Fair wage engenders basic human dignity

[Omaha Steve]

http://tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080410/OPINION01/804100361/1007/OPINION

By C. MELISSA SNARR, Ph.D. • April 10, 2008

The United States first introduced minimum-wage legislation in the midst of the Great Depression. Recognizing the failures of unregulated markets, the nation chose to draw a moral line below which no market economy could fall; desperate people should not be required to work at desperation wages.

Citizen-emboldened politicians understood taking advantage of people's economic vulnerability was morally unconscionable, even amid economic turmoil.

Minimum-wage legislation secured a simple principle for the regulation of markets: A job should keep you out of poverty, not keep you in it. But in the past 40 years, elite-driven politicians eroded this principle as they refused to index the wage with consumer-price demands. The minimum wage will rise this year to $6.55 an hour, but it would take $9.70 an hour to reach its buying power in 1968 — the year the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. died supporting Memphis sanitation workers' fair-wage struggle.

The living-wage movement seeks to restore a basic moral principle to the ongoing regulation of markets. People working a full-time job should be paid enough money to secure decent housing, food, transportation and health care for their family. In other words, people should be able to "live" in the most basic way on a minimum wage. In Davidson County, this means Metro government employees would need $10.36 an hour to avoid choosing between food, rent, electricity or doctor visits for their children (and that excludes savings, dining out and entertainment).

Better pay fuels economic growth

Contrary to common myths, 70 percent of minimum-wage earners in the U.S. are adults, many with families. These are not starter jobs for wealthy suburban teens. Wages are not depressed by undocumented workers but by corporate greed (states with the largest influx of undocumented workers have actually seen increases in jobs for documented workers and comparable stagnation of wages). As the Fiscal Policy Institute and others have documented, the number of small businesses and overall employment rate actually grew in states requiring wages higher than the federal minimum.

FULL story at link.