The worker's mite
Amidei, Nancy
MINIMUM-WAGE LEGISLATION THE WORKER'S MITE TO BE PAID & STILL POOR Having a job ought to mean something: food on the table, a place to live, a way to pay the doctor when the kids get sick....
...nancy amidei Nancy Amidei has written frequently on poverty, hunger, and human services issues in these pages.hese pages...
...Organized labor has been preoccupied with the trade bill (and with trying to line up votes for a veto override), and other supporters haven't been organized or visible enough...
...Unfortunately, losing this one means that some 12 million low-earning working people and their families will lose out, as will all the grocery stores, landlords, and merchants in the neighborhoods where they shop and live...
...1834, has a top figure of $5.05 an hour in 1990, but that proposal is not expected to survive the legislative process...
...Through most of the 1960s and 1970s, a minimum wage was enough to keep a worker with two dependents out of poverty...
...That's why America has so many "working poor...
...Economists now generally agree: raising the minimum has marginal impact on inflation because most workers earn substantially more than the minimum...
...The White House and a.long list of business and trade associations want to defeat even this modest increase...
...The trade bill," one lobbyist pointed out, "is important symbolically...
...Since 1981 the minimum wage has been stuck at $3.35 an hour, or $6,968 a year-and that's poor...
...The Senate version, S.837, would raise it to $4.65 an hour by 1990 (roughly what is needed for a family of three to escape poverty in 1988...
...The positives far outweigh the negatives...
...Politics and timing pose far greater obstacles...
...Now Congress has bills pending to change the minimun wage...
...but what's at stake in the minimum wage bill is all real.'' It's time we told the Congress so...
...if supporters of a higher minimum wage don't act fast, they may...
...even with one adult working full time and another working half time at the minimum , a family of four is still poor...
...Instead, for six million people earning at or below the mini- mum wage (and another six million earning just slightly above it), full-time, full-year work means poverty...
...This time around the two most frequently mentioned arguments against raising the minimum-higher inflation and lost jobs-don't loom as large...
...But then in the 1980s, its value started to decline...
...When they come to a vote late this month or in early June they may be defeated or changed for the worse (set a lower minimum, or include some version of a sub-minimum- chiefly affecting women, minorities, and youths...
...It's been fifty years since Congress first established the minimum wage as a minimally acceptable standard of living for anyone working full time, and much of the time since, that's what it's been...
...Now full-time work at the minimum gets a family of three just 72 percent of the poverty line...
...Despite that, this year's bills to raise the minimum are in trouble...
...For tactical reasons the version in the House, H.R...
...Members of Congress haven't heard why they should be for the bill, and as a result seem to be basing their votes on what it means to their campaign contributors, rather than what it means to poor families...
...and adult jobs aren't at risk-even for teens, a 10 percent increase in the minimum would produce only an estimated 1 percent decrease in job opportunities...
Vol. 115 • May 1988 • No. 10
