By: Mark Glennon*
What’s to be done in a state that has added no net new jobs in 20 years and has the highest unemployment rate in the nation?
Order employers to pay at least $25 per hour. That’s the new position of Chicago’s powerful chapter of SEIU, the Service Employees International Union, as reported by Crain’s and ABC Chicago. It would be a 60% increase in Chicago’s current wage of $15.40 per hour.
SEIU wants candidates for Chicago mayor, alderman and other city offices to take a position on that increase, and “the group appears quite serious about that,” according to Crain’s. So far, no candidate has said no to the increase, SEIU told Crain’s. The union’s full candidate questionnaire is here.
It seems like the ink on Fight for 15 posters has barely dried. That movement to push wages up to $15 per hour might appear to be largely successful on the surface. The Fight for $15’s “success is inspirational” to labor activists, as The Guardian reported last week.
In truth, it’s hardly clear that mandatory minimum wage laws account for an apparent floor of $15 in much of America. Inflation has pushed wages up. Prices are up 30% since the Fight for $15 movement started ten years ago. It was also assisted by voluntary pay hikes by employers responding to public pressure and, no doubt most importantly, to the continuing labor shortage. Job openings in America remain stuck near a record 10.7 million. Even in much of rural America where the only legal minimum is the federal minimum of $7.25, it’s easy to find starting, unskilled jobs paying $15 hourly. I can attest myself to seeing $15 help wanted signs in rural Indiana, for example, where only the federal minimum is law.
Whatever the cause, higher labor costs mean fewer jobs. Indifference to that simple reality is a trademark of labor progressives, and a leap to $25 per hour would be catastrophic.
This isn’t complicated. If cost goes up, supply goes down – with jobs or anything else. My daughter in college, for example, worked in a bowling alley over Thanksgiving break for $15 and I doubt the alley could pay more than that. We pay student interns $15 at Wirepoints because that’s about what they are worth. A jump to $25 would mean fewer, if any, interns. The examples go on and on.
Nor should it be challenging to understand that many jobs are not intended to be careers and should not be expected to pay a living wage.
For examples, look to where you can always find absurd hypocrisy – politicians. Congresswoman Jan Schakowski, while she supported Fight for $15, didn’t pay campaign workers that much. Her ad for workers offered $2,000 per month and responsibilities included “very long and irregular hours” and maintaining “7 day per week presence in office.” And JB Pritzker, while making the $15 minimum wage a key part of his first campaign, faced an organized demand from his campaign workers that he pay that much. “We demand that J.B. uphold his campaign’s values by paying his fellows a fair wage of $15 an hour,” said their petition.
Spiking mandatory wages to $25 per hour would kill countless jobs, especially in retail and part-time employment. Automatic check-outs in grocery stores, fast food and more would become all the more common. Countless restaurants would die. Students would be hit particularly hard.
For those interested in the empirical debate about the tradeoff between the minimum wage and job supply, the best compilation of research on the topic seems to be from the National Bureau of Economic Research. It reviewed over one hundred studies on the subject and concluded as follows:
Our review indicates that there is a wide range of existing estimates and, accordingly, a lack of consensus about the overall effects on low-wage employment of an increase in the minimum wage. However, the oft-stated assertion that recent research fails to support the traditional view that the minimum wage reduces the employment of low-wage workers is clearly incorrect…. Two other important conclusions emerge from our review. First, we see very few – if any – studies that provide convincing evidence of positive employment effects of minimum wages, especially from those studies that focus on the broader groups (rather than a narrow industry) for which the competitive model predicts disemployment effects. Second, the studies that focus on the least-skilled groups provide relatively overwhelming evidence of stronger disemployment effects for these groups.
Studies like those and common sense mean nothing to the job killers who run Illinois. A serious effort to lift wages would mean getting off employers’ backs and pushing the unemployed to take the many good wage, career jobs already available, as in manufacturing, and telling people to move to where those jobs are if necessary. It would also mean restoring the state and the nation to the kind of high growth economy like we had only a few years ago, which pushed up wages naturally by putting workers in the driver’s seat.
*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.
Audio and summary 
If this bill passes, say goodbye to local control over all Illinois parks and expect to see open drug and alcohol use, needles, no sanitation and fire hazards, but no ordinary park users.
A kids meal at McDonald’s will now cost $73.50 plus tax. But a free toy is in the bag. I’ll take 3.
I’m going to become a millionaire printing signs that say “Vacant Storefront for Rent”. Millions I say, millions.
the economics of supply & demand mean nothing to these fake-socialist. where is the demand for $25 hr workers or the burgers they flip? or, maybe like everything else with these folks we can just transfer the lack of supply or demand onto the backs of taxpayers and just pay folks $25hr to stay home and blame the whole mess on “rich people”…and if we’re $31 trillion in current debt of $144 trillion in long term debt who cares those are only more zeros..and besides, debts for dummies, everyone knows that.
Its going to get worse, much worse before it gets any better.
I can almost hear the businesses fleeing the state even faster.
Let’s amend the Illinois Constitution. If Amendment 1 could pass, a $25 minimum wage would be a slam dunk.
You have to make that kind of money to afford the taxes in Illinois. Taxes are going higher, much higher. No end to government greed, the taxpayer was put on earth to be screwed. This is true in every country and for thousands of years. As the saying goes “Shut up and pay your taxes”.
I assume SEIU already pays its employees $25/hour, right?
clever method to double state income tax revenue overnight.
Given the large number of jobs that would be lost under such a huge minimum wage increase I doubt income tax revenue would double
There is no amount of money that will satisfy the greed-crazed unions
What does it matter what position any of the candidates make? What if they all say yes? Will SEIU provide equal campaign assistance to all of them?
Chuy and Johnson already have the inside track to the SEIU endorsement. It’s obviously a ploy to justify their current endorsements. I wouldn’t touch this with a ten foot pole.
What WP and many do not understand is the union mentality – they would rather lose jobs permanently than give in on current demands.
If my personal experience with union membership is any indication, labor bigwigs will gladly throw future members under the bus to the benefit of current dues paying members.
Nixit as a former Union Member for the Union leaders its always and only about the DUES
More and more businesses will be fleeing Illinois. Soon the only jobs will be working for the government.
I’m pushing for $100 per hour. Under my plan everybody would be rich and I’ll be elected mayor for life.
Yes, we need true equity, where doctors, lawyers, professional engineers, and burger-flippers make the same equivalent hourly rate.
Equity is where the professionals are subservient to the peasants, with the Democrat overlords in charge of the distribution of limited resources to their benefactors. Like Soviet occupied countries, Mao’s China, current Venezuela. It works until it doesn’t. The problem with our professional class is that they’ve bought into it. I have a buddy from college who works pretty high up in a professional firm, it’s 100% woke from the top to the bottom, with only a handful of people secretly in opposition to the communist takeover of our institutions.
Yep. Even some people who started with little and made it to successful, well-paying careers have been accused so often by the woke crowd of achieving their success unfairly that they drink the kool-aid and believe it. Sad.