As college students enthusiastically apply for internships on Capitol Hill, they’ll be surprised to see how the intern pay is divided among party lines.
As hilarious as the concept of a $15 an hour minimum wage is, there is an attempt among Congressional Democrats to make it the law of the land. The “Raise the Wage Act of 2017” would increase the federal minimum wage by 107 percent, to $15 an hour.
Those backing the bill are lucky that they’ll never have to pay such a wage to their workers – because an Employment Policies Institute analysis showed that 95 percent of the House and Senate sponsors and co-sponsors of the bill hire interns for $0 an hour.
Almost all of the lawmakers who co-sponsored a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour also hired unpaid interns to supplement their staffs, a survey shows.
A report from the Employment Policies Institute reveals that 174 of the bill’s 184 co-sponsors, or 95 percent, hire interns who are paid nothing.
“It’s hypocritical to rally for a $15 minimum wage when these lawmakers don’t pay their own entry-level employees a cent,” said Michael Saltsman, managing director of the Employment Policies Institute.
And by the way, while five percent of those sampled do pay their interns, not a single one of them pays $15 an hour or above. Bernie Sanders, a man who describes any wage below $15 an hour as a “starvation wage,” pays his interns $12 an hour.
Studies over the years have found that increasing the minimum wage has an adverse effect on employment, particularly for low-skilled workers who are supposed to be helped the most, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
One survey concluded that two-thirds of the newer studies on the minimum wage, and 85 percent of the most convincing studies, found consistent evidence that increasing the minimum wage leads to job loss for low-skilled workers.
H/T The Daily Signal
If a $15 minimum wage is what they want, they should lead by example.
Of course, if they did that, they’d quickly learn just how unaffordable it really is.
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