Reply #22: For some, minimum wage brings maximum misery

[54anickel]

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/2586428

Leading the charge to raise the federal minimum wage is U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. The Republican Senate majority so far has been opposed to Kennedy's most recent attempt, Kennedy spokesman Jim Manley said.

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"The Republicans in the House are opposed to it, and the president is not in support of it either," said Josh Mason, policy director of the Working Families Party, a community- and labor-backed political party based in Brooklyn.

"As governor of Texas, Bush was responsible for the lowest minimum wage in the country. His record is not somebody who's likely to be pushing this issue."

For many, the issue is not about politics.

It's about fairness.

"We are the richest country in the world," said Beth Shulman, author of The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans.

No one, she said, can live on $10,000 a year.

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The issue is becoming even more pivotal because job growth in this country — home health aides, food preparation workers, security guards, cashiers, teachers' assistants and nursing aides — are some of the lowest-paying, according to a February article in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Monthly Labor Review, which projected job growth from 2002 to 2012.

Author Shulman describes this as a "hollowing out of the middle," where companies such as Wal-Mart Stores pay the minimum while expecting taxpayers to take up the slack in the form of food stamps, Medicaid and other programs for impoverished Americans.

"Corporations used to look at themselves as part of a community," she said.

"I think the ethic has changed."

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