Less is not more when it comes to minimum wage. Less is not enough for the women earning it but perhaps too much for the women paying it.
Women are the largest segment of the work force affected by the Congressional debate over the raising of minimum wage from a current base of $4.25 an hour to a $5.15 hourly rate during the next two years.
According to the Census Bureau, 4.1 million workers earn minimum wage in this country; one-half to two-thirds are women. With 80 percent of the jobs paying minimum wage in the traditionally female-populated services sector, many of the women holding these jobs are what economists call the “working poor,” including single mothers and women working part time to augment the family income.
But not only women working for hourly wages are affected. Some employers believe a minimum wage hike will force them to lay off workers, reduce the hours of those remaining and/or raise the prices of products and services.
According to the National Association of Women Business Owners, women own 38.5 percent of businesses in the U.S. and will own 50 percent of all domestic businesses by the year 2000. This year women-owned businesses already have generated $2.3 trillion in sales, according to the National Foundation for Women Business Owners.
Women-owned businesses employ more than 15.5 million people, according to NAWBO, with more than 50 percent having five or more employees; 10 percent of these companies have payrolls of more than $500,000 a year.
Joanne Perpoli, owner of Nu-Style Shade Co. Inc., a Chicago lampshade manufacturer, concedes that minimum wage “isn’t enough to live on.” But if an increase in minimum wage is mandated, many small businesses would have no recourse but to cut the number of employees, she says.
Perpoli says she pays her 12 employees — eight of whom are women heading households — a starting pay of $5. But if the minimum wage increases, Perpoli contends her ability to compete fairly is hurt.
Increased wages, rising health-care costs and payroll taxes are all factored into the cost of her product, she says. “But what is difficult is trying to fight the Far East imports because the cost of labor makes my product not very competitive at the wholesale level. It should not be a government decision but a business owner’s decision.”
As a teenage mother, Holly Salgado says she had no choice but to work minimum-wage jobs at first, including a stint at McDonald’s and one later as a bank teller. “I survived only because I had the help of my family,” says Salgado, who lives in Cicero with her two children.
Now an administrative aide at a non-profit organization in Chicago, Salgado says, “If I were to go to work today for minimum wage and I needed child care, all I would do is work to pay the babysitter.”
“Today, minimum wage gives someone (less than) $10,000 a year,” says Phyllis Apelbaum, founder and CEO of Arrow Messenger Service Co., in Chicago, which employs 250 people. Apelbaum hires entry-level telephone operators for $7 to $8 an hour, and says, “My experience in business has taught me that the greatest asset I have are my people.”
Margo Asta, owner of a downtown White Hen Pantry who starts her workers at $5.50 an hour, agrees, saying she could not pay her 20 workers the current minimum wage because “they would laugh at me.”
The only way Chicagoan Diane Konwinski says she has been able to live on what she has been earning in retail is by living at home and saving everything she can. Konwinksi, a college student, started working part time in a Skokie party goods store for $5 an hour in 1993 and now is making $8 an hour as a supervisor. “I couldn’t live on minimum wage and live outside my (family’s) house,” she says.
A single mother with three children, Maria Cruz earns $6.25 an hour part time at a major Chicago department store. When she was married 13 years ago, she worked for minimum wage at a glove factory and says she could “only survive” with her husband’s income added to the pot.
No longer married, Cruz says she can only work part time because of the high cost of child care and the special needs of her son, who is developmentally delayed.
“Full time would be better,” Cruz says, “but I just can’t afford it.”
