Reason #3 to support a minimum wage hike in Greensboro

My grandmother was a secretary at the Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce in the mid-to-late 1940s. A few years ago, I asked her about that job and she told me about when Western Electric came to Winston-Salem. She said that she was taking minutes in meetings between leaders from Western Electric and Chamber leaders (dominated, she recollected, by R.J. Reynolds people) in which the Chamber representatives were negotiating with Western Electric about the wages Western Electric would be paying to its new employees. The Chamber wanted to make sure that the wages wouldn't be too high. Western Electric had planned to pay its workers, my grandmother recalled, at a significantly higher rate than workers were paid at places like RJR and the Chamber was concerned that this would have adverse effects on local business. My grandmother recalled that the Chamber was successful in bargaining Western Electric down.

For me, my Grandmother's story begs the question of how "free" the market really is. As has been said elsewhere, "companies aren't bound to pay the least they can get by with," but when companies are getting extraordinary pressure from organized groups of businesses advocating to do just that, I think there is a need for a group of citizens working to advocate for their own concerns. This initiative is one example of such advocacy.