Morgan Chalfant reports for the Washington Free Beacon on an alternative to big-government ideas designed to help women.
A women’s group is rolling out an extensive set of policy proposals aimed at boosting job opportunities and flexibility for female American workers without expanding government.
The Independent Women’s Forum, a nonprofit research and educational group, on Tuesday unveiled an economic report that lays out a series of policy reforms that present alternatives to “one-size-fits-all” proposals to help women achieve success at a time when the women’s labor force participation rate is at a nearly 30-year low.
A boost to the minimum wage and other elements of the progressive agenda would hurt American women in the workforce by forcing companies to cut jobs or discouraging them from hiring female workers, the authors of “Working for Women: A Modern Agenda for Improving Women’s Lives” argue. …
… “A higher minimum wage would mean some women would get a raise, but others would lose their jobs as businesses seek to compensate for higher employment costs. When employment costs go up, businesses have to find a way to compensate—they can do that by trying to raise prices on consumer, cutting jobs, cutting take home pay, or reducing benefits. All of these changes are bad news for women,” Carrie Lukas, the Independent Women’s Forum managing director and the primary author of the report, told the Washington Free Beacon.
“Advocates of a higher minimum wage like to pretend that somehow the laws of economics don’t apply when it comes to wages, but it’s a simple fact—if you raise the price of something that means the people can afford less of it. And when laws make it more expensive to hire a worker, the result if fewer jobs,” Lukas continued.
Instead, the experts argue in favor of the expansion of the so-called “sub-minimum wage,” a $4.25 an hour wage for employees under the age of 20 to receive during the first 90 days of employment. The provision allows young workers to get a “foot in the door,” the report argues, and should be expanded to include those 25 years or younger and those who have been unemployed for 90 days or more.
