A Better Minimum Wage for Mother's Day

By Amy Davidson, The New Yorker

10 May 14

itt Romney, on “Morning Joe” today, offered two ideas about what mothers in America deserve. The first was flowers. “Well, you know, I always get lilacs for my wife on Mother’s Day,” he said. “I find some place in the neighborhood where I can cut some lilacs, and so I’m going to be looking or going to the grocery store and finding some.”

But a woman working in a grocery store, where he could buy those flowers if scavenging fails him, might be more interested in his second point. At another moment in the interview, he said that he has parted company “with many of the conservatives in my party on the issue of the minimum wage. I think we ought to raise it.”

Republicans tend to talk about the minimum wage in terms of teen-agers with after-school jobs, earning a little money, who could be denied a chance at a practical apprenticeship in the ways of the workforce if their potential employers were forced to pay more. The picture is of a teen-age boy with his first-ever employee pin. In reality, as Laura D’Andrea Tyson wrote in the Times recently, sixty per cent of minimum-wage workers are women, and “About three-quarters of female minimum wage workers are above the age of 20, and about three-quarters of these women are on their own. Many, of course, are working and taking care of children.”

One of the scandals of this country is that a woman in this position can work at the minimum wage, now $7.25 an hour federally, full time every week for a year and still be poor. The poverty line for a two-person household is $15,730 per year; how a woman and a child could or should live on that is something of a mystery. Some cities and states have set it higher, largely because the people in them see the current numbers as a cruel economic joke.

Romney deserves credit for ignoring the orthodoxy of his party, especially during a week in which Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. (The only Republican who voted to move it forward was Bob Corker, of Tennessee.) The G.O.P. maintained this position despite economic scholarship showing that raising the current minimum wage, even significantly, will help low-wage workers and the economy as a whole. (As Steve Coll wrote, last December, “At some theoretical level, high minimum wages will distort job creation, but the best empirical evidence from the past decade is aligned with common sense: a minimum wage drawn somewhat above the poverty line helps those who work full time to live decently, without having a significant impact on other job seekers or on total employment.”) In that light, the most honest moment in Romney’s comments came when he said he supported the minimum-wage increase “because, frankly, our party is all about more jobs and better pay.”

After the minimum-wage bill stalled in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, dismissed it as something revealing that “Washington Democrats’ true focus these days seems to be making the far left happy, not helping the middle class.” What does McConnell think that members of the middle class value, as they watch their neighbors and relatives—mothers, too—working hard and not getting by? It’s not a secret to them that, if they are looking for a typical minimum-wage worker, they might find her in the supermarket or bodega on Sunday morning. They might be there to bring her some lilacs.