Asheville needs — and can pass — a real minimum wage

by Martin Ramsey November 3, 2014

Asheville’s workers are badly underpaid. Local government could change that by requiring businesses to pay a living wage. Will they?

Above: a map from the National Low Income Housing Coalition showing how many hours working for the current $7.25 minimum wage are required to afford an average apartment across the country. Asheville has both higher housing costs and lower wages than the North Carolina average. 

I’m here today to discuss the possibility of Asheville instituting a municipal minimum wage. Across the country, cities like Santa Fe, San Francisco and Seattle have led the way forward in raising the standard of living for working people, however haltingly. Much ink has been spilled about Asheville’s housing and affordability crises and I submit that a way to begin would be by giving Tunnel Road and the future employees of the hotel boom a direct raise.

Impossible, some believe, and considering the General Assembly has nixed Asheville and Durham’s living wage contracting laws I do understand such a position. The NC Justice Center states in a July 2014 white paper on options cities do have that a city or county does have the right to pass a minimum wage law that applies to all private employers, if enforcement is through civil penalty rather than litigation. 

So we are faced with an option, does Asheville press forward with meaningful progressive economic policy designed to aid a service and hospitality workforce that numbers in the many thousands? Or do we declare defeat before attempting anything worthwhile?

Whether it is economic policy, protecting the environment, education or whatever, I believe anything worth doing will draw the ire of N.C.’s right-wing legislature. Since we obviously have options for moving forward the true question becomes:

Does Council have the political will to do so? 

Most workers in low-wage jobs are adults, not teens. 

Women make up 60 percent of low-wage workers. People of color are over-represented in low-wage work given the shape of labor participation nationwide.

We should reject arguments that call for the inevitability of grinding, low-wage expansion painted as economic recovery. I, as a citizen and a worker, call on Asheville’s City Council to institute a municipal minimum wage floor, pegged to a real living wage standard, adjustable as necessary. 

If you lack the courage to do so, I implore you to place it as a ballot referendum in 2015, and let the people of our city decide. If Council fails to act to the benefit of its working class citizens, we should organize to bypass them and place it on the ballot ourselves.

These remarks were originally delivered to Asheville City Council on Oct. 28.

Martin Ramsey is a left political activist, a media maker, writer and a service industry worker. He lives in Asheville.

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