http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0109-08.htm
This is an article about the minimum wage issue being ignored in Congress lately, namely in 2004-2005. It discusses the possibility of a Democratic turnover in the midterm elections and how this would effect the movement of a minimum wage increase bill through Congress.
Vermont is going to begin indexing their minimum wage for inflation in 2007. This makes sense in theory. The point is also raised here, however, that rising health care costs and competition from overseas firms are already hurting the economy here and that a higher minimum wage would cause more damage. The embedded contradiction is that while these other costs increase for firms, they often get passed onto consumers anyways, and consumers cannot afford those increases if their pay is remaining stagnant.
We see support from the non-profit think tank, the Economic Policy Institute, in this article as well as the last. This group is in Washington and has had some impact on Congress--Ted Kennedy, Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, proposed the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2005, which increases the federal minimum wage over a two year period to $7.25.
I am not in favor of the huge increases occurring in Santa Fe, although I do think that individual state ordinances have been working quite well. That said, this increase of a few dollars to keep up with the rising cost of living is something the whole country needs. State-by-state increases do work, but the article points out that they create incentives for firms to move across states and leave workers behind.
I have heard people argue that raising the minimum wage is unnecessary, since those who get paid a minimum are not supporting families, but merely high school teenagers at their first jobs. This article claims that this is a false assumption--apparently, over a third of adults aged 25-54 in minimum wage jobs remain in those jobs for at least three years. Additionally, minimum wage workers earned an average of 68% of their total family income.
I think this issue has strong ties to the immigration debate that comes up in class and in the world frequently. The people living in cities like Santa Fe who are being paid the minimum wage are not high school students at all--a lot of them are probably immigrants. This would explain why they account for so much of the family income while working a stereotypically unskilled job like restaurant service or construction. The stagnation of the federal wage may be because of the immigrant workers' reluctance to speak out against the government. I think that in the coming years, as these two debates heat up, we might see some parallel shifts occurring and it will be interesting to watch how one affects the other.
