Raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do, but it’s a popular thing to do as well.
When we talk about the kind of folks whose lives will be made better by raising the minimum wage, we’re not talking about a couple teenagers earning extra spending money to supplement their allowance. We’re talking about providers and breadwinners. Working Americans with bills to pay and mouths to feed.
I eat excellent bread, clean meat, good crisp veggies, organic fruits and nice wine and cheese. It is one of the things I am truly grateful for. I’m not kidding. You can’t ask a single mother of three working two jobs for minimum wage to eat that way. I am lucky.
Laws protecting this right – whatever the level of the minimum wage, and whatever the Government chooses to call it – are only as strong as the threat of enforcement is both real and feared.
In defence of Madiba’s legacy, we will continue to wage a relentless war on corruption and mismanagement of the resources of our country.
We always strive to be the best in the wage package.
It is enough that we set out to mold the motley stuff of life into some form of our own choosing; when we do, the performance is itself the wage.
When I recently spent a night at a homeless shelter, I was dismayed that members of the middle class had moved in and that earning above the minimum wage did not protect adults from having to share a room with dozens of others.
To improve the standard of living for working folks, we have to raise the minimum wage and empower workers to fight for their interests in an economic and political system that’s stacked against them.
Many unhoused people work full time but earn starvation, unlivable wages. Some struggle to access mental health services or substance use treatment, making earning a consistent and stable wage nearly impossible.
No one seriously believes that cutting the minimum wage is good for workers.
One of the great constraints on economic growth and employment is that the tax and benefits system has grown up over generations and does not give the right incentives. Increasing the minimum wage does not solve this problem.
One of the biggest disagreements between Sen. Hagan and I – I don’t believe we should be building an economy that’s founded on making ends meet on minimum wage. It’s impossible; it’s a stepping stone.
My mother raised me herself, along with my six younger siblings, in Cleveland, and life wasn’t easy even in the best of times. At age 42, she died, and it fell on me, then aged 22 and working minimum wage, to take care of all of us. At the time, I was newly married with a baby son. And I was deeply afraid for our future.
Like any parents, mine wanted me to have a secure job with a regular wage and career prospects. And the one job my father knew of, that he’d had experience of himself, was the army, so he could help me in that direction.
He thinks with regret of the great days when he could at harvest time at least go down into Hungary and work on the big estates and bring back, as his wage, a side of bacon for the winter. That was wealth, to him.
Yes, there is some evidence that migration can slightly depress wages at the bottom end of the labour market, but that’s an argument for a genuine living wage, for ensuring all workers are employed on the same terms and conditions, and for extending unionisation.
Well, what there ought to be is an international labor organization, a confederation of the trade unions of all the countries speaking for the workers who are competing with one another, and talking about the difference in wage levels between, say, Europe and Indonesia.
Now, California is a big state, we’re a very diverse state, full of diverse communities with local variations in the cost of living and local business conditions. Just like the rest of the country. And let me tell you, the sky did not fall when California enacted a $15 minimum wage.
Raising the minimum wage means raising the living wage – and that’s good news for Ohio.
Many women are heads of households. Many are the primary wage earners for their families.
If you and your skills are a complement to the computer, your wage and labor market prospects are likely to be cheery. If your skills do not complement the computer, you may want to address that mismatch. Ever more people are starting to fall on one side of the divide or the other. That’s why ‘average is over.’
With millions of family wage manufacturing jobs lost since 2001, we need an energy bill that takes bold action to tap into American ingenuity in order to lead the world in new clean energy technology, rather than playing catch-up to the Japanese, Danish, and Germans.
I reject the idea that any job is too hard or too dirty for American workers to do. American workers just expect and demand to be paid a decent wage.
The minimum wage in Denmark is about twice that of the United States, and people who are totally out of the labor market or unable to care for themselves have a basic income guarantee of about $100 per day.
It’s not so long ago I was paying £250 a season to play. I don’t think in my lifetime it will ever get to wage parity with the men, but we have made so many great strides already.
When we lift the wage floor, it not only betters the lives of those whose wages are directly affected, it also lifts the economy as a whole.
The struggle to have a living wage doesn’t come easy. You’re ready to work, you want it, you seek it… but it’s not like it’s just given to you.
It’s great that Maryland is tied for having the lowest wage gap between our working men and women of any state in the nation, but there’s more work to do to eliminate that gap entirely.
Hoover had prevented ‘an immediate attack upon wages as a basis of maintaining profits,’ but the result of wiping out profits and maintaining artificial wage rates was chronic, unprecedented depression.
Being unemployed – or working at minimum wage – is rough in the best of circumstances.
