This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 24th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Bernie Sanders campaign advocates a $15 minimum wage.

Workers for the campaign say they should be paid at least $15 an hour.

Cato's Ryan Bourne says there are obvious trade-offs when wage floors are introduced and it's important to consider who is

harmed and helped by those policies.

Bernie Sanders recently had, I don't know if you'd call it embarrassing but at least a notable TIF with some of his

own campaign workers where they basically made the case that they're working for less than $15 an hour and that's something that the

campaign should take seriously as a matter for the campaign itself just as he is sort of demanding that essentially all workers

be paid a specific wage by their employers.

So what, how did that get resolved?

Well you really couldn't script this story.

Essentially Bernie Sanders has a number of field staffers on his campaign

who are currently paid an annual salary of about $36,000 per year.

Now they've been complaining that they're actually working up to 60 hours per week and

say if you account for the number of weeks that they work for that salary they say that that's the

equivalent to just $13 per hour.

It should be noted that campaign workers like just in general work a lot.

Sure, yeah, they put in extraordinary numbers of hours

over often shortish time periods

as an expectation that you that going to work above and beyond the call of ordinary office hours.

But given Bernie Sanders has described $15 per hour as the bare minimum that people should be earning a kind of living wage and something

that he wants to institute through federal legislation.

...