By in
Rhode Island’s Future
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| Elizabeth Suever |
When the Rhode Island General Assembly moves
to pass the bills and budget articles that may raise the minimum wage from
$9.60 to $10.50 this year, they will be met with fierce opposition from local
businesses.
The Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce,
the Northern Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce, the Newport County Chamber of Commerce and the Rhode Island Hospitality Association represent businesses by paying
lobbyists extremely well to keep the 78,000 people working for minimum wage as
poor, desperate and hungry as possible.
The businesses represented
by these groups are not interested in paying living wages to their employees,
they are solely interested in exploiting workers for profits, and the hundreds
of thousands of dollars in salaries paid to the lobbyists who represent their
interests is money well spent considering how much these businesses will save
when it comes time to issue payroll checks.
Elizabeth Suever works for the lobbying firm of Roberts Carroll Feldstein & Peirce and fronts for the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce to the tune of $7,500 a month to her
firm.
Suever argued that the
minimum wage has already been increased several times in the last few years.
She argued that more information is needed about the impacts of raising the
minimum wage.
Conversely, Suever argued that the recent improvements in the local
economy and employment can’t be ascribed to the increase in the minimum wage
because “correlation does not equal causation” and we don’t know how much
better the economy might have been if we hadn’t raised the wage.
More studies are needed it
seems, because as long as our State House is producing studies, they aren’t
raising the minimum wage.
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| Lenette Boisselle |
Lenette
Boisselle spoke
to House Finance on
behalf of two organizations: The Northern Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce and the Rhode Island Hospitality Association.
The lobbying firm
Boisselle works for, Martiesian & Associates,
gets two payments from the RI Hospitality Association of $1,875 per month and
$625 per month. The Northern Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce coughs up two
payments of $2000 and $1000 per month to her firm for Boisselle’s services.
Boisselle, who was honest
enough to state her full opposition to increasing the minimum wage, reiterated
many of Suever’s points and added that businesses need consistency and
reliability, before adding wryly that the only reliability we have in Rhode
Island is that the minimum wage will go up roughly 5-9 percent every year.
She
expressed distaste at the idea that businesses have been forced to slightly
increase compensation for their employees, passive-aggressively chastising the
Representatives she was addressing.
Boisselle disputed the
state’s facts, saying that 78,000 people working minimum wage jobs seemed a
little high to her. Boisselle calculated that the increase in minimum wage
Governor Raimondo has suggested will cost businesses $36 million a year, or $3
million a month.
Later, Boisselle suggested
that implementing the wage would be difficult for businesses to comply with in
October and suggested that businesses will need time to prepare for the
increase. January of 2018 would be better. Of course, pushing the increase off
three months would save her businesses $9 million dollars, enough to more than
justify handsome lobbyist salaries.
Perhaps the most awful
part of Boisselle’s short presentation was when she suggested that the minimum
wage is so high right now that adults are taking jobs from teenagers.
Boisselle’s
solution to this imagined problem was to suggest that the General Assembly pass
an “opportunity wage” which would allow businesses to pay teenagers less than
the current minimum wage to do the same job an adult might do for more money.
Just writing a description
of her suggestion makes me ill.
Erin
Donovan-Boyle is
the director of the Newport County Chamber of Commerce and lists her compensation for
lobbying as 5 percent of her salary. Like Suever, Donovan-Boyle took a softer
approach, saying that her organization isn’t against a minimum wage, “we just
want it to be thoughtful and predictable.”
Donovan-Boyle noted that the
suggested increase in the minimum wage is 9.38 percent, even though the Consumer Price Index (CPI) only increased 1.4 percent. She would prefer
these numbers were closer because, I suppose, everyone working for minimum wage
should be forever kept at the same relative level of poverty.
Studies are needed, said
Donovan-Boyle, (noticing a pattern yet?) and the increase will be burdensome on
businesses. She also saw implementation issues with an October date, and hoped
it could be pushed off to 2018, just like Boisselle.
These
lobbyists are all reading out of the same anti-worker playbook.
Suever joked that the Reps who have been around long enough have all heard her
arguments before, whenever the issue of raising the minimum wage comes up.
Whenever there is a
suggestion to raise the wage, the same people and same organizations come out
and present their case. The arguments presented to our legislators are not
based on economics or even common sense. The arguments are based on greed.
Businesses want to pay
their employees as little as possible, but it would be bad for business to show
up and advocate for anti-worker, inhumane and exploitative policies in person,
so the businesses join trade associations that lobby for these awful
anti-worker positions on their behalf.
This is the only reason
businesses join chambers of commerce: To help rig the system against you.
Steve Ahlquist
is an award-winning journalist, writer, artist and founding member of the
Humanists of Rhode Island, a non-profit group dedicated to reason, compassion,
optimism, courage and action. The views expressed are his own and not
necessarily those of any organization of which he is a member. atomicsteve@gmail.com and Twitter:
@SteveAhlquist