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$10 in 2010: The National Campaign for a Fair Minimum Wage

Monday, February 23, 2009


What Poverty Costs America

Contrary to stereotype, the typical minimum wage worker is an adult over age 20. Most have high school diplomas or have completed coursework beyond high school.

An astounding 1 in 4 American workers are employed in jobs that pay poverty wages and provide minimal or no benefits. More than 60 percent of full-time minimum wage workers are women, often raising children.

Recent estimates find that childhood poverty costs the U.S. economy $500 billion annually, due to loss of productivity and economic output, and expenditures on health conditions and crime associated with poverty.

Visit www.uusc.org/10in2010 to get involved!

In 1938, in the middle of the Great Depression, still the most severe economic crisis this country has ever faced, Congress and President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted the Fair Labor Standards Act, establishing the first federal minimum wage.

Thinking about those on the lowest rung of the U.S. economy, Roosevelt anticipated that a minimum wage would put a floor under workers' wages and alleviate the hardship of inadequate pay. In addition, he surmised that it would stimulate the economy by increasing consumer purchasing power, allowing workers to attain adequate food and shelter and "buy their share of manufactured goods."

Roosevelt said, "The increase of national purchasing power [is] an underlying necessity of the day."

Today, there is an even greater gap between the minimum wage and the minimum amount of money it takes to survive. Even with recent increases, the federal minimum wage for a full-time worker amounts to just $13,624 per year.

Yet, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the national median basic-needs budget (including taxes and tax credits) for a single-parent, one-child family is $30,761.

What is often forgotten in the debate over the minimum wage is that workers are also consumers. Consumer spending makes up about 70 percent of our economy. If consumer purchasing power is at the heart of economic recovery, then so, too, are higher wages.

"When businesses don't pay a living wage all society pays," says U.S. Women's Chamber of Commerce CEO Margot Dorfman. "We pay through poverty and needless disease, disability and death from inadequate health care. We pay as women struggle to put food on the table. We pay as businesses and communities suffer economic decline."

Raising the minimum wage above poverty level is one of the most effective ways to combat poverty and support the human rights of children, women, and people of color in the United States.

Join UUSC and its partners in the call for living wages by promoting "$10 in 2010," the first step toward bringing the minimum wage closer to a living wage.

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