The higher you raise the Minimum Wage, the more jobs move overseas where the wages are even lower...
Posted on 10/16/2002 4:53:53 PM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
WATERVILLE — A million dollars in three days.
That is what the head of the nonprofit Made in the USA Foundation says is needed to save the C.F. Hathaway Co., which is scheduled to close for good on Friday.
Foundation head Joel D. Joseph plans to meet today in Waterville with political and business leaders committed to saving Hathaway to make a final plea for help in buying the venerable shirt company.
The 1:30 p.m. meeting will be held at the Mid-Maine Chamber of Commerce office at 1 Post Office Square.
Joseph announced the last-ditch effort Tuesday as more of Hathaway's workers were laid off. Most of the more than 200 workers at the Water Street factory are already gone.
The obvious question: Is it too late?
"No, it's not too late," Joseph said Tuesday, shortly after the announcement was made. "As long as the equipment is still there, and it is."
Joseph said another $1 million from private investors will give the foundation-backed effort to save Hathaway enough money to both buy and operate the company.
As for what would happen after the initial money runs out, Joseph said he is not worried.
"We think it will be self-sufficient after that," Joseph said, "We think it will be profitable."
Figures on the purchase price for the shirt company have never been released by either the foundation or Hathaway's owner, Windsong Allegiance Apparel Group of Westport, Conn.
It was unclear Tuesday how many legislators and business leaders were planning to attend Wednesday's meeting.
Contacted Tuesday, Hathaway Chief Executive Officer Donald J. Sappington said he was not aware of the meeting planned by the foundation, and so had no plans to attend.
Sappington said most workers at the shirt factory have already been laid off, and none will be left after Friday other than a few managers and distribution workers.
"There will be a handful of us here for awhile because there's still inventory that needs to be shipped, probably through the end of November," Sappington said.
With the work force mostly gone, Sappington said any eleventh-hour bailout financed by the foundation would have to start from the ground up.
"Well, it's too late to stop the closing, but it's not too late if somebody wanted to take the equipment and building and restart — you can always do that," Sappington said.
Kimberly N. Lindlof, president of the Mid-Maine Chamber of Commerce, said the chamber's involvement in Wednesday's meeting is very limited.
"I'm not running it, and I don't know a lot about it," Lindlof said. "I'm providing the physical location for it and I will be in attendance."
The Made in the USA Foundation is a nonprofit national organization with goals that include promoting American-made products and preserving remaining manufacturing jobs in the nation.
Joseph got involved in efforts to the save the 165-year-old Hathaway company after he read of Windsong's plans to shut it down.
In June, Joseph announced the foundation was organizing an effort to buy Hathaway, preserve its workers' jobs, and expand operations. By summer's end, he had gone so far as to to set up retail outlet stores selling American made products including Hathaway shirts in Freeport and Washington, D.C.
But the effort never attracted enough investors to succeed, and even the foundation's announcement about Wednesday's meeting was sent out under a "last chance" heading."
Jonathan Humphrey can be reached at 861-9252 or jhumphrey@centralmaine.com
The higher you raise the Minimum Wage, the more jobs move overseas where the wages are even lower...
So your "solution" is to bring Third World wage rates & benefits to the United States?
Abolish the 40-hour work week?
Eliminate time-and-a-half for overtime?
Do you honestly believe that Americans should have the same standard of living as people in China, the Phillipines, Indonesia, Honduras, Colombia, Angola, Somalia, Peru, etc. etc. etc.???
"So your "solution" is to bring Third World wage rates & benefits to the United States?" - Willie Green
Do you want such low-paying jobs to stay in America or relocate overseas?
Would you prefer that the areas of America in which unemployment exceeds 35% (e.g. some inner cities, parts of rural Appalachia, and several American Indian reservations) be denied those jobs, or would it be better for firms to relocate to those poor areas of America to take advantage of willing laborers and low-wages?
It is the Minimum Wage that prevents those areas of America from beating out foreign nations for those jobs.
Your options are therfore limited to either keeping people unemployed, earning nothing while the Minimum Wage law prevents them from competing on price, or earning something and being productive without that law.
Sadly, I suspect that you'd rather keep the poor indians and mountain families poor and unemployed. It seems to be OK by you for American jobs to be moved overseas just so long as the unemployed don't get stuck earning less than Minimum Wage.
But what you haven't taken into account is that earning nothing IS less than earning Minimum Wage.
Realistically, of course, the Minimum Wage is here to stay. Any rational, national debate on the subject would crush any politician who dared to aid the unemployed in America. The subject of the Minimum Wage has been demagogged into something that is political suicide to change.
So we'll keep the Minimum Wage and our low-paying jobs will keep moving overseas away from it.
No, my options are not restricted to those.
Our Founders provided others, including the ability to impose tariffs on imported goods while lowering other forms of domestic taxation.
"The prohibiting duties we lay on all articles of foreign manufacture which prudence requires us to establish at home, with the patriotic determination of every good citizen to use no foreign article which can be made within ourselves without regard to difference of price, secures us against a relapse into foreign dependency."
--Thomas Jefferson to Jean Baptiste Say, 1815.
You are correct to point out that low tarrifs could be placed on some low-wage products such that some areas of America could successfully compete for the jobs to make them AND that we wouldn't grow complacent behind too high a level of protectionism (a very dangerous sort of heroin-like drug to use for "curing" some forms of global competition).With the proper tarrifs in place, the Minimum Wage law would only harm the ability of America's rural low-wage areas to compete with American cities, not with competing only with foreign nations as I had said earlier.
Your point is well taken.
However, the national Minimum Wage law still gives rural areas an unfair disadvantage compared to America's urban workers. The costs of living are simply too different between American cities and American boonies to justify a one-wage-fits all minimum law.
Homes in Washington, D.C. cost far more than in rural Alabama, for instance, yet those unemployed in rural Alabama can't compete on the price of their labor. No, the unemployed in rural Alabama are forced by the Minimum Wage law to either remain unemployed or else charge at least as much as the minimum in D.C.
How do you figure that?
Population density drives up land values (and local taxes) in urban areas, returning the advantage back to rural areas.
And rural areas have a natural advantage in food production.
The minimum wage is the SAME for rural areas as it is for urban areas, even though it costs less for a worker to live in rural areas.So rural workers, who have lower costs of living, are prohibited by the minimum wage law from selling their labor at a more competitive rate than urban workers.
Thus, the minimum wage law penalizes rural areas, some pockets of which can have unemployment as high as 35%.
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