Minimum Wage: The States Get It. - Democratic Underground

Career Prole

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Wed Nov-24-04 06:45 PM
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Minimum Wage: The States Get It.

From BusinessWeekOnline, where they endorsed Kerry for President as well.

Commentary: Minimum Wage: The States Get It

By Aaron Bernstein

Florida Governor Jeb Bush helped to deliver 52% of his state's votes for his brother on Nov. 2, but that didn't stop fully 72% of voters there from backing a GOP-unfriendly ballot initiative: raising the minimum wage. The popular measure set a state wage floor of $6.15 an hour, a buck higher than the federal level, which hasn't been lifted since 1997. It also pegs the state's new minimum to inflation, so that the lowest-paid workers will get automatic increases each year to keep their purchasing power in line with consumer price hikes.

The initiative, to which Governor Bush offered only tepid opposition, makes Florida the 13th state to lose patience with the federal government and set its own higher minimum. It's also the third, following Washington and Oregon, to index its minimum wage to inflation. Both of these ideas are long overdue and should be emulated by Congress and other states.

<snip>

Certainly, there are few credible reasons left to oppose an increase of the federal $5.15 an hour. That sum gives a full-time worker barely more than $10,000 a year, despite a family poverty level that has climbed to $18,600. Indeed, the federal minimum was 40% higher in 1968, or $8.50 in today's dollars. So lifting it by a dollar or two wouldn't even come close to restoring low-wage workers' purchasing power back to where it was more than 25 years ago.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/bw/20041124/bs_bw/b3910096mz021

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ayeshahaqqiqa

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Wed Nov-24-04 06:49 PM
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1. So since I finally got a raise to $8 an hour

I'm acutally making less money than I did when I worked for minimum wage in '68?

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Career Prole

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Wed Nov-24-04 08:05 PM
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2. It's sad, isn't it?

When I get that statement from social security which shows what I've earned annually since I started working I see my wages went up every year from '71 until the first lay-off in '91.
There have been 5 lay-offs since and my pay's gone down with every new job. I'm making a bit more than half of what I was making in '90.
Sooner or later I'll be starving for the right to punch a timeclock.
Woohoooo! :shrug:

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Wed Nov-24-04 09:19 PM
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3. Deleted message

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Career Prole

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Wed Nov-24-04 10:09 PM
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4. Oh hell yeah.

We should also get rid of OSHA because businesses could afford to hire even more minimum wage workers.
And those health plans? Chuck 'em! Keeps hiring down.
Screw that 40 hour work week. After all, businesses will be doing the minimum wage workers a big favor making them work 80 hour weeks...why, that's like a 100% wage increase!
Heck, before you know it we could be a fucking sweatshop economy!
We could be another China!
Thanks, but no thanks. Dumb idea.

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Ima

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Wed Nov-24-04 11:33 PM
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5. Thank goodness

there is some mw laws or people would be working for $1. ph. They should raise it to $10 ph.

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Career Prole

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Thu Nov-25-04 12:26 AM
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6. "The minimum wage rate in Beijing is to rise by 30 yuan (3.6 US dollars)

to 495 yuan (59.8 US dollars) per month, the Beijing Office of Labor and Social Security announced Thursday."

Mao Ai, an official with the office, said the new rate would be implemented on Jan. 1 next year and would apply to all the employees of companies, institutes, government departments and other organizations.
The current minimum level is 465 yuan (56 dollars) a month.

Mao said the minimum rate was based on the average indices of prices, salaries and other statistics.

The city adopted a minimum wage in 1994, when the government required employers to pay at least 210 yuan (25.3 US dollars) per month.
http://www.asianlabour.org/archives/000418.html

They're making sixty bucks a month. Benefits? Nonexistent.
Worker safety? Not a consideration.
Yet every time you hear some corporate muckety-muck "address" the trade deficit they say we need to be more competitive.
That's what strangles the minimum wage debate. The need to be "more competitive".
We can't compete with two bucks a day. We simply can't. The bosses know it, too.
That won't stop them from trying to take away every gain we've made since the birth of the labor movement so they can line their own pockets in the name of "competition". Sooner or later we have got to draw the line.

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