While home prices and rents have increased upward of 70% over the last five years, state minimum wage has increased just 33%. Fortunately, Durango has the ability to close this gap by implementing a locally higher minimum wage.
This proposal is typically met with two rebuttals: 1) not every job is meant to provide a living wage; and 2) raising the minimum wage will cause businesses to raise costs and negate any increase in spending power for workers.
To the first point, I would argue that businesses that can’t provide something close to a living wage are not businesses at all. If success relies on poverty wages, that business model needs to be reevaluated.
As for the second point, this symbiotic relationship between inflation and wages should go both ways and the drastic increase in cost of living should have either been partially caused by an increase in wages or brought wages up along with it. If consumer costs are rising without any sort of catalyst from rising wages, then it is incumbent on local business owners to increase wages in response.
The default measure of success is how much money business owners can make for themselves. It’s time we start measuring success by how financially secure every member of a company is.
If Durango genuinely wants to maintain the things we claim make it such a wonderful place to live, it’s imperative that we take care of our workforce and ensure they have a reasonable opportunity to live where they work.
Jeff Dunn
Durango
