One innocent afternoon in the spring of 1958, as I'm playing sandlot baseball on Marmon Avenue in Northwest Baltimore, I am approached by a certain Mr. Berlin, a complete stranger, who asks if I wish to make more money than I have ever in my entire life imagined.
I am, at this time, not quite 13 years old. Never in this brief existence have I made any money at all, except for the 75 cents a week my father gives me in allowance, which I am negotiating (through the old ploy of begging and whining) to raise to a dollar.
"What do I have to do?" I inquire of this Mr. Berlin.
"Paper boy," he says.
And so, for the next 10 months, May through February, in TC suffocating city heat and numbing cold, six afternoons a week plus Sunday mornings when I rise at 5 and deliver the old News Post and Sunday American across the huge Seton Apartment complex plus surrounding neighborhoods, and evenings every other week going door-to-door attempting to collect payment from these subscribers, quite a few of whom manage quite successfully to dodge me, I am what is known in the marketplace as gainfully employed.
For $14.
Every 2 weeks.
This $14 figure is reached, more or less (usually less) by multiplying the 1 1/2 cents I make from every newspaper I deliver. In other words, it is a commission deal, and I mention it now because, after 10 months, someone in the winter of 1959 informs me of a phrase I had never heard before but which will echo into our present national debate.
Minimum wage.
Why work for that piffling $14, I am told, when you could be working for a minimum wage salary. Thus, a few years later begins my rich and legendary career, which includes making aluminum ladders in a West Baltimore paint factory ("Son," the foreman sadly told me as we departed, "you'll never be a ladder maker"); a roofer at Bainbridge Naval Base ("Son," said the foreman as we departed, "you'll never be a roofer"); and other jobs whose common characteristics were the "Son, you'll never be a . . ." parting lecture and, most important, the minimum wage.
It was $1.25 when I started and, over the years and the jobs, it went all the way to $1.60 an hour. And now, I notice by the noise coming from Washington, D.C., there's much talk of raising it again. This time, to $5.15 an hour.
Which, as a certain Mr. Berlin once told me, as he prepared to offer me $14 every two weeks, is more money than some people could ever imagine.
Congress, for example. Certain members think a minimum wage of $5.15 an hour is completely unimaginable. They think such a raise, from the current $4.25 an hour (which hasn't moved since 1991, though the cost of living certainly has), will unfairly strap employers. They think these employers might have to raise prices in order to afford this pay raise and, anyway, they think the government should keep its hands out of the private marketplace.
Isn't this a fine piece of business? These are the same politicians currently wishing to dismantle the entire welfare system. Work hard, they say. Play by the rules, they say. Even though, while saying this, they acknowledge that the minimum wage pays less than a combination of various welfare, health and tax benefits. So where's the incentive to work?
In some poor neighborhoods, not much. The McDonald's jobs, the Kmart jobs, are seen as chump change, particularly compared with certain profitable lures of the street. But there's another issue here, frequently overlooked: The majority of minimum wage workers aren't poor, they're middle class. They're teen-agers or spouses. Once, we thought of middle class people as comfortable. Now, they're one slim floor above the poor and not so certain to stay there.
So the minimum wage issue has to do with young people making a few dollars while going to school, yeah, but it's also about learning the discipline of work and taking a first step toward independence. And it's about spouses providing a second income to stay above the poverty line.
The current minimum wage is one step behind reality. Those who want government to butt out are the same ones who wonder why so many young people show disdain for the job market -- and who, back in 1958, would have heard of a job paying $14 every two weeks and thought it was just fine.