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Right now, the city of Berkeley is considering an increase in its minimum wage. A higher minimum wage would help thousands of residents afford the city’s high costs of basic living necessities, like food and rent. It would also give our university’s students a fighting chance to pay for college.

I am fortunate enough not to be in a situation where I need to depend on a minimum-wage job to support myself during school. But as a Cal student and a former restaurant worker, I know how difficult it is to maintain such a job while taking a full course load. Living on those wages while paying for tuition would be nearly impossible. Unfortunately, for many of my classmates, surviving on low-wage jobs is a reality.

A lot of people don’t realize that putting yourself through college is much more difficult now than it was 20 years ago. Today, tuition prices are higher than ever, and students are struggling to survive on a severely outdated minimum wage.

A couple decades ago, the total amount of fees due for the 1994-95 academic year at UC Berkeley was $4,346.50 for an in-state student, as reported in the fee schedule archive on UC Berkeley’s Office of the Registrar website. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI inflation calculator, that amount of money has the same buying power as $6,848.35 in 2013. That’s half of the $12,864 an in-state UC Berkeley student is going to have to pay this year. This hefty price tag doesn’t even include textbooks or housing.

In 1994, California’s minimum wage was $4.25 an hour, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations website. That would be would be worth $6.70 today, as measured by the CPI inflation calculator. If the 1994 minimum wage worth $6.70 doubled in constant dollars like UC Berkeley’s tuition costs, students today would be paid more than $12 an hour. It’s absurd that the minimum wage has only increased from what would be worth $6.70 today to just $8 — or $1.30 in constant dollars over the last two decades.

In an ideal world, a full-time student would be able to work 25 hours a week, every week, earning $10,400 for the entire year. However, a more realistic picture would take into consideration all of a student’s responsibilities outside of class: doing homework, studying for midterms and finals, writing research papers and participating in extracurricular activities and internships. These overwhelming priorities are vital for a successful career after graduation, but they often make sleeping, eating and sometimes even maintaining personal hygiene difficult to attain for most college kids.

Furthermore, anyone who has ever worked a minimum-wage job knows it isn’t easy, especially in a restaurant. Contrary to popular belief, this type of job can be incredibly fast-paced, intense and exhausting. Customers don’t often realize that their server has been running around like crazy, constantly rushing to get the next order out for the last five hours. They don’t know their server’s friendly smile could be masking the aching of tired feet as well as anxiety about an upcoming midterm.

That smile is bright and cheerful because getting decent tips could mean the ability to afford groceries that week. Still, there’s never any real certainty or stability in tips, especially for servers at casual restaurants. Tipped workers depend on the noncompulsory generosity of strangers, which can vary greatly among restaurants. At least tipped workers in California can rely on the guarantee of the minimum wage; tipped workers in some other states are paid as little as $2.13 an hour.

However, here in Berkeley, we have an opportunity to do better. Adding a couple of dollars to the minimum wage isn’t a lofty or outrageous goal; it is a small but vital change that would better the lives of our poorest workers.

Raising the minimum wage for everyone isn’t an attempt to run beloved local businesses out of town either. A higher minimum wage would increase the spending power of tens of thousands of people, including Berkeley’s students — one of the city’s largest consumer demographics. It’s a hard fact that operating costs are getting higher and harder for business owners to maintain. But that also means rent and food costs are increasing for their employees as well.

Our college students and minimum-wage workers need higher wages, especially here in Berkeley. We desperately need a higher city minimum wage for everybody, including tipped workers. The cost of living in Berkeley is much higher than it is in the rest of California. It is far too much to ask of anyone to survive on $8 an hour. It’s completely unrealistic to expect a stagnant wage to adequately provide for the constantly rising costs of going to college and living a decent life.

Shannon Lin is a second year student at UC Berkeley.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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Katie Holmes/Staff

Four years ago this week, we saw the federal minimum wage rise to a meager $7.25 an hour. The state minimum wage has been stuck at $8.00 for five years. For a full-time worker, this amounts to just $16,640 — far below the national poverty level for a family of four ($23,550) and much less a living wage in the Bay Area.

Over the past three years, our Raise the Wage movement has talked with thousands of Bay Area voters about this issue. When asked whether they support an increase in their city’s minimum wage to at least $10 an hour, people overwhelmingly say “Yes!” On street corners and at grocery stores, there’s excitement and support. In community college classrooms, it’s not unusual for us to sign up every single student as a supporter, with many volunteering their time, labor and personal resources to the cause. Last November in San Jose, 60 percent of voters in this politically moderate city said yes to an increase to $10 for all workers — despite being bombarded with hundreds of thousands of advertising dollars predicting doom and catastrophe if the measure passed.

Katie Holmes/Staff

Why such overwhelming support? Because average voters have a basic sense of fairness. They understand that people who work hard and play by the rules should make a decent living. They understand that the challenges of small and local businesses cannot be solved by squeezing our most vulnerable workers to do more with less. They understand that when you give a raise to a low-wage worker, most of that money goes right back into the local economy.

If you listened to the naysayers, you would believe that poverty is simply an impossible problem to address. But if you talk to the 40,000 working people in San Jose who now have $4,000 a year more to spend supporting their families, you’ll hear a different story. You’ll hear about having more money to put food on their tables, to pay their rent and to put gas in their cars so that they can get to work and school.

We have already proven that we do not have to wait for some distant and watered-down solution from Sacramento or Washington. We can lead the way right here in the Bay Area to provide a high-road model of economic development and anti-poverty measures.

Last April, Berkeley City Council took an important first step when Mayor Tom Bates introduced a resolution directing the city manager to draft an ordinance that would set Berkeley’s minimum wage at $10.55 an hour and build in an automatic cost-of-living increase pegged to the region’s consumer price index. This was a bold measure that matched the progressive values of this city. Mayor Bates’ measure passed with a unanimous vote by the City Council. Now, the city’s citizen labor commission is studying the issue, receiving public comment and preparing its recommendation for council action. A vote could come as soon as this fall.

Last week, 100 community members, low-wage workers and friends rallied in downtown Berkeley and marched to the labor commission meeting to encourage Berkeley City Council to continue on its high-road path in raising the minimum wage. Please join our efforts. You can contact us at www.raisethewageEB.org.

Nicky Gonzalez Yuen is the founder of Raise the Wage East Bay. He is the chair of the political science department at De Anza College and was on the steering committee for the San Jose Minimum Wage Campaign.

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The Republican Party’s best possible argument against government intervention in the economy is that it has negative unintended consequences — in particular, that it harms the vulnerable.

Of course, this isn’t usually the case — government programs, from Pell Grants to food stamps, have helped expand opportunity and lift millions of Americans out of poverty. But historically, Republicans have done better when they emphasized the adverse effects government programs could have on the poor, not the undue burdens they place on the rich.

This was how economist Milton Friedman, the libertarian icon and public intellectual who helped move public opinion to the right during the Reagan years, framed conservative economic policy proposals. “The fact is that programs that are labeled as being for the poor, for the needy, almost always have effects exactly the opposite of those their well-intentioned sponsors intend them to have,” he once said. The reason the Republican Party is in such dire straits is that it can no longer credibly deliver this message.

Consider President Obama’s proposal to increase the minimum wage to $9 per hour. This is, from an economic perspective, a questionable proposal, as Christina Romer, a UC Berkeley economics professor and former chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, argued in Sunday’s New York Times. “It’s far from obvious what an increase would accomplish,” she wrote, calling a minimum-wage hike a “half-measure” and pointing out that there are far more effective anti-poverty measures available.

In other words, there are doubts among experts on both sides as to whether a $9 minimum wage will actually help the poor or at least as to whether it is the best way to do so. But do any voters seriously believe that the Republican Party opposes a minimum-wage increase because it cares about the well-being of low-skilled workers? Of course not. Republicans appear to only oppose a minimum-wage hike because they care about the well-being of managers and CEOs.

After all, this is a party whose presidential nominee derided 47 percent of Americans as moochers. This is a party whose House majority leader, Eric Cantor, tweeted last Labor Day, “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” (As Paul Krugman noted, “on a day set aside to honor workers, all Mr. Cantor could bring himself to do was praise their bosses.”) The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which effectively speaks for the party’s business and financial wing, has a long-running view that taxes should be decreased on the wealthy and raised on the poor and lower-middle class, whom it has called “lucky duckies” because of their lower tax burden. It’s clear to voters that the Republicans don’t oppose a minimum-wage hike because they believe they are protecting the poor from a well-intentioned but harmful regulation.

To be clear, though I share Romer’s caution, I don’t have a strong position as to whether Obama’s proposed minimum-wage hike is sound policy. But it is a sweeping proposal, one that would affect millions of Americans, and it deserves, at the very least, careful scrutiny from an intelligent center-right party. Instead, it is being stonewalled by an insular, far-right party that refuses to offer any alternatives. And our democracy suffers for it.

The minimum-wage debate — which I think Republicans are likely to lose in the long run — is emblematic of a need for the Republican Party to adopt a more populist message through changes in style and substance. Instead of talking about how a minimum-wage hike would harm heroic job-creators, they should focus on the very real risk that it will increase unemployment rates for low-skilled workers by artificially raising the cost of labor. Of course, for this argument to be credible, it would need to be delivered in the context of a broader, genuinely populist conservative agenda, like a more family-friendly tax policy, an expanded child tax credit and a less Wall Street-friendly economic regime.

Our parties exist to check one another’s excesses. Friedman was at least partially right that for all progressivism’s good intentions, it sometimes backs economic policies that have harmful, unintended consequences. The Republican Party is currently not a serious party. But it has in the past and can in the future perform the essential function of checking liberal over-reach. Unfortunately, if its response to the minimum-wage debate is any indication, this won’t happen anytime soon.

Jason Willick is the assistant opinion page editor. Contact him at jwillick@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @jawillick.

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