For Immediate Release: Tuesday, February 7, 2017
From the office of Montgomery County Councilmember Marc Elrich:
Montgomery County Councilmember Marc Elrich today went to Annapolis to testify in opposition to House Bill 317 that would prohibit local jurisdictions from enacting their own laws regarding minimum wages and benefits. Councilmember Elrich also sent a letter to Maryland State Delegate Dereck Davis, chair of the House Economic Matters Committee, stating his opposition to the bill. The complete text of his letter is included.
Montgomery County Councilmember
Marc Elrich’s statement opposing
General Assembly bill that would limit
local jurisdictions from enacting
minimum wage and benefits legislation
His letter says bill: ‘Would stand as a wall against
local governments trying to address local conditions
that profoundly affect their residents’
ROCKVILLE, Md., February 7, 2017—Montgomery County Councilmember Marc Elrich today went to Annapolis to testify in opposition to House Bill 317 that would prohibit local jurisdictions from enacting their own laws regarding minimum wages and benefits. Councilmember Elrich also sent a letter to Maryland State Delegate Dereck Davis, chair of the House Economic Matters Committee, stating his opposition to the bill.
In his letter stating his reasons for opposing the bill, Councilmember Elrich wrote: “I am happy to say that local jurisdictions in this state stand together in opposing the proposed legislation that would stand as a wall against local governments trying to address local conditions that profoundly affect their residents. We may all have different issues that rise to the forefront, but that reflects the different needs that each of our jurisdictions face and are trying to address. For the State to supersede local jurisdictions assumes that you know better than we do about what is occurring in our counties at the most local level.”
The complete text of Councilmember Elrich’s letter:
February 7, 2017
The Honorable Dereck E. Davis
Chair, House Economic Matters Committee
Lowe House Office Building, Room 231
Annapolis, Maryland 21401
Re: House Bill 317 – Labor and Employment - Wages and Benefits - Preemption of Local Authority
Dear Chairman Davis,
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today on the matter of preemption. I am happy to say that local jurisdictions in this state stand together in opposing the proposed legislation that would stand as a wall against local governments trying to address local conditions that profoundly affect their residents. We may all have different issues that rise to the forefront, but that reflects the different needs that each of our jurisdictions face and are trying to address. For the State to supersede local jurisdictions assumes that you know better than we do about what is occurring in our counties at the most local level.
One of the explicit targets of preemption is our County’s efforts to raise the minimum wage. While we do not have unanimity on the schedule we should adopt, my Council colleagues have agreed on the need to raise the minimum wage. That is because we are all aware of the consequences of having a large portion of our population subsisting on wages that are absolutely substandard and that do not reflect the costs of living in the D.C. Metropolitan area and in Montgomery County in particular. Put simply, we see the consequences of living poverty every day and we recognize that those consequences impact people’s lives and, frankly, impact our budgets.
For our residents, minimum wage jobs do not afford a decent life nor dignity in work. People work hard, often in the most unpleasant jobs available, but they do not get ahead on a minimum wage job. While it’s great to acknowledge hard work, in these cases its not just hard work – it’s endless work. And endless work is not good.
Low paid endless work has consequences.
People cannot afford decent and affordable housing, so they wind up trapped in over-crowded substandard housing. Families are crammed together in apartments and houses, often leaving government to turn a blind eye to poor conditions and over-crowding because we know that absent this housing the alternative is homelessness. Over-crowded and substandard housing has a negative impact on families and on children in particular.
Poverty wages are destabilizing to families. There are now plentiful studies that show that poverty creates anxiety and depression in adults and children. For adults, poverty helps foster parental arguments. The depression has been shown to affect people’s judgements when it comes to decision making. For children, poverty absolutely affects the sense of self-worth, perceptions about one’s place in the world and negatively impacts their school performance – which as we all know has life-time consequences. In Montgomery County we have more children on free and reduces lunch that the District of Columbia has children in school. These affects are not felt on the periphery, they are felt at the core of our community.
Poverty costs the government. We spend more and more on education interventions for children. We have lower class sizes in communities with higher poverty rates. We deal with the social and emotional struggles that our students bring to school and our counselors bear heavy workloads. We pay for poverty with our social services, sliding scales for county programs, housing programs, summer meal programs, school provided breakfasts, and a myriad of social services where the common denominator for many is poverty. Poverty is expensive and tax-payers foot the bill. I have visited our shelters where working people, people with real jobs, seek housing because they cannot afford an apartment, or cannot get an apartment because of damaged credit that left then unable to qualify for an apartment. Apartment owners keep records of tenants who are habitually late in their payments – which should not be a surprise when people are spending 50% or more of their income on housing – because they cannot make the full rent on one paycheck.
These are real things we deal with at the local level. These are problems because the substandard minimum wage allows businesses to shift what should be their costs onto the public, onto the taxpayers. We talk too much about the “cost” of minimum wage to businesses and not enough about the costs borne by the public to compensate for inadequate wages. We hear complaints about the speed of raising the wage, and nothing about how this is a product of the business communities success in decoupling the minimum wage from inflation which has led us to this point. And the minimum wage was never about starter jobs, not even at its inception. Even if you believe in starter jobs, how does that work unless you have starter rent, starter food prices, starter clothing prices, and starter fuel prices? Why is it that the starter notion only applies to wages?
So I ask you to look at the human face of poverty and to allow jurisdictions like ours to address this issue in the most effective way we can by going to the root. We bear the fiscal costs, we deal with the social, emotional and developmental costs, and we know that lifting people out of poverty is life-changing, community-strengthening and simply the right thing to do. Do not pass this bill.
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Sincerely,
| Marc Elrich |
| Councilmember |
| At-Large |