For Immediate Release: Tuesday, July 25, 2017
Montgomery County Councilmember Marc Elrich's comments on
Reintroduction of Minimum Wage Bill
ROCKVILLE, Md., July 25, 2017—The Montgomery County Council today introduced Bill 28-17, Human Rights and Civil Liberties – County Minimum Wage – Amount – Annual Adjustment. Councilmember Marc Elrich is the lead sponsor of the bill.
Councilmember Elrich, who serves as chair of the Council’s Public Safety Committee and serves on the Education Committee, issued the following statement summarizing the need for the legislation:
I want to thank my colleagues for joining me as original cosponsors of this bill to raise the hourly minimum wage to $15. While this bill is similar to one that the Council passed earlier this year, which was vetoed, there are two important additions aimed at helping nonprofits and organizations that serve Medicaid recipients in day settings.
I know that some of my colleagues had been hesitant to support the $15 minimum wage. I think this revised bill addresses some of the major concerns.
I do want to focus on why I’m reintroducing this bill. We are all aware of the consequences of having a large portion of our population subsisting on substandard wages that do not reflect the costs of living in the Washington metropolitan area and in Montgomery County in particular.
This legislation is not about the dollar amount. It is about the broad impacts of a minimum wage. It is not about whether someone flipping a burger deserves to be paid $15 per hour for that work. It is about whether she can use that wage to support herself and her family.
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 it's not just hard work – it’s endless work. And endless work is not good. Low paid endless work has consequences.
Poverty wages are destabilizing to families.
People cannot afford decent and affordable housing, so they wind up trapped in over-crowded substandard housing, which hurts families, especially children.
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 percent or more of their limited income on housing – because they cannot make the full rent on one paycheck.
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 judgments 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.
Poverty costs the government.
In Montgomery County we have more children on free and reduced meals than 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.
We spend more and more on education interventions for children. 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 taxpayers foot the bill.
These are real issues we deal with at the local level.
A substandard minimum wage allows businesses to shift what should be their costs onto the public and onto the taxpayers. This bill addresses the concerns of small businesses by giving them more time to adjust, but it moves in the right and necessary direction.
We talk too much about the cost of minimum wage to businesses and not enough about the costs borne by the public and by families to compensate for inadequate wages.
I hope that we will be able to pass this bill with strong support. I look forward to working with the County Executive and all my colleagues.
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Release ID: 17-238