Members of our Community Editorial Board, a group of community residents who are engaged with and passionate about local issues, respond to the following question: Advocates in Boulder County have been pushing for a regional minimum wage higher than Colorado’s current minimum wage of $13.65. They have proposed increasing it to $15.41 an hour in 2024, with annual increases until reaching $25 an hour by 2028. Your take?
As I cope with the vicissitudes of aging, I am comforted by knowing that being born in 1954 allowed me to attend the college of my choice despite my parents’ lack of college and their employment in the retail sector. It wasn’t easy to pay tuition, but it was possible. This was largely because they did not have to rely on the minimum wage to guarantee their income. Instead, the minimum wage served as scaffolding; the real negotiations involved owners and unions.
Of course, the minimum wage should be raised to reflect the local cost of living; of course, employers will argue that this will hurt businesses and consumers in the long run. When a question repeatedly elicits the same two contradictory answers, we must re-examine the question itself.
While the government must set a minimum wage calibrated to the local cost of living, this should be only the starting point. The power differential between individual workers and employers; the multiple ways to calculate the cost of living, the value of employee “perks” (e.g., health insurance), and the worth of labor...
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