As the control of congress changed over the last couple of weeks and the Democrats dived into their 100 hours initiative, one of their first actions was to pass a bill to increase the minimum wage.  I understand the arguments on both sides of the issue and agree with some parts of each side.

As the dialogue continues to grow, however, and passions become inflamed, my fear is that one of the most critical aspects to any increase in minimum wage will be lost.  I’ve been talking to many business people this week and they are not concerned - the labor market is pretty tight here in Utah and many employers already pay their employees more than minimum wage.  And so they shrug it off convinced that the only metric that can really be impacted, by minimum wage, is labor cost and that metric won’t show even a ripple.

What many will fail to see is that minimum wage is not just a cost of labor issue, it’s a supply-chain issue and any financial impacts in the supply-chain go directly to the bottom line. 

What should you be doing?  Begin today, pull out your dashboards, pull your supply-chain folks together and take a 360 view of your supply-chain.  Make sure that your business understands and is ready to either mitigate or absorb the increases that will surley come to your supply chain as the minimum wage is incrementally increased.

Remember, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link!