KHQ.COM - What if U.S. workers were paid more as the nation's productivity increased?
If
we had adopted that policy decades ago, the minimum wage would now be
about $22 an hour, said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) last week.
Warren was speaking at a hearing held by the Senate's Committee on
Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. You can see the video here.
Warren
was talking to Arindrajit Dube, a University of Massachusetts Amherst
professor who has studied the issue of minimum wage. "With a minimum
wage of $7.25 an hour, what happened to the other $14.75?" she asked
Dube. "It sure didn't go to the worker."
The $22 minimum wage Warren referred to came from a 2012 study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
It said that the minimum wage would have hit $21.72 an hour last year
if it had been tied to the increases seen in worker productivity since
1968. Even if the minimum wage got only one-fourth the pickup as the
rate of productivity, it would now be $12.25 an hour instead of $7.25.
Some of the news media took this to mean
that Warren is calling for a minimum-wage increase to $22 an hour. That
doesn't appear to be the case. She seems to be merely pointing out that
the minimum wage has grown more slowly than other facets of the
economy.
Warren is taking some hits on Twitter for her comments.
One user describes her as "clueless and out of touch" while another
calls her "delusional." But other users are praising her arguments as
"compelling," saying she is "asking the right questions regarding
minimum wage."
