Monday, July 20, 2009
On July 24 the federal minimum wage will increase to $7.25 an hour, but this will be no cause for celebration, writes Jonathan Tasini, executive director of the Labor Research Association. For Tasini, the minimum wage is a “scandal” that “masks poverty” and needs to be dramatically raised.
In real terms the minimum wage is actually a “poverty-level wage.” Tasini points out that if an employee receiving $7.25 an hour worked every day of every single week, they would earn $14,645 a year, and that’s probably with “no health care, no retirement, no vacation days, no sick days.” According to the federal government, the current poverty level for a family of two is $14,570.
Tasini argues that the minimum wage should be lifted to $10 an hour, with more increases to follow, because almost 10% of the “workforce is affected by the minimum wage, either directly or indirectly (‘indirectly’ means that a rising minimum wage often increases wage levels just above the new minimum wage).” These days more than half of those earning minimum wage work full-time, and four out of five of these workers are adults—not teenagers with summer jobs, which many still assume.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
An American Scandal: The Minimum Wage (by Jonathan Tasini, Working Life)
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