McClatchy Newspapers: Minimum wage stuck in the 1950s

[marmar]

Commentary: Minimum wage stuck in the 1950s
By Holly Sklar


Are you better off than you were 40 years ago? Not if you're a minimum-wage worker.

It would take $9.92 today to match the buying power of the minimum wage at its peak in 1968, the year Martin Luther King died fighting for living wages for sanitation workers.

In today's dollars, the 1968 hourly minimum wage adds up to $20,634 a year working full time. The new federal minimum wage of $7.25 comes to just $15,080. That's $ 5,554 in lost wages.

"It is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis ... getting part-time income," King told workers in Memphis, Tenn., days before his murder. King said, "We are tired of working our hands off and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate with daily basic necessities of life."

Imagine what King would say today.

The minimum wage is stuck in the 1950s. With the raise, the minimum wage is higher than 1950's inflation-adjusted $6.71, but lower than the 1956 minimum wage of $7.93 in today's dollars. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/72332.html

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

1. I love McClatchy!

They are really carving a niche for themselves as being among the last standing respectable(in a very literal sense) news source.

[redqueen]

2. K&R

[HughBeaumont]

3. Hell, wages PERIOD are stuck in the early 80s:

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/HughBeaumont/86

[Canuckistanian]

4. Ravi Batra advocates for an immediate and large increase in minimum wage

The real problems for the crisis, he says is the gap between the real wage and labor productivity.

Interesting article, "Dr. Ravi Batra: New Thinking on the Economy"
http://www.truthout.org/031609A

[cascadiance]

5. Note that it is the McClatchy DC bureau to be thankful for...

There's a lot of decentralized leadership that helps the DC bureau operate as independently as they do. Note though that Brad Friedman has shown that some of the McClatchy newspapers that are in the network, like the KC Star, have "altered" some of their articles at times in questionable fashion (like stuff on voting machine issues, etc.). But the DC bureau itself does a good job.

I know one of the guys that works there now who I used to work with then when I worked at Knight Ridder back at the beginning of the century and during the 2000 election. I remember putting the tools for Knight Ridder's network of papers to have their custom year 2000 election web page then and how we reserved slots for the DC bureau to put in shared articles across that newtork then when they were first starting up.

I asked him then why they didn't try to work with CNN or some other major media news source that would get them more name recognition. He smiled at me as if he knew what the future was then, and said something to the effect, "Just wait and see...". Damn, but he was so right that they are the entity that needed to be empowered, and I'm so glad that I had the chance to help with those efforts now in retrospect, even after some of the right winger investors of Knight Ridder arguably used the then Knight Ridder DC bureau as a driving reason for them to drive breaking up and selling off of Knight Ridder some years back. Thankfully, McClatchy picked up a lot of the network and the DC bureau and has kept a similar hands off approach in letting the bureau pursue the news properly, and not micromanaged by other corporate elements that has happened in so many other M$M outlets like Newscorp.

[philly_bob]

6. If newspapers were rewarded for being right, McClatchy would be #1 or #2. n/t

[Solly Mack]

7. K&R