What a Higher Minimum Wage Does for Workers and the Economy

Tom Wolfe himself couldn’t have imagined a better New York juxtaposition. Pizza, Pepsi, and hot chicken wings were out on the table one November evening at Strive New York, an agency in East Harlem that helps ex-convicts and other chronically unemployed people get and keep jobs. Luz Droz, 32, who has a 10-month-old son, explained that she was trying to turn things around after “a little situation in my life,” which turned out to be two prison sentences totaling eight years for dealing drugs and passing bad checks. She detests being on welfare but was turned down recently for a minimum-wage job at Burlington Coat Factory. “I thought I was going to get it,” she said. “Once I get a job, I’m off to the races.”

The same evening, one stop south on the 4 express subway line, waiters were serving hors d’oeuvres of tuna tartare and basil-slathered shrimp in the Upper East Side apartment of billionaire George Soros. The guest of honor was Soros’s fellow billionaire David Sainsbury, the former chairman of the family-founded British supermarket chain J Sainsbury. He has a new book, Progressive Capitalism. Sainsbury will probably never meet Luz Droz, but he, too, had minimum-wage employment on his mind. To compete with China, he said, “the West must race to the top” and not try to “screw down the wages.”