John Hosier just became the poster boy for raising the minimum wage.
It’s the kind of December evening when the Hosier family might want to stay home.
At work all day, John Hosier has been resting on the living-room couch. Tina, his wife, has had her hands full taking care of their two young children. Yet, here they are, rolling 18-month-old Rose in a stroller with 5-year-old Donald tagging along, on a half-mile walk to the Salvation Army Church in Muskogee, Okla.
It’s not just a place of worship and fellowship. The Salvation Army’s affiliated store offers discounted goods and employs Mr. Hosier full time. The $6-an-hour job is the family’s sole paycheck, which amounts to barely $200 a week. Even with government aid, such as food stamps, the family is on poverty’s doorstep. “If it wasn’t for the Salvation Army, I don’t know where I’d be,” Hosier says.
That’s the same Salvation Army who pays their CEO an annual salary of $166,850 a year. It’s not like they don’t have money. Obviously the Salvation Army–a charitable organization–could pay John Hosier more if the Salvation Army chose to, yet it does not. If an organization devoted to helping the poor doesn’t consider his skill set to be more than $6 an hour, why in the heck should the government force them to pay him more?
Now, it could be that the Salvation Army pays John Hosier a crappy wage because they’re not really devoted to helping the poor, preferring instead to spend the monies donated to them for other, darker, reasons–in which case people should feel free to declare that they’re not giving another penny to the SA until they pay a living wage to their employees. If enough individuals joined in, such a boycott might actually accomplish something over time, by hitting Salvation Army generals in the pocketbook. A drop in donations is a restriction on income, and managers of charitable organizations with a decreasing income don’t stay managers for long
All a raise in the minimum wage does is cut the outflow of Salvation Army dollars, while leaving the incoming flow of donations untouched. Part of that outflow is John Hosier’s $6 an hour. Another outflow is the ostensible mission of the Salvation Army, housing the homeless, feeding the poor, yadda, yadda, yadda. Managerial salaries, including W. Todd Bassett’s 166k a year, are a third outflow. Which of the three do you think will be the least likely to be cut in response to a raise in the minimum wage?
Which of the three monetary outflows will be the most likely to be cut? Given that a large percentage of Salvation Army tasks are done by “beneficiaries,” people who compete directly with John Hosier for Salvation Army dollars and can legally do the same tasks he for performs for less money, he’s more likely to suffer, rather than benefiting, from an increase in the minimum wage.
At which point he’ll be a great poster boy for the argument that raising the minimum wage doesn’t help America’s poor at all, though I bet that job will engender considerably less media attention than his current one does.
Anna says:
Where do you get your information that SA pays their leader the amount you state? I don’t believe that is factual.
11 January 2007, 2:13 amKehaar says:
That’s in the Forbes article linked in the post.
11 January 2007, 9:55 amBigwig says:
As Kehaar pointed out, the Salvation Army salary amount was taken from Forbes. It’s actually kinda low in comparison to the remunerations of other charitable foundation heads.
Samaritan’s Purse, for instance, pays W. Franklin Graham III $349,529 a year.
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God
11 January 2007, 11:47 amScorpio says:
Well, the head of the SA makes about as much as a Congressman — and our po’ boy is not compelled to pay part of *his* salary, like he is compelled to part with tax money so the Congresscritter can make his booty.
The best thing that can be done is to hitch the minimum wage to Congressional salaries, so that the stolen-from can at least benefit a bit every time the trough-feeders get a raise.
11 January 2007, 4:26 pm