Thread: Conservative Leads Effort to Raise Minimum Wage in California

Conservative Leads Effort to Raise Minimum Wage in California

By JENNIFER MEDINA
Published: November 25, 2013

LOS ANGELES — Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley millionaire, rose to fame by promoting a ballot initiative that essentially eliminated bilingual education in California. He went on to become publisher of The American Conservative, a libertarian-leaning magazine.

Jason Henry for The New York Times

Ron Unz, who made millions in software, is spearheading a ballot initiative to raise California’s minimum wage.

But after decades in the conservative movement, Mr. Unz is pursuing a goal that has stymied liberals: raising the minimum wage. He plans to pour his own money into a ballot measure to increase the minimum wage in California to $10 an hour in 2015 and $12 in 2016, which would make it by far the highest in the nation. Currently, it is $8 — 75 cents higher than the federal minimum.

Using what he sees as conservative principles to advocate a policy long championed by the left, Mr. Unz argues that significantly raising the minimum wage would help curb government spending on social services, strengthen the economy and make more jobs attractive to American-born workers.

“There are so many very low-wage workers, and we pay for huge social welfare programs for them,” he said in an interview. “This would save something on the order of tens of billions of dollars. Doesn’t it make more sense for employers to pay their workers than the government?”

Mr. Unz plans to submit the ballot language to the California secretary of state on Tuesday, declaring his intention to gather enough signatures to place it on the ballot in 2014.

Labor union leaders and top Democrats in the state said they were not aware of the plan, though Mr. Unz said he would welcome their help.

President Obama has called for raising the federal minimum wage to $9 from $7.25, but has received little support from Congress.

“At the very least, this is a way to capture the attention of people and have a debate,” Mr. Unz said.

Mr. Unz has spent nearly $1 million on previous ballot measures and said he was prepared to spend some of his own fortune on this initiative as well. He added, though, that he expected the cost to be “minimal” because he anticipates widespread support.

But businesses would almost certainly spend to defeat the measure.
Earlier this year, Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, signed legislation to increase the minimum wage to $10 an hour in 2016. The California Chamber of Commerce labeled the bill a “job killer” and said that such a large increase would raise the unemployment rate and put the state’s precarious economic recovery at risk. A spokeswoman for the group declined to comment on Mr. Unz’s proposal on Monday.

Mr. Unz brushes aside such criticism, saying the size of California’s economy — which, at roughly $1.9 trillion, is bigger than most countries’ — would prevent any large-scale movement of jobs to other states. Instead, he argues, it presents the best test case for the kind of national minimum wage increase he has advocated for years.

National polls suggest raising the minimum wage is popular, and Mr. Unz said he believed such a measure would pass easily in California, where an estimated 1.6 million residents earn less than $10 an hour.

But it could cost millions to gather the nearly 750,000 signatures needed to get it on the ballot.

Mr. Unz entered politics in 1994 as a challenger to Gov. Pete Wilson for the Republican nomination, at one point accusing Mr. Wilson of being a closet Democrat. After his ballot measure against bilingual education passed in 1998 — he argued that such education kept students from learning English effectively and forced children to stay with other speakers of their native language — Mr. Unz backed similar successful measures in Arizona and Massachusetts. He became publisher of The American Conservative in 2007, writing opinion articles on the minimum wage, immigration and urban crime.

He left that post this year amid what he said were “ideological and administrative” differences. Officials at the magazine declined to comment.

Mr. Unz wrote in the magazine last year that manufacturing “sweatshops” that rely on immigrant workers, including those in the country illegally, were among the few industries that would be devastated by a higher minimum wage. “There’s a legitimate argument to be made that those kinds of businesses have no place in our economy,” he said, “and getting rid of them would eliminate the low-rung jobs that bring in new poor immigrants.”

Mr. Unz also argues that increasing the minimum wage would help eliminate what he calls an education bubble: More people are taking on huge debt to attend college, even though they may not be able to find a high-paying job afterward. If the floor of low-wage jobs is raised, he says, more people will find such jobs attractive.

While unions have backed similar voter initiatives in San Jose and Long Beach, Calif., labor officials are now focused on permanently tying the minimum wage to the rate of inflation, and said the measure Mr. Unz is proposing could be a distraction. Steve Smith, a spokesman for the California Labor Federation, was hardly enthusiastic when informed of Mr. Unz’s plans.

“He has not shown a great deal of support for workers’ issues in the past and was nowhere to be seen in the legislative debate here, so it’s not really clear what the motivation is here,” Mr. Smith said. “But he is saying some things that are the same as what we’ve been saying all along.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/us...rnia.html?_r=0

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December 3, 2013, 12:01 am


The Minimum-Wage Cure for Illegal Immigration

By BRUCE BARTLETT

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of “The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform — Why We Need It and What It Will Take.”

Last week, Ron Unz, a California businessman, submitted aballot initiative to the California secretary of state that would raise the state minimum wage to $12 an hour in 2016 from the current $8. The federal minimum wage is $7.25.

TODAY’S ECONOMIST

Perspectives from expert contributors.

Many states have minimum wages above the federal rate. Democrats and progressives have been pushing for higher minimum wages at the state and local level, encountering opposition much less intense than in Congress, where Republicans are adamantly opposed to any increase, saying it would lead to a loss of jobs. Polls show strong public support for a higher minimum wage.

What is curious about the Unz initiative is that he is a conservative who defends a higher minimum wage on conservative grounds. In an interview with The New York Times, he said it would reduce government spending on welfare. A recent study from the University of California, Berkeley, estimated that welfare benefits for low-wage workers amount to $7 billion a year.

More controversially, Mr. Unz also contends that a higher minimum wage would curb illegal immigration. He has made this argument for some years in a variety of liberal and conservative publications.

Cleverly, Mr. Unz has turned the principal conservative argument against a higher minimum wage – that it would reduce jobs by making employment more expensive – into a virtue. As he wrote in a 2011 article in The American Conservative magazine, of which he was then the publisher:

The automatic rejoinder to proposals for hiking the minimum wage is that “jobs will be lost.” But in today’s America a huge fraction of jobs at or near the minimum wage are held by immigrants, often illegal ones. Eliminating those jobs is a central goal of the plan, a feature not a bug.

He asserted that those affected would primarily be newly arrived immigrants, those with the weakest ties to American society. Those who have been in the United States for a while, who have mastered English and put down roots, would likely be “grandfathered in” and not lose their jobs.

“In effect, a much higher minimum wage serves to remove the lowest rungs in the employment ladder, thus preventing newly arrived immigrants from gaining their initial foothold in the economy,” Mr. Unz wrote. Once this fact became known, it would discourage low-skilled immigrants from coming in the first place.

Interestingly, liberals have made this same argument. Writing in The New York Times in 2006, the former Massachusetts governor and 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis and Daniel J.B. Mitchell, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, also defended a higher minimum wage partially on the grounds that it would disemploy illegal immigrants. As they explained:

If we want to reduce illegal immigration, it makes sense to reduce the abundance of extremely low-paying jobs that fuels it. If we raise the minimum wage, it’s possible some low-end jobs may be lost; but more Americans would also be willing to work in such jobs, thereby denying them to people who aren’t supposed to be here in the first place.

The idea that there are beneficial effects to excluding certain classes of workers from employment by having a minimum wage is not a new one. Indeed, early support for a minimum wage during the Progressive Era was based heavily on the expectation that it would price women out of the market.

As the Middlebury College economist Robert E. Prasch detailed in a 1999 academic article, progressives in the early 20th century had a very paternalistic attitude toward women. The first state minimum wages affected only women. This was often justified by the need to keep them from being tempted by prostitution, a point that was often made euphemistically. During debate on the minimum wage in 1912, the Public Service Corporation of New Jersey referred to “the pitfalls and temptations which beset young women who are thrown in contact with the world.”

The Princeton economist Thomas C. Leonard notes that another goal of minimum wages for women was to price them out of the labor market, thus reducing competition for jobs and raising wages for men.

“A woman whose wages contributed to her family’s income was ordinarily scorned as a parasite and a usurper of wages that rightfully belonged to the male head of household,” he wrote in a 2005 academic paper.

In another paper, Professor Leonard points out that early supporters of the minimum wage were motivated by the idea of “eugenics” – that public policy ought to improve the quality of the human race, biologically. One way the minimum wage served this purpose was by making those considered mentally defective unemployable. Without jobs, it was thought, it would be impossible for them to marry and reproduce, thus serving a eugenic purpose.

Keeping native-born women out of the labor force also served the eugenic purpose of encouraging them to marry and have children. In a 1907 letter that was widely circulated, President Theodore Roosevelt was highly critical of those of “native American descent” who failed to reproduce sufficiently, saying they were contributing to “race suicide.”

Pricing immigrants out of jobs served a eugenic purpose as well. Many immigrants of that era were viewed as racially inferior. This view led to adoption of the Immigration Act of 1924, which encouraged immigration from regions view as racially superior and set strict quotas on those from places where the people were seen as racially inferior.

Consequently, it is not surprising that the Unz proposal has gotten strong support from those who strongly oppose immigration for racial reasons. The website VDARE.com (named for Virginia Dare, the first white child born in the New World) strongly supports it. A Feb. 20, 2013, commentary said a higher minimum wage would keep out “wetback labor.”

There are good arguments for raising the minimum wage. For example, an August study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago said an increase in the federal minimum wage would raise aggregate spending in the economy and, hence, the real gross domestic product.

A higher minimum wage may also discourage some employment of illegal immigrants. But making an inadvertent side effect of the minimum wage its principal purpose may do more to divide potential allies than bring them together.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/20...igration/?_r=0

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Entrepreneur: Boost Calif. wages to $12-an-hour


By MICHAEL R. BLOOD
Associated Press
Published: Saturday, Jan. 11, 2014 - 6:57 am
Last Modified: Saturday, Jan. 11, 2014 - 12:28 pm

LOS ANGELES -- Democrats across the nation are eager to make increasing the minimum wage a defining campaign issue in 2014, but in California a proposal to boost the pay rate to $12 an hour is coming from a different point on the political compass.

Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley multimillionaire and registered Republican who once ran for governor and, briefly, U.S. Senate, wants state voters to endorse the wage jump that he predicts would nourish the economy and lift low-paid workers from dependency on food stamps and other assistance bankrolled by taxpayers.

A push for bigger paychecks for workers at the lower rungs of the economic ladder is typically associated with Democrats — President Barack Obama is supporting a bill in Congress that would elevate the $7.25 federal minimum to over $10 an hour.

But entrepreneur Unz, 52, is a former publisher of The American Conservative magazine with a history of against-the-grain political activism that includes pushing a 1998 ballot proposal that dismantled California's bilingual education system, an idea he later championed in Colorado and other states.

Two decades ago, as a 32-year-old, the theoretical-physicist-turned-software-developer tried to unseat then-Gov. Pete Wilson, a fellow Republican. After a long break on the political sidelines, Unz's reappearance has startled members of both major parties, and his proposal — if it goes to voters in November — could unsettle races from governor to Congress.

"He is a wild card in the deck of California politics," said Bill Whalen, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and former Wilson speech writer.

Republican National Committee member Shawn Steel praised Unz for his 1998 initiative, which abolished most bilingual education programs for students who speak little, if any, English and replaced them with English-only instruction. But Steel predicted a jump in the minimum wage would eliminate jobs, penalizing young people who often hold them.

Unz "is an innovator, he's extremely bright and he's a lone wolf," Steel said.
To Unz, who's spoken out over the years on issues as varied as campaign finance to IQ and race, the proposal simply makes sense. As drafted, it would increase the minimum wage in two steps — to $10 an hour in 2015, and $12 the following year, which would be the highest among states at current levels.

His push comes as Seattle's new mayor, Democrat Ed Murray, has said he wants workers there to earn a minimum of $15 an hour, and after fast-food workers staged nationwide rallies calling for higher income.

Unz says taxpayers for too long have been subsidizing low-wage paying businesses, since the government pays for food stamps and other programs those workers often need to get by. He posits that the increase — at $12-an-hour, up from the current $8 — would lift millions of Californians out of poverty, drive up income and sales tax revenue and save taxpayers billions of dollars, since those workers would no longer qualify for many welfare benefits.

He dismisses the notion that countless jobs would evaporate, noting that most of the state's lower-wage jobs are in agriculture and the service sector, which can't be easily automated or transported elsewhere. He believes higher wages would make the jobs more attractive to U.S. residents, curtailing a lure for illegal immigration.

For California, among the world's 10 largest economies in 2012, the jump "would be a gigantic economic stimulus package," Unz said in an interview. He hopes its passage in the nation's most populous state would have a ripple effect, prompting other states to increases wages.

Unz is an unusual figure in California's largely left-of-center political culture, untethered to traditional party apparatus, libertarian in his leanings and wealthy enough to make potential rivals nervous.

He declined to provide specifics on his personal wealth — he founded Wall Street Analytics, Inc., which was acquired by Moody's Corp. in 2006.

He calls the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan "totally disastrous," lambasts the government for bailing out Wall Street banks and sees little difference between Obama and predecessor George W. Bush.

In high school, he ranked among the top math students in the U.S. and studied theoretical physics at Harvard University, Stanford University and Cambridge University, according to his website.

His journalism and writings over the years — touching on subjects as diverse as college admissions, immigration and homosexuality — have been described as everything from insightful to offensive.

In an article for the New America Foundation, he wrote that the government's "vast and leaky conglomeration" of assistance and benefit programs had failed to ensure a decent living for workers, so "perhaps we should just try raising wages instead."

Businesses could raise their prices a fractional amount to cover much or most of the cost of the higher wages, which in turn would feed the economy with spending, he argues.

He estimates that discount retailer Wal-Mart, for example, could cover the cost with a one-time price increase of about 1 percent. Wal-Mart spokesman Kory Lundberg said he did not know the source of Unz's calculation and added, "It seems kind of hard to believe."

Would it be a wash for taxpayers if social spending decreases but the price of consumer goods rises?

Unz acknowledged it would be difficult to craft a precise analysis, since it's difficult to predict if governments would lower taxes or how different industries would cover the cost, through higher prices or cutting into profits. But overall, he argued higher wages and lower welfare spending would be "a very beneficial result."

The proposal is under review by the state attorney general, and if it clears that hurdle Unz can then begin gathering tens of thousands of petition signatures needed to qualify for the November ballot.

It's hard to predict its chances of passage, but raising the minimum wage has had appeal in California in the past — voters endorsed a wage increase by a landslide in 1996.

Bob Mulholland, a longtime adviser to the state Democratic Party, predicted the proposal would help Democrats, defining them as candidates in touch with Main Street.

"I think (Democrats) will see him as a sinner in the past but a welcome angel now," Mulholland said.

But it could become a tricky issue for Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, who is seeking another term and just signed a law that will raise California's minimum wage to $10 an hour by 2016. Businesses are unlikely to welcome another boost.

"This is the essence of insanity," said John Kabateck of the National Federation of Independent Business in California, who said every bump in the wage threatens jobs created by mom-and-pop businesses also struggling with a new national health care law.

State labor leaders might seem likely potential supporters, but at this point, Unz is being viewed cautiously because of his history in conservative causes. Also, labor is eager to link future increases in the state minimum wage to the rate of inflation.

"We are not totally clear on his motivation or his strategy at this point," said Steve Smith of the California Labor Federation. "He's not someone who has a record of supporting workers."

http://www.sacbee.com/2014/01/11/606...lif-wages.html
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/01/11/6063442/entrepreneur-boost-calif-wages.html#storylink=cpy

Millionaire conservative backs Calif. minimum wage increase

Politico

- ‎14 hours ago‎

LOS ANGELES - Democrats across the nation are eager to make increasing the minimum wage a defining campaign issue in 2014, but in California a proposal to boost the pay rate to $12 an hour is coming from a different point on the political compass. . .

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Conservatives for the Minimum Wage

By David Weigel

My new piece looks at the very public campaign by Ron Unz, the California software tycoon, to raise the state's minimum wage even faster and higher than the Democratic legislature has required. Instead of rising to $10 in 2016, Unz wants $10 in 2015 and $12 the next year. And as I found, he's been campaigning for this for three years, to little fanfare, waiting for Republicans to run out of wedge issues and rediscover populism.

DAVID WEIGELDavid Weigel is a Slate political reporter. You can reach him atdaveweigel@gmail.com, or tweet at him @daveweigel.

One of the issues motivating Unz, one of the factors that he thinks should rally conservatives, is the pressure put on wages by immigration. Make a minimum-wage job more attractive to low-skilled whites, says Unz, and it will no longer just be immigrants looking for remittance money who work them. I asked Mark Krikorian of the restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies whether Unz was on to something.

I sympathize with the goal, but I don’t think on its own raising the minimum wage can do what Ron wants it to do. I think the problem is only partly a matter of pay, especially since many jobs held by illegal aliens (and guest workers) pay more than the minimum wage (which is already $8 in Calif. and set to go up to $9 in July).

That small difference can mean a lot to someone in such a job but its effect in attracting more people is likely to be limited and I don’t see how it overcomes the non-monetary problems – the foreignization of some occupations in certain areas creates a social perception that those jobs are “unsuitable” for Americans (or Saudis, where they have the same problem); also, the recruitment networks that used to connect young people with entry-level jobs have been allowed to atrophy.

Raising the legal minimum without muscular immigration enforcement will just cause some illegal aliens to make more money, and cause others to be unemployed as their jobs are eliminated, but not necessarily change the social and structural problems that make it attractive to hire them in the first place.

Now, you could combine a higher statutory minimum wage with immigration enforcement – that would tighten the labor market, thus leading to an organic, market-driven rise in the de facto minimum wage, potentially making the statutory increase less applicable, but it would also reinforce the message that those are not jobs that are somehow beneath Americans. You’d probably also have to make unemployment less attractive by shortening (or at least not lengthening) the period of time you can receive unemployment payments, and also re-tighten the work requirements for welfare.

I’d prefer raising the minimum wage through market means, but if a statutory increase is the political price that needs to be paid to get support for immigration enforcement and re-tightening of welfare/work requirements, I’m okay with that.

The goal, as Mickey Kaus likes to say, is not money equality but social equality – that Americans aren’t equal only in the eyes of God but in each other’s eyes as well.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/20...src=burger_bar

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