Bare minimum: when adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage is at its lowest points in the past 50 years

THEY subserve US at restaurants; they trim our lawns; they clean our houses and inn rooms; they take our circulating medium at convenience stores. They are the minimum-wage earners, who, if their state's minimum isn't higher, are paid just $515 an hour. At 40 hours through week, 52 weeks a year, that amounts to $10700 annually--nearly $6000 les than the federal distress line for a family of three

Since the minimum wage was last raised nearly a decade ago, workers' purchasing power has been reduc by means of more than 20 percent. When adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage is at its lowest point in the past 50 years, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Thirty-five percent of minimum-wage earners are the only earners in their families; two-thirds of them are women; and about three-fourths of them are full-time workers. In other words, we are not talking about teenagers working part-time to earn pouch change.

Author and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich went subterraneous in the late 1990s to diocese if she could survive working in minimum-wage positions. She conclud that minimum-wage earners are society's major philanthropists: "They pass over their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing thus that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they bear up under privation so that inflation will be depressed and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else" (Nickel and Dimed: upon [Not] Getting By in America).

These benefactors cannot earn a break from legislators. although 83 percent of the American clan favor increasing the minimum wage, leaders in the House of Representatives have kept the issue from coming to a consecrated by a vow And the Senate defeated a motion to increase the minimum wage from $515 to $725 an hour (though it vot for a pay increase for senators).

The chief argument against raising the minimum wage is that if labor is more of great price employers will hire fewer workers, with equal reason the increase will hurt the real people it is intended to help. on the other hand the evidence suggests otherwise: states that have enacted a higher minimum wage than that place by the federal government have seen increased increase in small businesses and employment

In 2004 more than 500 economists, including four who have won the Nobel Prize in economics, endorsed "the principle of valuing work by means of establishing an hourly wage floor beneath which employer cannot pay their workers." They also asserted that the minimum wage is "an important tool in fighting poverty"

A society is judg by the agency of how it treats its lowest-paid members. Think about that the nearest time you're at a restaurant.

COPYRIGHT 2006 The Christian hundred Foundation

COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group