Wisconsin Gov. Scott WalkerRon Sachs/DPA/ZUMA
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is no fan of the minimum wage, and on Tuesday, in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Walker made that plenty clear. Asked about Wisconsin’s $7.25-an-hour minimum wage and whether he supported it, Walker said, “I’m not going to repeal it, but I don’t think it serves a purpose.” Here’s the exchange with Journal Sentinel columnist Dan Bice:
Bice: You were asked [in Monday’s debate] if you thought someone could live on the minimum wage in the state, and you said we should be trying to come up with jobs that pay more than that. And then you said, “The way you do that is not by setting an arbitrary amount by the state.” That sounds like you’re not a particular fan of the minimum wage. What is your position on the minimum wage? Should we have it?
Walker: Well, I’m not going to repeal it, but I don’t think it serves a purpose because we’re debating then about what the lowest levels are at. I want people to make, like I said the other night, two or three times that.
The jobs I focus on, the programs we put in place, the training we put in place, is not for people to get minimum wage jobs. It’s the training—whether it’s in apprenticeships, whether it’s our tech colleges, whether’s it our [University of Wisconsin] system—it’s to try and provide the training, the skills, the talents, the expertise that people need to create careers that pay many, many times over. [emphasis mine]
Walker has repeatedly arguing against raising the minimum wage, saying that doing so would kill jobs. (The Congressional Budget Office has found that raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would eliminate 500,000 jobs but also lift 900,000 people out of poverty and boost earnings for 16 million people. Cities with higher minimum wages have also seen strong job growth in recent years.) Walker opposes increasing the federal minimum wage and said in January that “the best thing we can do to help people who are unemployed or under employed is to fix Obamacare.”
The most recent Marquette University Law School poll found that 59 percent of Wisconsinites support increasing the minimum wage while 36 percent do not.
