Pay the maximum wage

The congressional furor over federal minimum wage laws prompted me last week to take a brief trip up and down Tunnel Road in our home town of Asheville, N.C. I wanted to discover just how relevant all this debate really was.

My suspicions were confirmed. In nearly a dozen places, all the kind of businesses where you might have expected minimum wages to be dominant, no one was paying the minimum wage. McDonalds, Burger King, Waffle House, Ramada Inn, Days Inn, Wal-Mart, Pizza Hut-all these and others were offering beginning workers wages more like $4.75 to $5.50, depending on the job. That's an average of 10 to 20 percent higher than the federal requirement. A few days later, in Colorado Springs, I found Starbucks Coffee trying-and failing-to attract new workers with a starting wage of $6.00. So what's going on?

I couldn't help thinking of the startling discovery I made a couple of years ago as an employer.

When our organization offered a new worker the $4.25 an hour that the minimum wage laws mandated, I suddenly realized, we were actually telling that person something like this: "If we could pay you less, and get away with it, believe me, we would!"

What an insult! What a degrading thing to say to a fellow worker. Yet I realized that the hurtful words that would never come directly from my mouth had to be felt all too sharply down in the psyches of the people who worked in our mail rooms and who were beginners in our order entry department. I was convicted.

The result-one I'm almost embarrassed to report to you because it seems so paltry now-was that we upped our wages here and there and instituted a new policy that from that time on, no one at God's World Publications Inc. would ever be paid minimum wage. Even beginners would earn at least thirty cents or so an hour above the federally mandated requirements.

I suppose a good cost accountant could figure out what that decision added to the cost of your annual subscription for WORLD magazine-but in this case, I'm frank to tell you the small increase was not a concern.

The bottom line is that God lays requirements on me as a Christian employer that supersede any biblical requirements I have to keep in mind toward you as a subscriber. Yes, we have a few biblical reminders to give you an honest deal when you send us $39.95 for a year's worth of magazines-and we work hard to do that. But much more frequently, the Bible talks to me about fairness toward my employees. I am left to assume (and I do) that God has a structure in which if we honor him with the issues he mentions most often, he will prosper us on other fronts as well. Even if he doesn't, at least we've had the joy of trying to be faithful.

Not the least of God's standards for those of us who are employers is that we treat our neighbors-and that certainly includes our employees-as we would want to be treated. That requirement, all by itself, logically spurs us to explore not how little, but rather how much we might be able to pay those who work for us.

During my brief survey, a waitress at Waffle House, of all places, told me with a tone of ownership how her pay is directly geared to company profitability. "It makes me feel like I'm part of something," she said, reporting that Waffle House's computers calculate a wage for her every week that exceeds minimum wage by more than $2.00 an hour. "Sometimes it's a little less than $6.25," she said, "usually it's a little more."

To be sure, $6.25 an hour-which translates to about $13,500 a year-isn't much to live on. It's not an income to sustain even a meager standard of living. But that's another issue.

The point here is that the federal government sets a bogus standard when it presumes to tell employers where to set their minimum wage. The standard is phony because it rests only on the heartless, soulless, and economically irrelevant guesses of bureaucrats.

Christian employers, by contrast, should hear God's creative standards at work when it comes time to set their staffers' wages. Pay your employees, God says with wonderful simplicity, the way you'd want to be paid if you were in their shoes. And if you want to add believability to the process and show your employees how much you trust in God's good provision through free market principles, set up a generous system that will let them share in the profits.

As is always the case, God's system of good gifts to his people will easily eclipse the supposed generosity of Uncle Sam. But for that to happen, God's people-especially those who employ others-will have to discover in news ways what it means to be faithful.