By J.D. Harrison
Washington Post, April 30 2014
Small business owners are vehemently opposed to raising the minimum wage. Meanwhile, in other news, small business owners overwhelmingly favor raising the minimum wage.
Wait. What?
Depending on who you ask and which polls you trust, you can come away with a very different perspective on how an increase in the federal minimum wage would affect small firms. And with Congress and several states currently mulling legislation to raise the floor on wages, employers in towns across the country are lining up on either side of what has become a critical election-year issue in Washington.
On one side, the National Small Business Association and National Federation of Independent Business continue to push back against raising the minimum. ...
Small employers in favor of raising the minimum wage argue that individuals making $7.25 an hour simply don’t have enough money to purchase their company’s goods or services.
Increase the minimum wage, they say, and you’ll increase sales. ...
John Shepley is one of the owners of a Maryland business that grow plants for eco-friendly roofs. His state last month became the second state to embrace the president’s calls for a $10.10 minimum wage, says he favors the wage hike. He noted that low-wage workers usually turn right around spend nearly all of their earnings, often at local businesses.
“That added spending, added tax base, and all the other benefits are going to far outweigh any conceivable downsides,” he said at an event with the Department of Labor.
Some owners say paying higher minimum wage helps businesses retain employees and cultivate a more reliable workforce, as well.
“We hired entry-level people at near minimum wage in the past, and learned this resulted in their personal financial problems impacting the quality of the work they produced,” Carmen Ortiz Larsen, a small business owner in Maryland and vice president of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Montgomery County, said in a statement earlier this month in support of a higher wage floor in the state.
Her consulting company now pays no lower than $10 an hour, translating into “good retention rates, a good product and happier customers.”
During a rally at the Capitol earlier this month, Scott Nash, co-owner of Moms Organics Markets in the Washington region, offered a similar take. He said his company has found that “people with less stress are happier and work more productively,” adding that “the minimum wage right now is too much of a burden on these workers.”
National small business advocacy groups like Small Business Majority, the Main Street Alliance and Business for a Fair Minimum Wage are pushing those owners’ messages in Washington. The latter has gathered more than a thousand signatures from employers in favor of bills that would raise the minimum wage, while Small Business Majority recently published a poll showing overwhelming support for the legislation. ...
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