Tuesday was a day of “Fight for $15” minimum wage protests by airport and fast-food workers across the country. Naturally, Fox hates the idea but, unfortunately, the network could not seem to fight it without promoting misinformation.
Fox’s Your World show covered the protests with a totally fair and balanced panel of two opponents and one supporter of a $15 minimum wage. Plus, host Neil Cavuto chimed in occasionally with another anti-minimum wage hike viewpoint.
Media Matters caught this segment and summed it up nicely:
Fox has a long history of peddling misinformation about the minimum wage and of specifically targeting Seattle’s phase-in of a local minimum wage of $15 per hour, which research suggests has not harmed the local economy, and in fact Seattle saw a “boom in job growth” and “exceptionally strong” labor market after increasing wages. Despite a coordinated campaign from right-wing media outlets opposed to increasing minimum wages, local and state-level increases continue to succeed and the ballot box, lifting wages for millions of American workers.
“Market watcher” Scott Martin, of Kingsview Asset Management, said, “What you saw was workers' hours being cut, benefits being cut, job losses. In fact small businesses in Seattle suffered mercifully [sic] … because they saw the cost go up. They were unnatural to what was going on in the environment."
Martin told Democrat Christy Setzer, the lone supporter in the group, “So I’m all for people making more money, but for the government to control it, Christy, is not right. That hurts businesses more than it helps the workers.”
Setzer correctly responded that Seattle has been phasing in its minimum wage hike. “What they’re finding,” she correctly noted, “is that there’s actually been really minimal disruption in terms of prices, in terms of hiring. What they have been able to do is put a little more money in workers’ pockets, for low-wage workers who can use that money for really basic life necessities.” She added, “It’s actually a great example of how you can do this, certainly, on a local level and see it succeed.”
Fox’s Deneen Borelli insisted otherwise. “It is not working in Seattle," she said. "Employers are either letting people go or they’re not able to hire people, and there are restaurants, for example, that are using tablets to take people’s orders so they’re not even able to hire waitresses like they used to years ago.”
Borelli also made a minimum-wage hike sound like welfare: “People should be striving to make as much money as they can, and not to rely on government mandates,” she scolded.
Setzer replied, “If you leave it, as Deneen said, to what the employer feels that they can afford to pay, then many employers are going to pay, probably, below the minimum wage. They don’t actually think that they should even pay any sort of minimum wage.”
That is probably what Fox News thinks, too.
Watch the propaganda below, from the November 29, 2016 Your World, via Media Matters.
You have to argue with these people that," No. It does not work that way! ".
If the price of bread goes up, the price of a cheeseburger does not go up.
If the price of electricity goes up, the price of a cheeseburger does not go up, etc.,etc.
The price of a cheeseburger will go up eventually, but it has more to do with what McDonald’s and Burger King charge than anything else.
Think of all the people bottom feeder crap companies would hire if they didn’t have to pay their workers! A Trump America of unpaid workers could end unemployment for good!
Dump the minimum wage now… oh, sorry… got carried away by Fox News’ right-wing agit-prop. ;^)
The crickets would be SO loud waiting for one example.