President Barack Obama has declared in Tuesday
night’s State of the Union Address that he shall be pushing for a
significant increase in the federal minimum wage, a change which has
long been overdue. Right now the minimum wage is not nearly a living
wage, but a poverty wage. Congress has only approved a raise in the
federal minimum wage three times in the last three decades. Now the
federal minimum is stagnant at $7.25 an hour. That amounts to a grand
total of $15,080 a year (about 1,256 a month) if you work 40 hours every
week with no sick days or vacation time. That is not nearly enough for
even one person to afford rent, food, utilities, gas, car insurance, and
other necessary daily expenditures.
In no state in the country is it possible to pay for a basic
but safe two bedroom apartment and the utilities on a full time job at
minimum wage. An individual trying to live off of minimum faces absolute
destitution in the event of a broken car, missed work, an injury, or a
health problem. This is one of the primary reasons why there are now
over 45 million people in the United States who are living below the
poverty line, and there are over 50 million people without any health
insurance. Despite belief to the contrary, most people in poverty are
either disabled or they work very hard and are known as the “working
poor”.
If minimum wage had increased at the same rate of economic
inflation to keep up with the cost of living than it would be $10.58 an
hour today, which is just over 22,000 dollars a year at 40 hours a week.
Almost two thousand dollars a month would make it possible for a
single person on their own to budget very tightly and have enough to
cover all their usual expenses without government assistance, except for
particularly expensive places like New York City or Los Angeles.
It is significant to note, however, that if minimum wage grew
at the same rate that CEO salaries and profits have for the last forty
years that our minimum wage would be closer to twenty three dollars an
hour. In truth, that is what corporations, from all of their
historically momentous growth of wealth over the decades, can really
afford to pay their workers, but they choose not to. The profits from
the one hundred richest people in this country are now enough to
eliminate poverty worldwide, four times over. There is no genuine reason
for minimum wage to not be far above even ten dollars an hour, except
for the greed of our so called “job-creators” and their refusal to risk
any decrease to their next billion dollar Christmas bonus.
Tipped employees have a separate federal minimum, which is at
$2.13 an hour and has remained unchanged for over twenty years.
According to the Fair Labor Standards Act, an employer is exempt from
having to pay the usual minimum wage if the employee makes thirty
dollars or more a month in tips. It is also legal to pay someone who is
under the age of twenty a starting wage of $4.24 an hour for the first
three months they work for an employer. There are also exceptions
allowing employers to pay less than minimum if the worker is a full time
student, a student learner, or has a disability.
The good news is that states do have the power to raise their
state minimum wage through state legislation, and employers have to
adhere to the higher standard in those states. In November of 2012, ten
states voted to increase their minimum wage, including Washington,
Vermont, Oregon, and Ohio. The state with the highest minimum wage in
the country is the state of Washington with a rate of $9.19 an hour.
Thirty one states, however, still cling to the federal minimum of $7.25.
There are some states wherein certain occupations can legally get away
with paying LESS than the federal minimum. In Arkansas they can pay
their employees $6.25 an hour if the employer has four or more
employees. Employers in Georgia sometimes pay $5.15 an hour if they have
six or more workers. In 2011 there were 2.2 million workers making less
than the federal minimum.
attribution: None Specified
The Chamber of Commerce and the National Restaurant Association
(of course) protest the very idea of raising minimum wage at all and
insist that it will lead to employers cutting hours to make up for the
difference. However, this would be foolish and counter-intuitive because
businesses always maintain precisely the number of employees they need
to keep up with demand, failing to do so would cut more deeply into
profits than would raises for employees. There are no employers who are
going to hire someone new when they do not need the extra help, even if
they have the money to do so, and employers are certainly not going to
fire people and cut hours, leaving them short-handed, as long as demand
remains steady. So it is the level of demand (the customers) that
enables a business to grow and keeps it lucrative and operating. Of
course, the best way to maintain a stable customer base is to make sure
that as many people as possible are receiving a living wage, which
enables them to purchase this country’s endless array of goods and
services and keeps our economy from collapsing.
President Obama is hoping for a federal minimum wage hike to $9
an hour, which is down from the $9.50 he initially proposed, and much
further down than the $10 minimum Clinton tried for in the 90’s. Of
course a raise of $1.75 would be helpful, but it is still not going to
get most people out of poverty, and may do us little good in the long
run if we do not have an indexed minimum wage. An index rate is a
minimum wage which automatically increases to keep up with the rising
cost of living from inflation. Otherwise, we may find ourselves in this
same position five or ten years from now, fighting to raise wages again
because no one can make a living working full time. Obama said “If you
work full time, you shouldn’t be in poverty”. It is hard to imagine
someone disagreeing with that statement…but alas, they exist.
The President stated that “[Raising minimum wage is] not a
Democratic thing or a Republican thing”, and went on to say that it was
the job of both sides to restore balance and security to the country. He
received applause for his usual attempt at bipartisan peacemaking, but
the reality is that no matter what Obama does to improve the country,
Republicans are going to oppose it. President Obama’s desire to appease
and win over the congressional republicans quickly became a tiresome
failure, now it is a play at absurdity. It is time to end the game of
bipartisan politics and take the path of progressive leadership for
which we elected this president in the first place.
Republican politicians have no stake in the struggling workers
of the country, and they have no interest in improving their
circumstances. It is against their interests to eliminate poverty for
millions of people, thereby empowering those people to seek better
opportunities. Republicans and their rich CEO overlords want to have a
huge pool of oppressed, uneducated, desperate workers who are willing to
do any job for as little pay as the employers can possibly manage. That
way they always have a hefty pool of obedient workers who are less
likely to complain or make demands. This pattern of thought is apparent
in the less intellectually adept republicans who allow such intentions
to become blatantly obvious, like Michelle Bachmann who said that we
could practically end unemployment if we did away with minimum wage laws
entirely so we could hire people at “whatever level”.
If we want to avoid absolute economic destruction we have to
invest in our workers. Employee’s clock out of work and immediately
become consumers, and our country has a consumer based economy. It is
time to strengthen our country by strengthening our people and raise the
minimum wage to a living wage. In the event that President Obama
succeeds at raising the rate to nine dollars an hour, it must only serve
as a starting point. It is only impossible to make a difference if we
insist that failure is the only possibility. Obama is certainly right in
that no one who works full time should have to wallow in poverty with
little chance of getting ahead.
“A market where chief executive officers make 262 times that of the
average worker and 821 times that of the minimum-wage worker is not a
market that is working well. And it is surely not working well enough to
build a solid middle class.” ~Marcy Kaptur
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TYT Army...too strong!
I will not fault this woman for
taking a job at a Christian school (though I certainly would not) because jobs
are very hard to come by in this economy, but ideally she should not have had
to take a job in a religious setting and submit to a moral clause. First of all,
the expectations within the workplace should remain separate from the privacy
of your home life. Secondly, there should be more than enough schools and
funding for teaching and administrative jobs in this country so this woman
wouldn’t have to take a job at a Christian school. Lastly, my primary point,
that religious institutions should not own and run schools; education should no
longer be the domain of religion. We as a society just accept it, because this
is the way it has always been; we have always had religious educational
institutions. Historically churches have been a primary source for education in
one form or another. Socialized public school is much newer to our society than
religious education, although it is the far more preferable method of
instilling strong minds into our populace.
Their scheme works best, however,
if they can catch people when they are young, impressionable, and already prone
to irrational fears, guilt, and the belief in imaginary creatures. If children and
young people have no other influences in their life other than religion at their
schools, jobs, hospitals, and at home than they are the unsuspecting victims of
cult indoctrination, and they have very little chance for mental expansion
within such a restrictive and oppressive environment during their formative
years. How can you properly analyze your beliefs or the world around you if you
have had absolutely no exposure to any other way of thinking or living,
particularly during the years your brain is developing? If you have to isolate,
pressure, and consume people into an ideology, than that ideology does not
stand strong enough on its own. Religiously based education most often is
designed to promote an unquestioning adherence to a strict worldview. It is
against the interests of religions to promote free, critical thought; as such
thought inevitably leads to the questioning of one’s own spiritual habits and
beliefs. .jpg)
The
ideology that many religious institutions promote is one that perpetuates a
discriminatory and exclusionary atmosphere within society as a whole. The moral
contract that Teri James had to sign included a section forbidding homosexual
activity as well, thereby excluding homosexuals from employment also, which should
be illegal, but in many places is not. There is virtually no faction exempt
from the reaches of religious judgment, especially to homosexuals, bisexuals,
blacks, atheists, or women who get abortions, use birth control, are single
moms, have sex, or generally reveal any aspect of their sexuality in any way. Often
the students themselves become targets of harassment from students and teachers
if they are believed to be gay, atheist, or some other ungodly deviation from
holiness. Religious schooling also denies children of sexual education, the
truth about evolution, the Big Bang, and anything else that religion deems
“sinful” or “blasphemous”, which is anything that contradicts their collection
of ancient writings of orated tales from an era predating modern science.
Join me on ...
If you still believe that being gay
is evil I cannot stop you from thinking that way, but it really should not be a
concern of yours (if you are not gay) so why interfere in the lives of others?
There are couples BEGGING to be allowed to marry their loved one and not have
to move to another state away from their friends and family to do it. You can
live your own life by whatever code you choose, but if they want to rot in hell
for all eternity, let them do it, it is their choice. No one should have the
right to force their faith and beliefs on other people, especially by passing or
supporting legislation that would restrict the freedoms of others.
It has been said a million times by
all those who are rational, but it is still true, that it really shouldn’t
matter who you love. The political right screams about small government and
freedoms, but they ignore those words when it comes to dictating who you can
marry, a woman’s reproductive rights, or the substances you can consume. The hypocritical
right wing is fed by the fears and prejudices of an ignorant populace fooled by
lunacy that is ages old, and in almost all the social problems I come across I
see the same core issue…lack of education. I do not just mean school; I speak
of a general lack of understanding and working knowledge of the world and a
failure to see past one’s own limited experience. Knowledge is the finest cure
against any prejudice. If only knowing were valued more than following, if only
questioning were more valued than obeying. Hate is taught; it is not innate, whereas
the inclination to explore is perfectly natural and should be nourished. So
parents, please teach your children to appreciate the variety of life and seek
a deeper understanding in all things and people, so that we may create a future
where bigotry and prejudice is a thing of the past. Now is the time to give
justice to the homosexual community and give them the same rights and legal
protection that heterosexuals have always had. 