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Source: St.文件倉 Louis Post-DispatchDec. 21--Monica Green could live on $15 an hour. She couldn't live on $7.35.When her $15-an-hour job disappeared, and she was reduced to fast-food and health aide work, she and five of her seven children landed in the Gateway 180 emergency homeless shelter, just north of downtown."It's a gym and a whole bunch of beds, and you're next to people you don't know," Green said. "My boy said, 'Who are these people, Mama?'"But it was warm, and the family was fed."It's not a horrible place, as people say. It's not comfortable. They try to help you out and give you resources," she said.Green's story may be relevant to the running debate over whether to raise the minimum wage.A noisy campaign is under way, led by labor activists, demanding that the minimum wage -- $7.25 nationally, $7.35 in Missouri -- be raised to $15 per hour. Fast-food workers, who often earn the minimum, have been marching around restaurants shouting, "St. Louis can't survive on $7.35."President Barack Obama this month called for a 39 percent hike to $10.10, citing a low minimum wage as a factor in rising income inequality in America. He talked about people "who work their tails off and are still living at or barely above poverty."Opponents warn that a much higher wage would lead to fewer jobs for low-skilled workers, and people such as Green might have no job at all.CONFLICTING STUDIESEconomists have been arguing about the minimum wage since the 1930s and they're still at it. The anti-wage-hike argument goes like this: Higher wages force employers to raise prices. Restaurants will sell fewer hamburgers, and will need fewer people to serve them. Pressed by higher costs, employers also turn to automation -- such as self-serve drink stands -- and the job count will fall farther.The chief proponent of that view is David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine. He finds that a 10 percent rise in the minimum wage may reduce employment by 1 to 3 percent for people on the bottom rung. This wipes out the social benefit of higher wages for the workers who remain.The higher wages-equals-fewer jobs view was dominant until the 1990s, when other studies appeared showing little or no effect on jobs when the minimum rises.Most studies have concentrated on teenagers and the restaurant business. All of the studies face the problem of separating the effect of a minimum wage hike from everything else happening in the economy.To get at that problem, economist Andrajit Dube and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley compared counties that share a border formed by a state line. Among them are the counties along the Mississippi River between Missouri and Illinois, including St. Louis. The researchers then looked at what happened at restaurants when one state raised the minimum and the other didn't.Their 2010 study found that restaurant pay in the wage-hike state went up, but employment stayed even with the neighboring counties where wages didn't rise."For cross-state contiguous counties, we find strong earnings effects and no employment effects of minimum wage increases," they concluded.The explanation from high-wage advocates goes like this: Tough competition prevents owners from raising prices by much, so they need the same number of people to serve nearly the same number of hamburgers. Instead, higher wages squeeze profits. They also cause "wage compression." Owners deny raises for managers to finance raises on the bottom rung. Meanwhile, higher wages mean that fewer employees quit, cutting hiring and training expenses.'STRONG FOR THE KIDS'This debate is not academic to Monica Green.Green, 33, dropped out of high school when she became pregnant at age 16. She thinks that's why she's been stuck working in restaurant kitchens. Better jobs demand a high school diploma.Things were fine when her husband was working, and when Green was earning $15 an hour as a cook at a restaurant in the University City Loop.They earned $40,000 in the good years. That made raising seven children possible, although not easy. "I was married. We made decent money. I didn't need the system," she said.Then things fell apart. The couple divorced. She took the kids and moved out. Green's employer cut her pay to $12, then cut her hours. "I was only getting 12 hours per week," she said.She left and took at job at a Popeyes restaurant in north St. Louis County. It offered more hours, but paid only the minimum wage. She found a second part-time job as a health aide, working the overnight shift for $9 an hour. She collects no child support."I couldn't pay the rent. I couldn't pay the heat," she said. "I tried to get to the end of the month, but it wasn't enough."She moved the family place to place, ended up in her cousin's house, and finally at the shelter in October of last year. She took five children with her, and left two with relatives."You try to be strong for the kids. At night you just try to wish you were in a better place," she said. "I was living in a shelter and working two jobs."About one in five women at the Gateway 180 shelter has a job, often at minimum wage. "The ones who are employed are generally working in food service. Obviously they're not making it. That's why they're here," said Kathleen Beach, interim director at the shelter, which serves women and children.WHO GETS MINIMUM WAGE?Except for the number of her children, Monica Green would be a fairly typical low-wage worker. For one, she's not a teenager.The liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute looked at who would benefit if the minimum wage was raised to $10.10. It reported that 88 percent are at least 20 years old, and a third are at least 40 or older. A little more than half work full time, and about a quarter have children.Conservative groups see the numbers differently. The business-supported Employment Policies Institute notes that many low-wage workers aren't the sole breadwinner in their families.The group looked at who would benefit if the mini存倉um was raised to $9.80, a previous plan that Obama endorsed. The typical beneficiary had a family income of $50,662, the institute calculated.Indeed, Green's paycheck isn't her sole income. Uncle Sam helps, giving her $900 a month in food stamps. She is also eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit. That's a reverse income tax program that gives refund checks to working people too poor to owe any income taxes. It pays up to $6,000, depending on income and family size.Her children are on Medicaid, the government health coverage for the poor. She just signed up for subsidized health insurance for herself under Obamacare. It starts in January.She is not unusual. Researchers at Berkeley and the University of Illinois studied welfare payments among fast food workers, who average $8.69 per hour and 30 hours per week. They found that 52 percent receive public assistance. In Missouri, the bill runs to $147 million per year. Nationally, it's nearly $7 billion.This galls supporters of a higher minimum wage, who say taxpayers are picking up a tab that employers should pay.Raising the minimum would provide an economic boost to poor parts of town where low-wage workers spend their money, advocates say."These guys are not going to sock it away in their savings accounts," said Martin Rafanan, a Lutheran minister assigned by his bishop to help in the minimum wage campaign. "The low-wage, no-benefits approach just puts money in the pockets of rich people."But economists such as Neumark argue the opposite. If the idea is to help the poor, the tax credit works better than raising the minimum wage, he said. The credit goes only to the working poor, he notes, not to middle-class teens working for pocket money. And it doesn't reduce jobs.BUSINESS PERSPECTIVEFast-food entrepreneurs, meanwhile, are largely keeping quiet. The Post-Dispatch contacted franchisees who own McDonald's, Burger King, Taco Bell and Wendy's restaurants in St. Louis, as well as the St. Louis-based Panera chain. None were willing to discuss the minimum wage and its effect on their business.A McDonald's corporate spokeswoman, responding to a minimum-wage demonstration in St. Louis this month, emailed a statement: "McDonald's and our owner-operators are committed to providing our employees with opportunities to succeed. We offer employees advancement opportunities, competitive pay and benefits," it said.Forrest Miller said he pays more than the minimum at his family's Giuseppe's restaurant in St. Louis and Royale Orleans banquet hall in south St. Louis County. But he thinks raising the floor is a bad idea."When you hire entry-level people, it's a weed-out process. If they stay, they get advanced. Nobody in their right mind is going to let a good employee stay on the minimum wage. You'll lose them."The minimum has become a mishmash, changing state to state. While the national rate is set at $7.25, it's a dime an hour higher in Missouri because the wage is adjusted by law for inflation. It will rise to $7.50 next month.In Illinois, the minimum wage is $8.25 an hour, and Gov. Pat Quinn has called for an increase to $10 an hour. In San Francisco, the minimum wage is $10.74.The fast-food industry has survived hikes in the minimum wage, and the industry could withstand another "modest" one, said Jonathan Maze, editor of Restaurant Finance Monitor.How about a $15 minimum? "A restaurant that pays a $7.50 minimum would likely have to raise prices about 20 percent, which would increase the cost of a Big Mac by 80 cents, making it $4.79," he wrote in a recent analysis.That's near the breaking point for fast-food diners, he said. McDonald's cut the Angus Burger from its menu when it didn't sell for nearly $5, he notes.That worries restaurant owners. Wages make up about a third of their operating costs."Fast food exists mainly to sell cheap food," Maze said. "When they see a huge increase in a major line item, it hurts their ability to sell cheap food."Results vary by the brand and location, but the typical fast-food restaurant will bring in $1.2 million to $3.1 million a year in sales, Maze said. Operating profit margins run about 12 percent.Those margins used to be wider. The slow-growth economy has not been kind to fast-food chains, Maze said. Evidence of that is the persistence of the dollar menus, which defy inflation. "People have been born and are now graduating from college since the dollar menu has been out," he said.Shrinking margins have led to some consolidation. Owners of one and two restaurants are becoming less common than those owning dozens.A moderately higher minimum wage wouldn't cause many fast-food places to fold, Maze believes. Instead, it would squeeze profits and slow expansion. That would be a shame, he says, because restaurants have been one of the fastest-growing parts of the employment picture.Advocates for higher wages like to point to the fat profits of big fast-food chains, which both own and franchise their restaurants. McDonald's made a $5.5 billion profit last year.Monica Green, meanwhile, has finally escaped fast food. She's out of the shelter too, thanks to Gateway 180, the charity that runs it. The group has been paying Green's rent for an apartment in a run-down building, bordered by abandoned houses in north city's College Hill neighborhood.It's "transitional housing," a temporary program designed to give the family financial breathing room.To Green, things are looking up. Mother and kids, all seven of them, are together again. She found a $10 per hour, part-time job at a Brentwood restaurant. That, and her overnight health aide job, equals about 40 hours a week. With no rent to pay, she can put money into savings.She studies for her general equivalency diploma during the day. "I think life is going to be better," she said. "I got Jesus. He's going to see me through it."Copyright: ___ (c)2013 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Visit the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at .stltoday.com Distributed by MCT Information Services儲存