As of this spring, the real (that is, inflation-adjusted) value of the United States minimum wage has reached a new historic low. The following graph shows the minimum wage, in nominal dollars and 2005 dollars, from 1950 to 2005:
(Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics)
That’s right: as of this spring, the real value of the minimum wage is lower than it’s been in fifty-five years. As inflation continues to exert its eroding effect, the real value of the minimum wage will continue to fall into deeper historical depths. Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan has introduced a bill, S. 14, to bring the minimum wage back up to a more typical historical level. Not one Republican has cosponsored it, and it is languishing in the Senate. In the House of Representatives, no one has even bothered to introduce a bill to increase the minimum wage.
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Are you surprised at this? It’s just another piece of the jigsaw puzzle. The picture on the box, when it’s completed, shows no middle class – just super rich and dirt poor. We’re expendable now.
While I agree with the intentions of increasing the minimum wage, the actual implementation of such would only hurt those it is designed to protect. How many people in this country currently work for less than the minimum wage with no benefits? Quite a lot I believe. Increasing the minimum wage would only serve to increase the unemployment rate and the number of uninsured.
Actually, Alec, that’s a supposition that’s not supported by the research, which clearly shows that minimum wage increases have not significantly contributed to unemployment.
Republican theories are not enough. The facts matter.
Well, unemployment’s pretty low in England at the moment and, as I understand it, our minimum wage isn’t appaullingly low.
Alec, that’s an unfounded fear purported every time an increase to the minimum wage is proposed – and it’s always been proven wrong. Many states have MW laws that are much higher than the federal MW, without detrimental unemployment of the under-skilled and under-educated classes that survive on MW jobs.
Henry Ford proved nearly a century ago that paying a fair living wage to employees empowers them to buy the products that move our capitalist economy forward. I’d argue that the millions of workers and families that are barely subsisting on MW jobs are more of a brake on the economy than would be any added costs to providing higher wages. People that can barely afford housing, food, and clothing aren’t adding much to an economy dependent on people to buy more and more stuff, to eat out often at restaurants, to see more movies, to travel, etc.
Look at Wal-mart. I’d wager to say that it’s doing its fair bit to strangle our economy. It goes to small towns, drives out other businesses, then pays its employees, who have to work there because there’s nowhere else, so little that the only place it can afford to shop is Wal-mart. It also doesn’t offer benefits, so the states have to pick up its tab there through welfare health care programs. Forcing a company like that to pay its employees a living wage shouldn’t hurt anything but its falsely inflated profit margins, and it would free up state money.
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Right on! It’s a sure thing – the towns that have living wage laws also have good solid employment, because people go to those communities and spend money there – because they’re good places to live.
The race-to-the-bottom approach advocated by Alec and the Republican Party produces states like Mississippi and Alabama, where manufacturers will rotate in and out, staying only for as long as they get special tax breaks.
At the same time, more responsible and reliable companies move operations to communities that are attractive to the highest quality workers.
I know which kind of community I’d rather live in.
Back about 1973 I was stationed in Alabama. One of the men I was stationed with was an instructor of economics with University of Maryland (they had instructors anywhere a military person wanted to take a class; ships, Antarctic, you name it) and he showed us an article in a magazine which I see now was quite prophetic. The name of the article, (the magazine was Our New Times” or something like it) was, “It’s Time to Kill the Goose That Laid the Golden Egg.” And it went on to say that the middle class had to be reduced to the point of almost non existance, the rest of the country impoverished. The author kind of felt that “the worker” had served his purpose and now capital was the only thing that counted. No sentimentality, please, reality was reality, and if you beleived in sharing the pie with the hired help you deserved to go down the tube as well. Naturally, we all scoffed, but by 1980 I started seeing pretty much what the author wanted taking place.
“What purpose did he think the worker had, and why did he think it was now necessary to kill the middle class?”, I type with a horrified look on my face.
I will happily support an increase in the minimum wage… Just as soon as the Powers-That-Be tack a rider on the bill extending to all who have had their seniority and consequent wages wiped out, a concurrent cost of living wage increase commensurate with what they should have been paid with all the OTHER minimun-wage increases that came with NO cost-of-living increase for THOSE low-wage earners…such as my wife, who, after 18 years at Jack-in-the-Box, makes the princely sum of $9.05/hour, as a Shift Leader. She started working there when the minimum wage was $4.50/hour…real compensation, huh? And this is typical, folks. Unless we raise ALL the lower income wages, all we do is make the lowest income scale the norm for many working Americans. And fuck your “research”…That’s what it looks like out here in the REAL world.