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Title: From a Narrowly Defined Minimum Wageto Broader Wage Policy

Citation Type: Journal Article

Publication Year: 2010

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Abstract: As a policy issue the minimum wage has traditionally been viewed by those that support it as a measure designed to assist the poor. Meanwhile, for those who oppose it, mainly the various interests that will have to bear the costs and economists steeped in the neoclassical tradition, the minimum wage is simply inefficient. Because minimum wage earners are usually at the bottom of the distribution and often lack the requisite skills to command higher wages, they are the ones most likely to be hurt by increases in the minimum wage as employers seeking to compensate for rising labor costs will only lay them off. The minimum wage has in short been viewed as essentially a poverty issue as opposed to a broader middle class labor–management issue. As a result, it has not always enjoyed the type of support that it might, particularly from members of Congress, were it couched in terms of broader middle class wage policy. When coupled with the bulk of the minimum wage literature claiming disemployment effects, the minimum wage tends to be marginalized and dismissed as that which will produce more harm than good. This is unfortunate because it misses the opportunity for the minimum wage, especially when coupled with new areas of research, to be part of a larger arsenal of wage policy in the service of democracy. In this article, I focus more on the political economy of the minimum wage, particularly since the advent of new studies that have called into question the efficacy of the traditional orthodoxy. I explore how, as a result of these new studies, which form what I refer to as the post-orthodoxy, the minimum wage might be conceived of as a broader middle class policy. Increasingly, the minimum wage is being explored from a variety of different perspectives. From a policy stance, the implications are enormous: because we are no longer tied to an orthodoxy that has led policy in one specific direction, we are now able to engage in greater policy experimentation (Levin-Waldman 2004). This no doubt requires additional research into areas that haven’t previously been explored, for the old orthodoxy effectively closed off all discussion. But new research can also serve to bridge the gap between the research of economists and the research of political scientists, which in many cases has spoken past one another. The result can only be new research where each respective discipline sheds light on the other, and the ultimate outcome is a wage policy that serves the broader interest of a democratic society.

Url: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00346760903480525

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Authors: Levin-Waldman , Oren, M

Periodical (Full): Review of Social Economy

Issue: 1

Volume: 69

Pages: 77-96

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure

Countries: United States