Skokie Welcomes Everyone...Except Low Wage Workers

At this week’s Skokie Board of Trustees meeting, Mayor Van Dusen sought to circumvent the Cook County minimum wage law just in time for the July 2019 increase to $12/hour. Two years ago, 80 percent of voters overwhelmingly supported a minimum wage increase. Now, with the annual increase from $11 to $12 an hour on the horizon, the mayor and his supporters are looking to run an end game around the Cook County law using the recent decision by the Illinois Assembly to increase the minimum wage statewide by 2025. And, while, I am happy to see that the Illinois Assembly is moving in the right direction on the minimum wage, let’s be real. $15 an hour in 2025 is not going to cut it. In fact, $11 an hour in 2019 does not cut it.

Let’s talk about the reality of increasing the minimum wage.

A popular (yet inaccurate) argument is that increasing the minimum wage threatens businesses by either making it difficult to sustain or discourages them from moving into our village. Yet, study after study has demonstrated that there is “little to no impact of minimum wage laws on employment or hours. In their meta-analysis of 64 studies.” Professors Dale Belman of Michigan State University and Paul Wolfson of Dartmouth College report that “a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage is statistically associated with a small 0.2 and 0.6 percent drop in employment or hours…[these changes] are too small… to have meaningful consequences in the dynamically changing labor markets of the United States”

Let’s look at this another way…

When you tally up all your basic living expenses, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a family of four (2 working parents and 2 kids) in Cook County needs to earn $85,638 a year to meet their basic standard of living. This calculation does not include savings or college funds or spring break trips to Cancun. Broken down, this means that a worker needs to earn $20.58 per hour to attain this standard of living. Minimum wage workers in Skokie are currently earning $11 hour – just under HALF this amount.

What does this mean for our community?

It means that many families are forced to make difficult choices such as:

• Work more than one job which means less time with their children including showing up for parent-teacher meetings or their children’s school activities;
• Relying on public health insurance and other social welfare programs to offset their low wages;
• Having to make difficult choices on how they spend their money – groceries vs. medicine, new shoes for their kids vs. groceries, etc.

Let’s be clear. July’s scheduled increase to $12 an hour is a far cry from $20.58 an hour, but it is an improvement. The increased wages in the pockets of workers results in increased spending in our community through taxes and consumer spending. It also means that your children’s friends can go to bed with full bellies and have access to medicine when they get sick.

Make your voice heard and tell Skokie leaders that you support the Cook County Minimum Wage.

Emily Twarog Miller, PhD
Skokie Resident and Associate Professor
School of Labor and Employment Relations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign