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  • Features
    • From the President
    • World Class Fine
    • House busters
    • Landmark Voting Rights Act
    • Fight to increase minimum wage
    • Power to the people
  • Union Front
    • Auto glassworkers dog-tired
    • AK Steel workers OK new contract
    • Member minute
    • Local 1968 workers stay strong
    • Federal agency's e-mails show bias
    • Delphi Update
    • Ask a Working Woman survey
    • One on one with General Holiefield
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    • Still Solid
    • Skilled Trades
    • Workers' Words
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    • Solidarity Index / Past Issues

Keep it ‘clean’

Fight to increase minimum wage heats up this fall

We’re talking $2.10, considerably less than what most folks pay for a cup of gourmet coffee.

Yet that’s the paltry amount of a pay raise Congress won’t approve – without attaching weakening amendments – for the millions of workers earning the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. (That comes to about $10,700 annually, $6,000 below the federal poverty level for a family of three.)

Congress hasn’t raised the minimum wage in nearly 10 years, but they’ve boosted their own pay eight times since then and recently cleared the way to give themselves another $3,300 pay raise.

It’s been a bumpy ride for minimum wage this summer.

In June Sen. Edward Kennedy’s “clean bill” to simply increase the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour over three years failed to pass the Senate.

Then in July – the day before taking a five-week recess until after Labor Day – the House voted for an increase by pairing it with a cut in inheritance taxes on multimillion-dollar estates. By attaching this so-called “poison pill” amendment, they knew House Democrats wouldn’t go for it – and they’d try to make Democrats look bad for doing so.

But in an important Aug. 3 victory, Senate Democrats successfully blocked the GOP estate tax-minimum wage-tax extender package, dubbed the “trifecta.”

“Just think of what it is to have a bill that says to minimum wage workers, ‘We’ll raise your minimum wage, but only if we can give an estate tax cut to the 7,500 wealthiest families in America,’ ” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

So far 22 states have set their minimum wage above $5.15, according to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).

And eight states, including Arkansas, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, enacted new wage minimums this year. California and Massachusetts are also expected to raise theirs.

This November there are ballot initiatives in six states: Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and Ohio.

Kennedy and other Democrats vow to keep pressing Congress to take up a clean bill to increase the minimum wage.

Don’t America’s working families deserve that?

Jennifer John