Missing Voices in the Upward Mobility Conversation
Small Businesses Are Caught Between Paying More for Products and Consumer Expectations
Santa Barbara County faces a stark reality: we have the second-highest poverty rate in California, with one in six adults and one in five children living in poverty. Nearly 60 percent of jobs in our county are “non-opportunity” positions with no clear path to a livable wage, including 94 percent of agricultural jobs, 89 percent of food service jobs, and 82 percent of health-care support positions. (See canva.com, pp 23, 35.) As a local small business owner, I was excited to hear ideas at January 24’s Upward Mobility Summit co-hosted at S.B. City College and Alan Hancock College.
The summit began with a powerful keynote from sociologist and author Matthew Desmond that resonated deeply with my observations as a local business owner. Desmond’s work highlights how the consolidation of economic power and systemic labor exploitation perpetuate poverty, explaining why seemingly straightforward solutions like minimum wage increases often fail to create lasting change when underlying power imbalances remain unaddressed.
This concentration of power didn’t happen by accident. For decades, government has allowed consolidated economic interests to write rules that continually increase the advantage of the largest — not just over workers, but over small, independent businesses. Through policy decisions and regulatory changes, large corporations have gained unprecedented control over markets, while programs intended to help workers often end up primarily benefiting these same powerful interests. When undercompensated workers do achieve gains such as minimum wage increases, there is little to prevent the economically powerful from “extracting” those gains through opportunistic increases in costs of goods and services that workers need to fulfill their basic needs.
