Workers Need a Living Wage Essay -- Its Time to Raise the Minimum Wag

It's 6:00am and that annoying beep of your alarm is ringing in your ears. You get up, start the coffee maker, shower, and get dressed in your work attire. You start your car and back out of your drive-way before noticing that you're running on the last fumes of your tank. You drive to nearest gas station where you see gas prices have, once again, risen. The aforementioned scenario is only one of many examples of the depreciating value of the dollar. In fact, in the past five years, the CPI-U has increased from 168.8 to 190.7 - that's a 12.97% inflationary increase (Historical CPI)! Sure, to Corporate Joe in his fancy sports car, a few extra pennies for gas isn’t much, but what about the school janitor who is trying to successfully raise a family of four on minimum wage? The most immediate reality behind Living Wage organizing is the dramatic erosion of the minimum wage. Even with the 1996 increase to $5.15 an hour the buying power of the minimum wage is still 30 percent below its peak in 1968. This is true despite the fact the economy was about fifty percent more productive than in 1968. A minimum wage that had kept pace with productivity gains would be roughly $11.20 today (Pollin and Luce, 58). In fact, in 2003 the poverty rate rose from 12.1 to 12.5 percent leaving 35.9 million people at or below the poverty line of $18,660 for a family of four (U.S. Census Bureau). These 35.9 million people trudge through their manual labor occupations day in and day out only to see the (few) dollars they earn slowly depreciate in value. In 1906, John Ryan, advocate of the living wage, wrote "Every man who is willing to work, has, therefore an inborn right to sustenance from the earth and on reasonable terms or conditio... ...ome of the fiscal burden they experience. With the increasingly inflating dollar and therefore the depreciating value of the minimum wage, an implementation of a universal living wage would be the humanitarian thing to do. Works Cited Historical Consumer Price Index. Historical CPI. 2003. 4 March 2015. Pollin, Robert and Stephanie Luce. The Living Wage: Building A Fair Economy. New York: New Press, 1998. U.S. Census Bureau. Poverty 2003 Highlights. 26 August 2004. 25 February 2015. Glickman, Lawrence. A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of a Consumer Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Acorn.org. ACORN: About Acorn. 2005. 2 March 2015.