In at least one sense, the debate over raising the minimum wage is as simple as political questions can get.
If you require businesses to pay employees enough money to live on, will that mean the businesses themselves could die?
Tavis Smiley does a solid job of framing that question Friday at 9 p.m. ET (check local listings) in the PBS series Getting Ahead.
Smiley mostly skips the larger, obviously critical matter of which politicians are in favor of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and which are against it.
Instead, he goes to the people whose lives and businesses will be shaped by the consequences of that battle – the people for whom this doesn’t mean votes, but cash in pocket. Or not.
That takes him to California, where the “Fight For Fifteen” (left) has made the most progress. The wheels are in motion there for an incremental increase, and some communities have sped up the timetable beyond the state’s mandate.
Smiley taps only a few economic experts for an overview of the minimum wage debate.
Instead he talks to the workers who will get the increase and the small business owners who will have to pay it.
He notes several times that much of the increased cost will fall on large national businesses that employ a large number of low-wage employees, particularly fast food chains and big box stores.
But, in a smart move, he focuses here on people who own or run a single small business, like a restaurant or a grocery store.
In a sense, they are the canaries in the mineshaft because they’re the ones who depend on weekly or daily cash flow.
To no one’s surprise, most of these business owners say the minimum wage increase has led them to cut back on employee hours. They work on small profit margins, often 5% or less, and a big increase in one of their major costs, labor, can come close to wiping that out.
In general, they say they’re going for readjustments rather than mass layoffs. They’re cutting back on hours. Owners are taking on some of the chores, like bookkeeping, that they have been delegating to part-timers.
Smiley talks to a café owner in Oakland who says he supports the minimum wage increase, “because how can anybody be against workers earning a living wage?” He then says that despite cutbacks, he expects he will earn no profit this year – and admits he can’t do that indefinitely.
On the other side, workers tell Smiley what a difference it makes in their lives to earn $12.25 an hour instead of $9.50. They can get their cars fixed. They can stop accumulating high interest credit card debt to pay their basic expenses. They can worry less about paying the rent or feeding the kids.
Smiley doesn’t find any villains here. He just finds two sets of economic realities that don’t automatically mesh.
He saves his real punchline for the very end when he notes that for all its stark simplicity – higher pay or not? – the minimum wage debate is actually part of a much larger economic discussion that includes crucial matters like affordable housing.
He doesn’t pretend to tackle all that, never mind solve it. He does, however, take a good snapshot of where it stands at this early stage in its evolution.