – to places where the labor force doesn’t rule so solidly over their business counterparts in the state Legislature.

Rep. Paul Sherlock, a Warwick Democrat and a key supporter of the minimum wage increase, points out that a person currently working a 40-hour week and making minimum wage would bring home $246 before taxes. With the proposed increase, the same person would make $270 before taxes.

As we have stated in the past, our Legislature can do better than that – and at the same time send a message that Rhode Island is a good place to do business. What we need from our legislators are progressive ideas regarding job training and incentives for those companies that make real efforts to retrain employees so that they can move up to increase their skills, responsibilities – and wages.