This week in the War on Workers: Albuquerque minimum wage measure under attack

Albuquerque, New Mexico, voters will have the chance to vote to raise the city's minimum wage on Tuesday, taking it from $7.50 to $8.50 in 2013, tying the minimum wage to inflation, and giving tipped workers a raise to 45 percent of the regular minimum wage in 2013 and 60 percent in 2014. It should go without saying that all the usual discredited arguments are being hauled out again trying to convince voters that this would be terrible, terrible, terrible.

City Council President Trudy Jones, for instance, throws several arguments up against the wall to see what sticks: raising the minimum wage would hurt small business! And the city budget, because it would cost more to hire lifeguards! (Wait, Albuquerque only pays its lifeguards minimum wage? Doesn't it seem like you'd want the person tasked with pulling you out of the water if you start to drown to be making a little more?) Also, she says, it would hurt teenagers, who are "the very group that the minimum wage was designed to help."

Oh, the teenager argument. Proponents of poverty wages love that one so much. It's supposed to make us think that people earning minimum wage are just doing it so they can buy pizza and movie tickets and designers jeans, luxuries that their parents won't cover. But in reality, a solid majority of minimum-wage workers are adults, just as a majority of minimum-wage workers and the people making just above minimum wage who would likely get a raise as an indirect effect of a minimum wage increase work full-time. These people need that extra dollar an hour to pay for rent and food, and in Albuquerque, they haven't seen a raise since 2009:

A gallon of milk that cost $2.69 in 2009 is now $3.50. According to a recent study by New Mexico Voices for Children, 40,000 workers'fully one-seventh of the city's workforce'would benefit from the increase. Nearly one-sixth of Albuquerque's population lives in poverty.

But what about small business? What about jobs? Wouldn't jobs be lost if the lowest-paid workers got a dollar raise? Well, no. Take this study of New England, where each state has a different minimum wage, and where states with higher minimum wages actually did better at keeping jobs during the recession and regaining them after it. That's just one of a number of studies showing that raising the minimum wage doesn't cause job loss, in fact. Instead, the extra money in the paychecks of the workers who are most likely to spend it, because they need it just to get by, provides economic stimulus. Small businesses get their share of that when their customers have more to spend.

Proponents of rock-bottom wages are always coming up with the same arguments that say that a minimum wage you can live on is something to fear. It's no different in Albuquerque, and it's as wrong there as it always is.

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