Most bill hearings In Annapolis don’t draw an overflow crowd. But Tuesday’s hearing on proposals to raise Maryland’s minimum wage did. Workers, business owners, politicians and community leaders -- a hundred witnesses in all – told lawmakers why they thought the state should raise the wage – or why raising the wage is a bad idea.
Gov. Martin O’Malley said that, all around, giving Maryland a raise is the right thing to do.
“We all do better when we’re all doing better and that’s why the legislature will raise it from time to time, because it’s not just the right thing to do to reward hard work,” O’Malley said. “It’s also the best thing to do for our economy. Our economy grows when the middle class becomes stronger.”
Republican Del. Kelly Schulz of Frederick County, who sits on the economics committee, didn’t buy the math.
“What if we’re wrong?” asked Schulz. “How many jobs will it take for us for you specifically as the leaders of this state, to say we’ve done damage. How many is too much?”
A range of bills are on the table. The governor and Prince George’s County Democrat Del. Aisha Braveboy both have nearly identical bills. If passed, they’d raise the wage to $10.10 by 2016 and then tie the wage to inflation so the value isn’t eroded when the cost of living increases. Tipped employees would also receive higher wages.
The proposal would mean some 450,000 Marylanders would see higher wages.
House Republicans have their own bill too. It would leave it up to counties to set a minimum wage. That’s the idea that Harford County Executive David Craig, who is running for his party’s nomination for governor, came out to support. He worried that, because many of Maryland’s counties border other states, a higher wage would chase businesses over the borders.
“We need to let the counties do it,” Craig said. That way, he says, “Western Maryland could [stay] competitive with Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania. The Eastern Shore could be competitive with Delaware. But if we change it, make it statewide, that’s not going to work.”
Business owner Joe Parsley says raising the minimum wage will hurt him. He owns a Shell gas station and carwash in Frederick and says raising the wage to $10.10 would cost him about $45,000 dollars a year in higher wages and higher payroll taxes.
“To come up with $45,000 in two years when this is fully implemented – that is going to hurt,” Parsley says. “I’m either going to be taking a monster pay cut myself, laying people off, [or] jacking up the price of the cost of a carwash.”
Parsley says his employees are mostly teenagers and college kids, that minimum wage jobs are what they do before they can get a better job. He says it’s not a wage they’re supposed to be trying to live on.
“People say this is about teenagers. That’s a fantasy,” says Benjamin Jealous, the former president of the NAACP. “Only 13 percent of low-wage workers in our state our teenagers; 23 percent of them are parents. What’s real is we’ve gotten to the place where, yes, we may have 50,000 teenagers working low-wage jobs but we have 100,000 parents.”
Tiffany Berord of Prince George’s County is one of those parents. She works at Wal-Mart and has two kids. She says that with both her wages and her husbands together, they can’t make ends meet, so they rely on entitlement programs for health care and nutrition assistance for her kids.
“Raising the minimum wage means a lot to me because it would take a step toward us being independent instead of being dependent on government assistance,” Berord said.
Tuesday’s hearing wasn’t the last of the debate. The Senate Finance committee will hear testimony on minimum wage bills Thursday.
