Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jaquelyn Ziegler Fernandez Rieke, who is owner of Nutty Steph’s in Middlesex and Onion River Campground in Plainfield.
[I]’m concerned about the challenges faced every day by thousands of workers in Vermont who don’t earn a living wage. Raising the minimum wage would present a two-fold benefit for business owners like myself. I would have a more dignified and less stressed workforce to employ, and I would sell more when Vermont workers, with expendable income, buy more of our high quality chocolate and granola. In fact, they will spend a lot of money on Vermont products, and this will strengthen my small business and many others.
Our society on its face appears affluent, but in reality so many in our state are suffering under poverty, lacking resources, lacking time and lacking community. Most of us have a car but tens of thousands just drive them to and from work, earning barely enough to cover their insurance, gas and keep up with maintenance.
Over half a century ago we created a minimum wage, about which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in 1933, “By living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level — I mean the wages of a decent living.” Along the way the purchasing power of the minimum wage has dropped as inflation and the cost of living have outpaced wages for millions of Americans.
Though Vermont has made improvements in raising the minimum wage in recent years, we have not gone far enough to address the rising inequality in our state. While the share of total income in Vermont going to the top 1 percent has gone up, the rate of childhood poverty has and homelessness have also increased. The cost of basic necessities like child care and health insurance keep rising, and wages have not kept up with the cost of living. Over half of our single mothers with young children live in poverty, and nearly 3,000 more children live in poverty now than in 2008. Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020 will not only put more money in the pockets of our most vulnerable workers, those workers will spend in their communities, spurring local economic growth.
And now tens of thousands of average Vermonters, like millions of average Americans, have no expendable income, no savings, no free time, no capacity to resist the trickle-down economic policies that have been growing ever stronger since Reagan.
By moving our minimum wage up so it’s much closer to a livable wage, we’d help our state a lot and as a bonus, we’d raise the American boat. We would join the states that have already accomplished this progress, and we would be showing the country that we do not all have to follow Trump’s agenda of dismantling worker protections and benefitting Wall Street and massive corporations.
