Raising Arizona Minimum Wage: Morally Right or Morally Wrong?

Here in Arizona we have a problem in the Arizona State House with Republican legislators like Sylvia Allen
PHOENIX — Calling the voter-approved measure morally wrong, a Republican-controlled Senate panel voted Monday to ask voters to reconsider the 2016 measure which is set to hike the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020.

Who else is on that panel - the Committee on Commerce and Public Safety - in the Arizona State Senate who approved by Monday’s 5-3 party-line vote - a new challenge this week to what voters approved in the last General Election?
Sen. Bob Worsley R-Mesa 
Sen. Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert
Allen told The Independent on Wednesday, that she feels that Prop 206 is far too burdensome on the small, locally-owned businesses that dominate rural Arizona. “Cost of living went up with prices. The minimum wage was never meant to support a family,” Allen said. That in a nutshell is her thinking.

Allen said the minimum wage hike has forced employers to reduce employee’s hours and raise prices, increasing the overall cost of living the wage hike was intended to address.
According to more details in this report  from The White Mountain Independent her questionable argument supporting small business is way off-the-mark for any kind of workable wage to deal with the real cost-of-living for workers in small business jobs that pay the mandated minimum wage.
Huh? Facts and data below challenge her assertions:

“What I see is we are going to destroy small business in Arizona and have nothing but chain stores,” Allen said. “Large corporations are not affected as much because they are already paying higher wages.”

Tomas Robles, co-director of Living United for Change in Arizona, the organization that spearheaded Prop 206, had his own take on the issue.

“These are lies,’’ he argued. Robles cited figures which show unemployment in Arizona is at the lowest rate in a decade and that employment in the traditionally low-paying leisure and hospitality sector not only has risen since the measure was approved, but has outpaced the national average.

Going even farther into where this strange thinking of a publicly-elected official, Allen said the issue goes beyond the effect on small businesses.

“Your business is your private property,’’ she told colleagues.

“No one has the right to tell a business what they have to pay to an individual,’’ Allen continued. “They don’t know the particulars of that business. They don’t know the liability that they carry.’’

> Echoing that theme by Sylvia Allen the Snowflake legislator presented Diana Links, who said she owns a catering firm which provides lunches for charter schools.
“My family took a risk, not the voters of Arizona,’’ she said.
> Sen. Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert, said the entire concept of having voters set a higher minimum wage is questionable.

“I believe I have a moral responsibility to be generous with my own money,’’ he said. “But I believe it’s completely immoral to be generous with other people’s money.’’

Supporters, however, saw the issue in terms of the broader good.

> Sen. Sean Bowie, D-Phoenix, told colleagues that the margin of victory for the measure is actually larger than most of them won their own seats. Nor was he swayed by arguments that a minimum wage hike is improper taking of money from one group and giving it to another.
> Sen. Bob Worsley, R-Mesa, went along with his GOP colleagues and voted to put the issue on the November ballot

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