National News You Can Use

Mar 31 2013 National Employment Law Project and Cry Wolf Project
In her Congressional testimony from 1959, Eleanor Roosevelt noted the repetitive quality of objections raised by minimum wage opponents over the previous five decades. More than 50 years later, it appears that nothing has changed.

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Mitch Potter
Sep 16 2012 Toronto Star
Excerpt: Those who have spent time inside Occupy camps know them as secular. But Rev. Stephen Copley, chairman of Let Justice Roll, a coalition pushing to raise the U.S. minimum wage (currently $7.25/hr), says the...
Austin Robertson
Sep 3 2012 Associated Press

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — The minister who heads the Arkansas Interfaith Alliance says concern for the poor should prompt Congress to pass an increase in the minimum wage.

The Rev. Stephen Copley says the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour...

Tom Watson
Sep 3 2012 Forbes
On Labor Day 1978, I started my first minimum wage job, making $2.65 an hour at the local supermarket stocking shelves and bagging groceries, and driving a battered Buick Skylark to work after school that fall with Darkness on the Edge of Town...
Sep 3 2012 Institute for Public Accuracy
Rev. Stephen Copley, 
Director of the Arkansas Interfaith Alliance and chairman of the national nonpartisan Let Justice Roll Living Wage Coalition, Copley said: “Our motto at Let Justice Roll is ‘A job should keep you out of poverty, not keep...
Holly Sklar
Jul 24 2012 McClatchy-Tribune News Service
Time flies when you're moving backward. With the federal minimum wage stuck at $7.25 an hour since July 24, 2009, workers now have less buying power than they did in 1997 at the start of the longest period in history without a raise.
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Jul 23 2012 Institute for Public Accuracy

Excerpt: Ariel Jacobson is senior associate in the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee’s Economic Justice Program...

Jul 19 2012 National Employment Law Project
America’s low-wage economy is marked by two extremes. On the one hand, workers earning at or near the minimum wage are seeing the real value of their paychecks diminish steadily over time, as the cost of living increases while their wages remain...
Holly Sklar
Jun 4 2012 Distributed in Massachusetts by American Forum: Fall River Herald News, Taunton Daily Gazette, Sun Chronicle, Providence Journal, more

Massachusetts led the nation when it passed the first state minimum wage law a hundred years ago on June 4, 1912. Today, it is a laggard.

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By John Schmitt and Janelle Jones
Apr 30 2012 Center for Economic and Policy Research
Relative to any of the most common benchmarks – the cost of living, the wages of the average worker, or average productivity levels – the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is well below its historical value. These usual reference points...