Northampton City Council to vote on "living wage" resolution
Fred Contrada
masslive.com
NORTHAMPTON - The City Council will take up a resolution calling for local employers to pay their workers a living wage when it meets tonight.

Put forward by the Northampton Living Wage Coalition and sponsored by the majority of councilors, Mayor Mary Clare Higgins and the city's Human Rights Commission, the resolution recognizes a living wage as a human right.

"For people earning less than a living wage, it's crisis time," said Katherine Callaghan, a lawyer with Western Massachusetts legal Services and a member of the coalition's steering committee.

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Raising Minimum Wage in Hard Times.

A labor of love - and low pay

Op-ed by Renee Loth
Boston Globe, Oct 23 2009

A RECENT report in the medical journal The Lancet estimates that half the babies born in the United States this year will live to age 100. That means plenty more work for people like Evelyn Coke.

Coke was a home care aide who spent more than three decades taking care of elderly shut-ins on New York’s Long Island. She bathed, dressed, and cooked for them, kept an eye on their prescriptions, and saved the health care system millions by keeping them out of nursing homes. For this the Jamaican immigrant was paid roughly $7 an hour.

Revised formula puts 1 in 6 Americans in poverty

By Hope Yen
Associated Press, Oct 20 2009
Washington -- The level of poverty in America is even worse than first believed.

A revised formula for calculating medical costs and geographic variations show that approximately 47.4 million Americans last year lived in poverty, 7 million more than the government's official figure.

New 2008 poverty, income data reveal only tip of the recession iceberg

By Heidi Shierholz
Economic Policy Institute, Sep 10 2009
An additional 2.6 million people slipped below the poverty line, as the poverty rate increased from 12.5% to 13.2% between 2007 and 2008. Poverty is now at a higher rate than the country faced four decades ago, in 1968...
Furthermore, it is important to note that the federal poverty threshold as currently measured is widely understood by poverty researchers to be a vastly outdated and inadequate measure... Poverty experts often use twice the poverty line as a more accurate threshold for material deprivation... In 2008, 31.9% —96 million people — were living below the twice-poverty threshold...

Top 1 Percent of Americans Reaped Two-Thirds of Income Gains in Last Economic Expansion

By Avi Feller and Chad Stone
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Sep 9 2009
Two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to the top 1 percent of U.S. households, and that top 1 percent held a larger share of income in 2007 than at any time since 1928, according to an analysis of newly released IRS data by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. During those years, the Piketty-Saez data also show, the inflation-adjusted income of the top 1 percent of households grew more than ten times faster than the income of the bottom 90 percent of households. More

Working Without Laws

By Annette Bernhardt, Ruth Milkman & Nik Theodore
The Nation, Sep 4 2009

For the past thirty years, the gospel of lean and mean has reordered the world of work, setting off a race to the bottom in which employers circumvent and evade standards that once seemed inviolate. That race has now taken us to a logical low point: many employers are ignoring workplace laws altogether.

Fair Wages Help Small Business

Op-ed by Kent Ross
Distributed by American Forum, Jul 23 2009
As a small business owner, I find that people expect me to grumble about the increase in the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour as of July 24. But I’m not grumbling. In fact, I think it should be raised further.

Every time the minimum wage goes up, I find that new customers come to my bicycle shop because they have more money to spend, and some of my old customers buy more when they visit. With the economy in the slump it’s in today, this kind of boost in consumer spending not only helps individual entrepreneurs, but helps the country as a whole to recover.

Minimum Wage Stuck in the 1950s

Op-ed by Holly Sklar
Distributed by McClatchy Tribune News Service, Jul 23 2009
Are you better off than you were 40 years ago? Not if you're a minimum wage worker.

It would take $9.92 today to match the buying power of the minimum wage at its peak in 1968, the year Martin Luther King died fighting for living wages for sanitation workers.

Raising the Minimum Wage in Hard Times

Summary

  • The federal minimum wage was enacted during the Great Depression to promote economic recovery.
  • The long-term fall in worker buying power is one reason we are in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
  • An America that doesn't work for working people is not an America that works.
  • Raising the minimum wage boosts consumer purchasing power and economic recovery.
  • Raising the minimum wage does not increase unemployment in good times or bad.
  • Raise the floor to lift the economy.

Holly Sklar
Jul 22 2009
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Raising Minimum Wage in Hard Times
Let Justice Roll

Raise the Minimum Wage to $10 in 2010

Summary

  • Recent minimum wage raises are too little, too late.
  • The minimum wage is a poverty wage instead of an anti-poverty wage.
  • The minimum wage sets the wage floor. A low minimum wage institutionalizes an increasingly low-wage workforce.
  • A low minimum wage reinforces a growing gap between haves and have-nots.
  • Workers are also consumers. The long-term fall in worker buying power is one reason we are in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
  • Raising the minimum wage lifts workers, business and the economy.
  • $10 in 2010 will break the cycle of too little, too late raises.
  • $10 in 2010 will make up ground lost in minimum wage buying power since 1968.

Holly Sklar
Jul 22 2009
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Raise the Minimum Wage to $10 in 2010
Let Justice Roll

States and Cities Minimum Wage Chart

A chart of all the states and cities with a minimum wage above the current federal minimum wage.
Jul 14 2009
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State and Cities with Minimum Wages Above Federal Level
Let Justice Roll
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With over 100 member organizations, the nonpartisan Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign is the leading faith, community, labor, business coalition committed to raising the minimum wage to a living wage at the state and federal level.