Skip to main content

The News, Nashville, May 5, 2016

Last week, a small business owner from Nashville travelled to Washington DC to testify before Congress about how businesses and the economy will benefit if the federal minimum wage is raised above the current rate of $7.25 per hour. Speaking to the House Democratic Caucus Forum, the founder and CEO of LetterLogic, Sherry Stewart Deutschmann shared her own experiences as a business person who pays her employees $16 an hour, 45% above the minimum wage amount.

“Until a few years ago our entry-level pay was $12 an hour. At that time, we began looking at our employees and trying to understand the kind of life we were enabling them to create, and as our “litmus test” we used the following baseline: “If the two lowest-paid employees of LetterLogic got married, what kind of housing could they afford? Could they afford to start a family? What schools would their children attend? How much of their income could they save?” And, at that point, we raised our starting wage to $14 an hour, and then just a few months later, we raised it to $16.”

House Ranking Member Robert C. “Bobby” Scott sponsored the House Democratic Caucus Forum. He also sponsored the Raise the Wage Act, which sought to raise the minimum wage to $12 by 2020. ...

Deutschmann says raising the minimum wage is good for business. “Raising the minimum wage will increase productivity and reduce the costly turnover that plagues so many short-sighted low-wage businesses. It will boost sales by putting more money in the pockets of workers who most need to spend it.”

In 2002, as a single mom with a high-school education Mrs. Deutschmann cashed in her 401k and had a week-long yard sale to raise the capital needed to start her own company, LetterLogic, in her basement.

Following the growth of her company, she became a leader member of the National Women’s Business Council, a small group of female business leaders whose role is to advise the Small Business Administration, the President, and Congress on issues related to female entrepreneurship.

Today, her company processes and delivers patient billing statements for hospitals nationwide, doing so in both traditional print as well as mail formats and also electronically. “Though our business has a high-tech component, most of our jobs are in the factory, where our employees operate machinery that prints, folds, inserts, and then sorts over 235,000 bills each day. These positions could easily be filled at the minimum wage,” she explained.

The federal minimum wage of $7.25, which Tennessee follows, was set in 2009.

The hearing in Washington comes on the heels of leaked polling conducted by Republican pollster Frank Luntz’s firm showing 80 percent of business executives, most of them members of state chambers of commerce, support increasing the minimum wage. Business for a Fair Minimum Wage’s national poll also found substantial business support: 61 percent of small business owners said they support raising the wage. ...

Read more

Copyright 2016 GCA Publishing