Change is for other people. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I, Vt.) supports a federal $15 minimum wage, but he pays his own campaign workers less than that. Eric Boehm reports:
In a statement, Shakir stressed that Sanders’ campaign “offers wages and benefits competitive with other campaigns, as is shown by the latest fundraising reports.”
Exactly! If Sanders’ campaign can find a sufficient number of employees willing to work for $10 an hour or $12 an hour, that’s fine. No one is being coerced to work for him, and he’s paying what the market for field workers allows.
Sanders the politician likes to criticize other employers for doing exactly what he’s doing.
“Americans should not be subsidizing the richest family in America and Walmart workers should not be living in poverty,” Sanderstweeted last month, castigating the big box retailer for not paying all workers $15 per hour. “Walmart’s greed has got to end,” he added.
But Sanders the employer surely knows that paying field workers $12 an hour instead of $15 per hour will allow his campaign to hire more field workers. He’s not employing those people because it makes him feel good to do it, and he’s not paying less than $15 per hour because he’s a skinflint multi-millionaire who is too greedy to care about workers. He’s employing them to help him succeed in ahighly competitive arena where small margins can make a big difference.
When the problems with a government mandated minimum wageare so obvious that even a socialist’s campaign can’t help but acknowledge them, it should probably make you wonder if Sanders the politician is being willfully ignorant about one of his centerpiece proposals.
[Eric Boehm, “Bernie Sanders Gets a Lesson in What a $15 Minimum Wage Would Mean,” Reason, July 19]
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