Your Guide to Deciding on the $15 Minimum Wage

Make some room in your wallet, Clevelanders — because you might be getting a raise. Activist group Raise Up Cleveland is pushing for a minimum wage increase in Cleveland from $8.10 to $15 per hour and will attempt to put the issue on the November ballot. However, the outlook may not be all green. Critics, including City Council president Kevin Kelley and Mayor Frank Jackson, argue it may actually lead to job losses. The clash has gotten so ugly that Raise Up Cleveland and their Service Employees International Union District 1199 backers bought mobile truck billboards calling for Kelley’s ouster. Two prominent voices in the debate make the case for and against the hike that Clevelanders may soon be voting on.

Against // Ward 14 city councilman Brian Cummins will be voting against the Cleveland measure, which he says could put more people out of work. While a Peace Corps administrator during the Bill Clinton-Al Gore years, he saw firsthand what happens when costs rise and revenues tighten. “You clearly have to start cutting, you have to start laying people off,” he says. “That’s a reality.” Earlier this year, he proposed a compromise that would gradually raise the minimum wage to $12. But his idea, and a similar $15 plan by councilman Jeff Johnson, hit a legislative wall. City Council will likely not modify the legislation, so the question of whether to immediately raise the wage will be up to the voters. But Cummins hopes Raise Up Cleveland will consider increasing the wage incrementally instead of all at once. “If they went for $15 like bam, I think it would be disastrous,” he says. “But that’s their choice to make.”

For // The Rev. Jawanza Colvin, pastor of Olivet Institutional Baptist Church and a leader for Raise Up Cleveland, says that bumping the minimum wage to $15 could help lift impoverished citizens. Raising the wage could also end up saving taxpayers money in the long term. “Today the minimum wage is barely sufficient for an individual and certainly not sufficient for a family in America,” Colvin says. “As a result of that, we have to subsidize our minimum wage workers with a social welfare economy.” He rejects the assertion that increasing the wage could lead to job losses. “There’s no evidence when we’ve seen communities phase in a road to $15 that it will in any way stall the economy,” Colvin says. “It’s the right thing to do.”