In Mark Segebart's world, the minimum wage is a quaint notion, something along the lines of an allowance. Make your bed. Clean your room. Flip some burgers after school and you'll get $7.25 an hour, enough to take your best girl to the sock hop, with some spare change to double-straw a milkshake at Pokey's.
By Douglas Burns
Daily Times Herald, Iowa, March 28, 2013
The minimum wage, according to Segebart, a Republican state senator from Vail, just doesn't have any place in adult discussions, in the business of raising families and paying utility bills. No one could or should expect to work for that amount, right? It's just, well, kids' stuff.
"If you want to set minimum wage to be a living wage that you think everybody, that's a place you get a job and you're going to live on the minimum wage, that's one philosophy - it's not mine," Segebart said at last Saturday's Carroll Chamber of Commerce legislative forum. "I think the minimum wage is a starting wage for young workers that are untrained and unskilled and are just starting into the workforce, and it's a place to start. A lot of businesses hire those young people to start out at that wage. It's certainly not a living wage, and I don't think it was ever intended to be a living wage."
Segebart, an Iowa State University-educated farmer, who, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, has received $205,204.96 in federal farm subsidies from 1995 to 2011, mostly through the corn-commodity program, isn't processing the notion that many people are seeking to make ends meet in minimum-wage jobs.
Perhaps he should go to Burger King in Carroll. ... Jeremy Theulen, a Burger King assistant manager, told the Daily Times Herald in an interview that the starting wage at the fast-food chain in Carroll is $7.25 an hour (minimum wage) to $8. ...
"There are really not many high school kids who work here," Theulen, a 2007 Carroll High School graduate said. "It's probably like late 20s."
U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, a 40-year champion of increasing the minimum wage, recently said in Des Moines that 340,000 Iowans would see their paychecks increase under a minimum-wage increase he supports. Of those Iowa workers, 60 percent are women, 82 percent are adults (not teenagers), 22 percent are parents, 50 percent have family income under $40,000 and 45 percent have some college education or more, The Des Moines Register reported. ...
"Many of the members of the U.S. Women's Chamber of Commerce were once employees themselves," Margot Dorfman, the CEO of that organization, said during a news conference on Harkin's legislation. "They know that the typical low-wage worker is an adult woman, and they know that raising the minimum wage helps women workers." ...
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