Promoting the right to a living wage is a core component of UUSC’s economic justice program.

In the United States, we support coalitions involved in the growing "living wage" movement – especially groups that are working as part of faith-labor-community coalitions on local, statewide and national living wage movements. We also support Unitarian Universalists joining in living wage movements in their communities and states.

One such coalition is Let Justice Roll, the only national US interfaith coalition working strategically on living wage education, organizing and advocacy at the national, state, and local level. In addition to living wage partnerships, UUSC has launched Wage Justice!, an initiative to deepen faith-based advocacy in this movement. As part of Wage Justice, we provide support to UU activists and congregations on strategically selected local and statewide living wage campaigns, including sharing education and resource materials to increase UU and interfaith participation in this vital economic justice movement.

One tool you can order is a DVD called "La Marcha: Working for Economic Justice" which shares the story of the Santa Fe Living Wage Network and its pioneering victory as a faith-labor-community coalition in achieving America’s highest local living wage.

Through partnership, advocacy and education, UUSC is committed to the success of this growing national living wage movement which is dramatically improving the lives of America’s most marginalized and vulnerable workers, and bringing diverse communities together to achieve economic justice.

Living wages: Consider these facts!

• Today’s federal minimum wage puts workers below the poverty line! Hard working Americans who work 40 hours a week and earn the minimum wage still find themselves living below the poverty line.


• A Living Wage helps Women Workers: 35% of workers who receive a minimum wage are their families’ sole earners. 61% are women, and almost 33% of those women are raising children – therefore approximately 11 million women and their families would be directly affected by a $1 dollar increase in the minimum wage.


• A Living Wage is good for business: raises in the minimum wage have neither been detrimental to small business nor resulted in job loss and inflated wages. In fact, small businesses perform better in states with higher minimum wages. Between 1998 and 2004, the job growth for small businesses in states with a minimum wage higher than the federal level was 6.2 percent compared to a 4.1 percent growth in states where the federal level prevailed.


• A Living Wage benefits taxpayers: Because the minimum wage covers, on average, only 34 percent of a family’s basic costs of living, working families often rely on government assistance, including housing subsidies, medical assistance, food stamps, and welfare. If minimum wage workers earned enough to provide for their families, taxpayers would not need to pick up the tab for employers who do not pay their workers a living wage.


• A living wage has overwhelmingly supported by the general public: Support for an increase in the minimum wage extends across all political groups, with 86% of voters polled by the non-partisan Pew Research Center favoring a hike in the minimum wage from its current level of $5.15 per hour.