As N.M. legislators debate increasing the state’s $12-an-hour minimum wage, it’s essential they remember the two sides to every coin that goes into paying that wage:
Employee and employer
While advocates for increasing the minimum wage to the neighborhood of $15.55 an hour maintain it’s needed to help ensure low-income workers can afford to pay their bills, their analysis doesn’t go beyond those employees.
Employers, the other side of the coin, will have to cover the increase, along with higher prices on everything from eggs to gasoline. To make the math work they will have to cut staff, cut hours of operation and/or raise prices. While Rep. Christine Chandler, D-Los Alamos, sponsor of one of the bills, says the doom predicted after the last statewide increase, to $12 an hour, hasn’t come to be, that took effect mere weeks ago; her victory lap is premature.
Rep. Andrea Reeb, R-Clovis, calls this latest legislation “actually a tax hike, and it’s going to raise the cost of food.” George Gundrey, owner of Tomasita’s restaurants in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, deemed it an “attack on our family-owned businesses.” The N.M. Chile Association, the state’s Cattle Growers’ Association and the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce are all against it.
Urban and rural
Missing in the debate are the differences in cost of living and cost of doing business across our large state. Jal and Wagon Mound are not Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and small businesses (and consumers) in rural New Mexico...
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