Minimum Security

Over the past ten years, a host of scrappy grassroots campaigns across the country have successfully pushed through living-wage ordinances in 112 cities and counties. The individual wins are significant, but they add up to a big-picture victory, too--the expression "living wage" has seeped into the national discourse, along with the notion that working families shouldn't have to rely on public assistance or private charity to make it from month to month.

Yet the federal minimum wage remains stalled for the eighth year in a row at $5.15 an hour--a shocking $10,712 annually for fifty-two weeks of full-time work. This, of course, at the same time the Bush Administration unblushingly escorts the wealthiest Americans onto the tax-break gravy train.

"Certainly $5.15 an hour is not a living wage," scoffs Robert Pollin, economics professor at the University of Massachusetts and one of the nation's leading experts on the economics of living-wage law. If the minimum wage had been raised with inflation and the productivity rate since 1968, when the minimum wage was at its peak, Pollin says, it would be $14.50 an hour. Activists have long recognized the stalemate at the federal level that has arrested the minimum wage at subpar standards, and the living wage was an attempt to remedy that.

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