Life at $7.25 an Hour

CAPTION: Robert Iles works for $7.25 an hour in Atchison, Kansas - the rate that is likely to become the nation's new minimum wage. Robert Iles has his own version of a dollar's meaning, learned last February when store owner Jack Bower (left back) took him aside and said he would be getting a pay raise to $7.25. ?Okay,? Iles remembers replying, wanting to seem business-like. ?But inside I was doing the cha-cha-cha,? he said. ?It was like going from lower class to lower-middle class. (David Finkel - The Washington Post)

"That'll be $16.70," the clerk said to him, and instead of correcting this, Iles gladly took the change.

Thirty cents, suddenly got.

The Wal-Mart Factor

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Iles drove past the Atchison Inn, where starting pay is $5.15, past Movie Gallery, where it's also $5.15, and stopped in front of Country Mart, the fanciest grocery store in town, where high school students start at $5.15 and, according to owner Dennis Garrett, "some of them aren't worth that."

A few days earlier, Garrett had gotten a letter from a lobbying consortium called the Coalition for Job Opportunities, urging him to write Congress to protest the minimum-wage increase. It came in the form of a letter already written, to which he merely had to add his congressman's name and send it off to Washington. "We are very concerned," the letter began, and it was signed by 25 organizations.

The most conspicuous signature, though, was the one that wasn't there, that of Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, with 1.3 million workers. Wal-Mart won't say how many of those workers earn less than what the new minimum wage would be, but if the Atchison store is an example, starting pay is $6 an hour.

Nonetheless, in October 2005, Wal-Mart chief executive H. Lee Scott Jr. said in a speech that the "U.S. minimum wage of $5.15 an hour has not been raised in nearly a decade, and we believe it is out of date with the times." He went on to say, "Our customers simply don't have the money to buy basic necessities between paychecks."

When it comes to Wal-Mart, however, just about any announcement that affects public policy is greeted with suspicion, and that has been the case with the minimum wage. Some have said that Wal-Mart, in need of good publicity, is supporting an increase for public relations reasons; others have declared it an attempt to drive small, independently owned stores out of business.

These suspicions exist in Atchison as well. As in many small communities, Wal-Mart defines local retail, and just as Always Low Prices had to retool itself, Country Mart was significantly affected by Wal-Mart's new food-stocked Supercenter several miles away.

What is Wal-Mart up to? What are its true motives? Like many others, Dennis Garrett wonders. He imagines public relations is part of it, but he didn't want to speculate on whether this was an attempt to put him out of business, except to say that raising some wages wouldn't do that. He'd reduce some hours, he said. He'd manage.

Yes, Atchison businesses would be hurt initially, but in the long run, if unemployment increases, those hurt the most would be the very ones Wal-Mart insists would be helped -- the customers, especially the younger ones, "the people who don't advance their education and need a job between the ages of 16 and 21, 22, 23."

In other words, many of the workers in Atchison, one of whom was now at Garrett's service counter buying a money order so he could pay bills. Even though Iles has a checking account, this is the method he prefers because if he were to pay by check, and the check were to bounce because of insufficient funds, the penalty would be devastating. A $25 fee would require more than three hours of work.

And where would those hours come from?