Oregon's Minimum Wage Woes

In this short 35 day legislative session in Oregon, the legislature in all its wisdom decided to take up the issue of increasing minimum wage. I’ve been watching via social media as many farmers and ranchers have actively engaged in contacting their legislators, as well as testifying against it.
Vice President of Boshart Trucking and SJB Farms Shelly Boshart Davis has been very active in sharing how this would affect her family’s businesses.
Davis: “What we tried to talk to the legislature about is the things that they didn’t look at — like competitive advantages from state to state. How do we compete with Idaho if their minimum wage is $7.25? How do we compete with different countries when their minimum wages isn’t going up? We tried to explain to them about costs — about if those costs increase to us all of a sudden we are not going to be competitive. We talked to them about balance sheets, about profits, about how some years we are profitable and some years we are not. So we tried every possibility that we could to explain that this could hurt us. That we need to follow the market. It truly fell on deaf ears and now that bill sits on the Governor’s desk.”
There are three tiers to the legislation — minimum wage in the Portland metro area would be $14.75 — the second tier would be non-rural counties at $13.50 and rural counties — which include all of Eastern Oregon would have a minimum wage of $12.50