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February 6, 2015 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
UP IS DOWN
By Don McIntosh
Associate Editor
On Jan. 8, University of Ore-
gon published a report contend-
ing that low-wage employers are
being subsidized by taxpayers
— because their workers qualify
for public assistance programs.
And the UO Labor Education
and Research Center (LERC)
report used that as an argument
in favor of raising the minimum
wage.
But two weeks later, the Ore-
gonian newspaper turned that
same argument upside down,
based on a state study requested
by Republican state Rep. Julie
Parrish of West Linn. The front-
page Jan. 23 article was accom-
panied by a 200-point-type
“screamer” headline, and ran
with a graph purporting to show
that raising the minimum to $15
an hour doesn’t help workers
much, because every dollar they
gain reduces their food stamps,
earned income text credit, and
childcare benefits.
Published the day before a
state Capitol rally to raise the
minimum wage, the article
came off as a provocation aimed
at a growing labor-backed cam-
paign to raise wages for Ore-
gon’s lowest-paid. Lawmakers
have introduced bills for
phased-in minimum wage in-
creases to $15 an hour and to
$12.20.
“It’s shameful what The Ore-
gonian did,” said Oregon AFL-
CIO President Tom Chamber-
lain, a point person for the
coalition pushing a big mini-
mum wage increase.
Raahi Reddy and Ellen Scott,
authors of the LERC study, say
the Oregonian analysis appears
to break down the closer you
look at it. For one thing, it’s
clear that Parrish cherry-picked
the sample: She asked the Leg-
islative Revenue Office to esti-
mate the impact on a single par-
ent with two children. The
Oregonian had access to the re-
port, but didn’t make it publicly
available for others to check its
methodology and accuracy. The
Oregonian article does reveal
(on paragraph 11 after a jump to
Page 10) that the figures were
based on just one theoretical
family with a single parent with
two young children who works
full-time at minimum wage.
But it appears that for the
“The Oregonian and
elected politicians all talk
about good middle class
jobs, but when it comes
right down to it, their
music doesn’t back up
their dancing. They’re
out of step with what’s
going on in the country.”
— Oregon AFL-CIO president
Tom Chamberlain
Oregonian’s numbers to pan out,
the single parent would have to
be one of the lucky few getting
benefits in the underfunded
state-administered Employment
Related Day Care subsidy pro-
gram. Oregon State University
public health researcher Bobbie
Weber says few people even
know about that program, which
serves less than 20 percent of
those eligible — fewer than
10,000 families. For them, the
“benefit cliff” is real, in that
raises can cause them to lose the
day care benefit — under cur-
rent rules, which have a hard in-
How the Oregonian stretched
the facts to argue that a massive
minimum wage increase
wouldn’t help workers
come limit. But nothing stops
the state from changing eligibil-
ity rules to gradually taper off
benefits instead. That would
render moot the Oregonian’s hy-
pothetical case of the worker
who lost income thanks to a
minimum wage increase.
The bigger flaw is that the
Oregonian article says nothing
about the impact a $3 to $5 an
hour increase would have on the
rest of the 400,000 Oregonians
who LERC estimated earn
poverty-level wages at or below
$12 an hour. Yes, workers on
food stamps would lose some
benefit for every wage increase
they get, but they’d still come
out substantially ahead. Same
goes for the Earned Income Tax
Credit, which was specifically
designed to reward work by ta-
pering off gradually. Plus, the
Earned Income Tax Credit may
a hugely successful anti-poverty
program, but delivers its benefits
but once a year at tax time with
a big refund. A minimum wage
increase, on the other hand,
would be felt within a week of
taking effect.
“The thing that disturbed me
the most in that article is the im-
plication that we ought to main-
tain the status quo of low wages
subsidized by tax dollars,” said
OSU researcher Scott, who did
in-depth interviews with 44 low-
wage single mothers for the
LERC report. “We shouldn’t be
arguing for that. These families
repeatedly told us they don’t
want to rely on public assis-
tance. They want to be self suf-
ficient. And on $9 or $10 an
hour they can’t.”
“The business lobby, The
Oregonian and elected politi-
cians all talk about good middle
class jobs, but when it comes
right down to it, their music
doesn’t back up their dancing,”
said Chamberlain, the AFL-CIO
president. “They’re out of step
with what’s going on in the
country. If you look at the data,
25 percent of the workforce
make poverty wages and 49 per-
cent of all new jobs make less
than $12 an hour. You can’t talk
about a vibrant economy unless
you address that. So yes, we
support 15 Now. We think it’s
the government’s responsibility
to make work pay a livable
wage.”
Oregon ranks No. 7 nationally in union density
Unions in the United States added
48,000 new members to their ranks in
2014, according to a Jan. 23 report from
the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Employment grew by about 2.3 million
workers, resulting in a decline in union
density. The percentage of the work-
force with union membership dropped
0.2 points to 11.1 percent. That’s the
lowest percentage since the government
began producing comparable estimates
in 1983, when it was 20.1 percent.
Of the 14.6 million union members in
the U.S., 7.2 million were in the public
sector and 7.4 million were in the private
sector.
Union membership in Oregon was es-
timated at 243,000 — up 35,000 from
2013. The rate of union growth was the
largest in the country, taking it from
13.9 percent of the workforce in 2013,
to 15.6 percent last year — seventh
highest in the nation.
Washington, with an estimated
491,000 union members, ranked fourth
in the proportion of its workforce that
was unionized (16.8 percent). Those
numbers are down from 2013, when the
BLS reported 546,000 union members
in the state, representing 18.9 percent of
the workforce.
New York continued to have the high-
est union membership rate (24.6 per-
cent), followed by Alaska (22.8 percent),
Hawaii (21.8 percent), Washington,
New Jersey (16.5 percent), and Califor-
nia (16.3 percent).
North Carolina again had the lowest
rate at just 1.9 percent.
The percentage of employed women
who were union members remained
constant at 10.5 percent, while the rate
for men dropped by 0.2 of a percentage
point to 11.7 percent.
The union membership rate was high-
est among workers aged 55 to 64 (14.1
percent), and lowest among workers
aged 16 to 24 (4.5 percent).
The most-unionized occupations
were local government (41.9 percent),
utilities (22.3 percent), transportation
and warehousing (19.6 percent),
telecommunications (14.8 percent), and
construction (13.9 percent).
Agriculture (1.1 percent), finance (1.3
percent), and bars and restaurants (1.4
percent) were the least unionized.
The BLS data show that union mem-
bership boosts wages. Full-time union
workers had median weekly earnings of
$970 compared to $763 for nonunion
workers. The difference was even bigger
in some occupations: Median weekly
earnings for union construction workers
was $1,123, compared to $724 for
nonunion.
The median wage last year for union
women age16 and older was $904 — 89
percent of the $1,015 weekly for union
men. The median for nonunion women
was $687 — 82 percent of the $840
weekly median for nonunion men.
“The wage gap for women in unions
is much smaller than for women who
are nonunion workers,” said Joan Ent-
macher, vice president for Family Eco-
nomic Security at the National Women’s
Law Center. “But last year the rate of
union membership for women was flat.
To promote equal pay for women, it’s
time for lawmakers to stop the attacks
on unions — and strengthen workers’
rights to organize.”
The BLS union membership report is a
pretty accurate depiction of trends at the
national level, but at the state level, data
can be misinterpreted because minor year-
to-year fluctuations — particularly in less
populous states — may not be statistically
significant. Oregon’s percentage in the re-
port has fluctuated in the last decade, with
a low of 13.8 percent in 2006 and a high
of 17.1 percent in 2011. Oregon has about
1.2 percent of the U.S. population.
(Editor’s Note: Press Associates Inc.
contributed to this report.)