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Kansas legislators want a pay increase. Those working minimum-wage jobs deserve one too.

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Kansas legislators want a pay increase. Those working minimum-wage jobs deserve one too.

Mar 19, 2023 | 4:33 am ET
By Mark McCormick
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Kansas legislators want a pay increase. Those working minimum-wage jobs deserve one too.
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Demonstrators participate in a Jan. 15, 2021, protest outside of McDonald's corporate headquarters in Chicago as part of a nationwide effort calling for minimum wage to be raised to $15 per hour. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Kansas legislators have figured out a way to boost their pay — through an independent body that would explore per diem and retirement benefits.

Reportedly, the nine-member, independent body would shield lawmakers from the appearance that they’re feathering their own nests, which do need some feathers. Legislative pay has stalled at $88.66 per day and an additional $157 per day for meals and lodging for about 20 years. Kansas lawmakers deserve a raise, but so do many of their constituents.

In fact, whenever lawmakers — state or federal — get a raise, we ought to also raise the minimum wage. Even though the legislative body exists in service of the public, wide swaths of the working-class public often do not have their interests sufficiently represented in our state bodies.

Merely suggesting an upward adjustment of the minimum wage, now standing at $7.25 an hour, elicits shrieks and howls from politicians who seem to empathize more with business owners over the needs of less-wealthy constituents.

To be fair, some caution is warranted.

Jeremy Hill, director of Wichita State’s Center for Economic Development, said any sudden or dramatic change to the minimum wage should be discouraged. Short term benefits to low-income earners could give way to inflationary pressures, Hill said. But he wasn’t categorically opposed to a minimum wage bump.

“Overall, the minimum wage is well below an inflation-adjusted level over time,” Hill said. “Increasing the minimum wage is reasonable, given the economic circumstances.”

Hill also said that most economists would agree that politicians should be removed from the decision process.

“An automated process would be preferred,” Hill said.

Agreed.

The proposed third-party committee on legislative pay would produce a December report that legislators could endorse or reject.

There is nobility, particularly here in Kansas where lawmakers make $22,000 a year, in taking a vow of poverty to serve civically. But maybe we are getting what we pay for: political leadership oddly obsessed with four or five trans athletes in our roughly 2 million-person populace, while ignoring public health care needs and juvenile justice reform.

– Mark McCormick

There is nobility, particularly here in Kansas where lawmakers make $22,000 a year, in taking a vow of poverty to serve civically. But maybe we are getting what we pay for: political leadership oddly obsessed with four or five trans athletes in our roughly 2 million-person populace, while ignoring public health care needs and juvenile justice reform.

No current lawmakers could serve on this independent panel, although at least two members should be former legislators. No current legislative staffers or lobbyists could serve either.

This feels like the kind of sensible governance we should expect all the time, not just when legislative livelihoods are at stake. We should scrub the politics out of many areas of civic life, this included. Since 1938, when the federal government established a base, hourly wage, which workers received that minimum and how much has remained a political issue.

How?

Any time a raise in the minimum wage gets mentioned, opponents say it would devour jobs.

While there may be truth in that statement, according to epi.org, the average top CEO compensation ratio to the average worker was 351 to one in 2020, up from 61 to 1 in 1989 and 21 to 1 in 1965.

How many jobs are we losing inside that low-road-capitalism ratio?

Employers can pay tipped employees $2.13 an hour in direct wages if that amount plus tips equals the federal minimum wage. This doesn’t seem fair.

Most of our systems favor the powerful at the expense of the poor. In fact, legal activist Bryan Stevenson has said our criminal justice system treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.

That’s why, as Hill and others have said, politics should be removed from the equation.

“Political interference tends to create problems,” Hill said.

Tying a minimum wage bump to any salary or benefit bump for state or federal legislators makes our system more fair, more equitable and more representative. To this point, fairness to the working class has proven elusive. We shouldn’t confuse the minimum wage with an actual living wage, for example.

That’s why groups like Fight For $15 have become a global movement in more than 300 cities on six continents. Low-wage employers make billions of dollars in profit while leaving the people essential to that work “struggling to survive,” according to its website.

The minimum wage does not increase automatically now. Congress must pass a bill, which the president signs into law. On the state level, legislators must do the same, and the bill would be signed by Gov. Laura Kelly.

But if lawmakers can figure out how to get themselves a raise — deserved or not — without political repercussions, then certainly they can figure out how to bring more fairness to the current minimum wage for the legions of working-class people they represent.

Mark McCormick is the former executive director of The Kansas African American Museum, a member of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and deputy executive director at the ACLU of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.