By Brandon Patty
As Labor Day approaches, millions of Americans will jump in their cars and hit the road for one last getaway before Summer 2019 comes to an end. And one of the bumper stickers you may see on the highway that always makes me laugh is the one that says, “The Labor Movement: the folks who brought you the weekend.”
Not quite.
While it’s true that 19th century labor unions campaigned for shorter working hours – specifically, an eight-hour workday when 12- and 14-hour days were the norm – most of these efforts accomplished little more than creating bitterness and enmity between workers and business owners. Some of these labor-led protests turned violent – so violent, in fact, that an 1886 Chicago protest left seven police officers and four workers dead. (The more things change….)
In reality, if you want to thank anyone for the modern two-day weekend as we know it, the credit goes to forward-thinking private business owners, who recognized the competitive value of offering their workers reasonable hours, safe working conditions and decent wages. While a New England mill worker is generally credited with being the first to give his workers Saturday and Sunday off – in order to allow Jewish workers to observe the Sabbath – it was none other than Henry Ford who instituted the policy on a widespread scale in 1926 – more than a decade before the federal government would begin instituting limits on work weeks. What’s more, Ford’s two-day weekend came 12 years after he doubled his factory workers’ daily wage to $5 a day – a figure that was unheard of in 1914.
Why is this important to recall today? Because at a time when Democrats, progressives and the liberal media are calling for raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, it’s critical to remember that government regulation and artificial price and wage fixing have never fueled the American success story. That honor goes to the free-market principles of capitalism championed by the Republican Party.
The track record on raising the minimum wage is clear. When government forces private business owners to raise wages to an arbitrary level not supported by supply and demand, business owners are invariably forced to either reduce workers’ hours or lay off people entirely – resulting in greater unemployment, not less. Even Socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders proved this lesson. When Sanders’ campaign workers pointed out that his $15-an-hour rhetoric didn’t match what he was paying them, he announced he would indeed raise their wages to the inexplicably magical $15 an hour. He then immediately reduced all their hours so as not to impact his campaign’s bottom line.
Despite this object lesson in the fallacy and ruin of Socialist economic policies, the Democratically controlled U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to more than double the federal minimum wage – again to $15 an hour. (What is it about that number? Anyone?) Apparently, House Democrats were unmoved by the Congressional Budget Office report indicating that while raising the minimum wage to that level would lift 1.3 million people above the federal poverty level, it would also result in 1.3 million Americans losing their jobs. See how that works?
If Congress truly wants to help Americans escape poverty, it should look no further than our great state of Florida, where Republican policies of low taxation and responsible regulation have fueled economic growth. The proof is in the numbers: In July, Florida’s unemployment rate was just 3.3% (lower than the 3.7% national average); in St. Johns County, that figure was just 2.9%. What’s more, since 2010, the number of unemployed Floridians has dropped by 66%, from a high of more than 1 million to less than 350,000 today.
That’s a labor success story worth celebrating.
Brandon Patty is chairman of the St. Johns County Republican Party.
