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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Economy : Elections & Legislation : Labor : Political-Economy |
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Congress Values Own Paychecks More Than Workers |
Current rating: 0 |
by Holly Sklar
(No verified email address) |
21 Jun 2006
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The minimum wage sets the wage floor. When the minimum wage sinks, it drags down wages for workers up the pay scale as well. Between 1968 and 2005, worker productivity rose 111 percent, but the average hourly wage fell 5 percent, adjusting for inflation, and the minimum wage fell 43 percent. |
Members of Congress like to talk about values. They sure don't mean the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
While more and more hardworking Americans struggle to make ends meet, Congress showed what it really values -- the rising value of congressional pay.
The House refused to block the $3,300 "cost of living adjustment" that will raise congressional pay on Jan. 1 to $168,500 -- not counting great health benefits, pensions and perks.
Congressional pay raises between 1997 and 2007 will add up to $34,900. That's more than average workers make in a year.
It would take more than three workers to make $34,900 at the minimum wage stuck at $5.15 an hour -- just $10,712 a year -- since Sept. 1, 1997.
Full-time workers at minimum wage make less than $900 a month to pay rent, food, healthcare, gas and everything else. No wonder the U.S. Conference of Mayors Hunger and Homelessness Survey found that 40 percent of adults requesting emergency food assistance were employed, as were 15 percent of the homeless.
Childcare workers and security guards struggle to care for their own children. EMTs and health care aides can't afford to take sick days.
Yet Congress has given itself raise after raise, while giving none to minimum wage workers.
As Adam Smith himself wrote in "The Wealth of Nations," "It is but equity … that those who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged."
Today's minimum wage workers have less buying power than minimum wage workers did back in 1950 when Harry Truman was president. The 1950 minimum wage is $6.30 in 2006 dollars, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator.
It would take $9.31 today to match the value of the minimum wage of 1968. It takes nearly two minimum wage workers to make what one worker made four decades ago.
The minimum wage has become a poverty wage instead of an anti-poverty wage. This has ripple effects far beyond minimum wage workers and their families.
The minimum wage sets the wage floor. When the minimum wage sinks, it drags down wages for workers up the pay scale as well. Between 1968 and 2005, worker productivity rose 111 percent, but the average hourly wage fell 5 percent, adjusting for inflation, and the minimum wage fell 43 percent.
The inflation-adjusted earnings of college-educated workers have fallen since 2000. Poverty rates are higher now than in the 1970s and we have an increasingly low-wage workforce instead of a growing middle class.
Contrary to myth, raising the minimum wage helps business and boosts the economy. We had high economic growth, low inflation, low unemployment and declining poverty rates after the last minimum wage hikes in 1996 and 1997. States that have raised their minimum wages above the increasingly inadequate $5.15 federal level have had better employment trends than the other states, including for retail businesses and small businesses.
Higher wages increase consumer purchasing power, reduce costly employee turnover, and improve productivity and the quality of products and services. For example, In-N-Out Burger, home of the nation's first drive-through hamburger stand, ranks first nationwide among fast food chains in overall excellence, food flavor, quality and customer service. Their entry-level wage of $9 is nearly $4 above the federal minimum wage.
Small business owner Malcolm Davis wrote in a letter to the editor, "My lowest-paid employee makes $8 per hour. … If I can find a way to be fair with my employees in rural Eastern North Carolina, why can't our government?"
A recent survey by the National Consumers League and Fleishman-Hillard Communications found that 76 percent of American consumers believe "how well a company treats/pays employees influences what they buy." Consumers said "commitment to employees" is the strongest proof of corporate responsibility and it is important for companies to ensure that workers "are paid a living wage."
A job should keep you out of poverty, not keep you in it. It's time for Congress to stop their luxury raises, and raise the minimum wage to a living wage.
Holly Sklar is co-author of "A Just Minimum Wage: Good for Workers, Business and Our Future" (www.letjusticeroll.org) and "Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies That Work for All Of Us."
© 2006 Holly Sklar |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
Comments
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Tim Johnson's Vote |
by historian
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
22 Jun 2006
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Our Rep. Tim Johnson voted against this pay raise, which is quite typical of him. He does this to posture about how he's on the side of the little guy, but the reality is different.
Tim knows these pay raises will pass without him having to vote yes. Tim is independently wealthy, so he has no personal need for the money.
But Tim definitely needs the votes of lots of working people. Essentialy the publicity from voting against pay raises is worth every penny Tim gives up -- which is none, since the pay raises inevitably go through. It's a cheap stunt that he has honed over the years.
Meanwhile on issues that are important to working people -- raising the minimum wage, healthcare, support for stronger labor laws -- Tim is almost totally missing in action, except for mouthing the occasional platitude. While he has continued to draw campaign funds from several unions that really ought to know better, Tim has been laughing all the way to the bank. There is very little to show for these union's investments in re-electing Tim over the years.
Meanwhile, Tim and the wealthy elites he really serves are rolling in the dough of their investments and tax cuts during a decade without a raise in the minimum wage. What did the average working family get? Another decade older and deeper in debt, as is our nation. |
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CEOs Earn 262 Times Pay of Average Worker |
by Kamal Taha
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
22 Jun 2006
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Chief executive officers in the United States earned 262 times the pay of an average worker in 2005, the second-highest level in the 40 years for which there is data, a nonprofit think-tank said on Wednesday.
In fact, a CEO earned more in one workday than an average worker earned in 52 weeks, said the Economic Policy Institute (http://www.epinet.org/) in Washington, D.C.
The typical worker's compensation averaged just under $42,000 for the year, while the average CEO brought home almost $11 million, EPI said.
In recent years, compensation has been a hot issue with shareholders who have been bombarded with news stories about chief executives who are given multimillion dollar bonus and pay packages even if shares have declined.
For example, the chief executives of 11 of the largest companies were awarded a total of $865 million in pay in the last two years, even as they presided over a total loss of $640 billion in shareholder value, a recent study from governance firm the Corporate Library, found.
In 1965, U.S. CEOs at major companies earned 24 times a worker's pay. That ratio surged in the 1990s and hit 300 at the end of the recovery in 2000, according to EPI.
CEO pay is defined by the sum of salary, bonus, value of restricted stock at grant and other long-term incentives. Worker pay is hourly wage of production and nonsupervisory works, EPI said.
Copyright © 2006 Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/ |
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There's a Rot at the Core of the American System |
by working class
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
22 Jun 2006
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Look at the disconnect:
First, the American system is supposedly based on those who produce getting the fruits of the labor in some sense, The system is supposed to reward those who perfrom and eliminate the dead weight. But what do we see?
"The minimum wage sets the wage floor. When the minimum wage sinks, it drags down wages for workers up the pay scale as well. Between 1968 and 2005, worker productivity rose 111 percent, but the average hourly wage fell 5 percent, adjusting for inflation, and the minimum wage fell 43 percent."
Then we see:
"In recent years, compensation has been a hot issue with shareholders who have been bombarded with news stories about chief executives who are given multimillion dollar bonus and pay packages even if shares have declined.
"For example, the chief executives of 11 of the largest companies were awarded a total of $865 million in pay in the last two years, even as they presided over a total loss of $640 billion in shareholder value, a recent study from governance firm the Corporate Library, found."
And Tim Johnson is working hard to prop up exactly this kind of system.
Like The Who said many moons ago (sniff), "We won't get fooled again." |
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Class Warfare: The Minimum Wage Goes Down |
by Katrina vanden Heuvel
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
22 Jun 2006
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The GOP just shafted the working people of America. By rejecting an attempt to raise the minimum wage, the Republican-controlled Senate showed that it is far more interested in lining the pockets of its campaign contributors than – as Paul Krugman wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Monday – arriving at a "new New Deal" and working to "rebuild our middle class." The 52-46 vote was eight short of the 60 needed for approval. (The measure drew the support of eight Republicans --four of these are up for reelection in the fall.)
Sen. Edward Kennedy's amendment would have raised the wage from the current $5.15 an hour to $7.25 – the first raise in a decade. "The minimum wage," as economist Gwendolyn Mink, makes clear, is supposed to guarantee an income floor to keep full-time wage-earners out of poverty. But today, the federal minimum wage guarantees abject poverty for workers... nearly $6,000 per year below the federal poverty line for a family of three."
But the vast majority of Republican Senators, several of them millionaires several times over, don't care about poverty or the well-being of their working class constituents, What they really care about is that they're sitting pretty, having voted themselves another raise --to $168,500 --on January 1.
Even the not-exactly-populist Wall Street Journal points out, "While the minimum wage has remained frozen, lawmakers' salaries have risen with annual cost-of-living increases keyed to what is given federal employees. And last week's vote in the House Appropriations Committee followed a floor vote days before in which the House cleared the way for members to get another increase valued at thousands of dollars annually." So, while Congress will soon make close to $170,000 a year, hardworking full-time minimum wage workers make just $10,700 annually.
One group that did important work to end this inequity is the Let Justice Roll (http://www.letjusticeroll.org/) coalition--a fast-growing program of more than 70 faith and community groups. The coalition labored mightily to target senators who were critical to passing this legislation and preventing it from being weakened by Republican's bogus charges of "class warfare." (For the true definition of class warfare, check out my Dictionary of Republicanisms.
"Class warfare, n.: any attempt to raise the minimum wage").
For millions of families, this callous vote means another day of choosing between rent and health care, putting food in the refrigerator or gas in the car. Meanwhile, a Big Oil CEO makes $37,000 an hour. Want to talk about class warfare?
Katrina vanden Heuvel has been The Nation's editor since 1995 and publisher since 2005. She is the co-editor of "Taking Back America--And Taking Down The Radical Right" (NationBooks, 2004) and, most recently, editor of "The Dictionary of Republicanisms" (NationBooks, 2005).
© 2006 The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/ |
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If Congress Deserves a Raise, Why Don't Workers? |
by AFSC
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
23 Jun 2006
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AFSC Urges House of Representatives to Raise the Minimum Wage and Reject Thomas Extate Tax Giveaway
PHILADELPHIA - June 21 - Following Congress’s eighth pay raise since 1997 and the defeat today of minimum-wage legislation in the Senate, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization and co-recipient of the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize, urged the U.S. House of Representatives to raise the federal minimum wage. Since Congress last raised the minimum wage in 1997, its real value has eroded more than 20 percent.
AFSC is also calling on House members to reject an estate tax “compromise” expected to be brought to the House floor on Thursday. The legislation, introduced by House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R-CA), would exempt estates worth as much as $5 million - $10 million for couples - from taxation indefinitely.
Joyce Miller, AFSC assistant general secretary for justice and human rights, said: “After years of favoring the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers, Congress can show it cares about ordinary people by voting to raise the minimum wage and reject a ‘compromise’ that would starve social programs of needed money by gutting the estate tax.”
The Service Committee supported an amendment by Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) to the Department of Defense authorization bill, which would have raised the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour. On Wednesday, the Senate rejected that amendment by six votes, and also an amendment by Senator Michael Enzi (R-WY) that would have coupled a smaller minimum-wage increase with devastating anti-worker provisions.
A person who works 52 weeks a year, 40 hours a week at the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour earns just $10,700 - $6,000 below the federal poverty level of $16,660 for a family of three. Sixty-one percent of minimum wage workers are women.
“The minimum wage is a moral issue,” Miller added. “By keeping the minimum wage a poverty wage, Congress is compounding the race and gender discrimination that disproportionately tracks women and people of color into low-wage jobs.”
“Some members of Congress have argued that raising the minimum wage would hurt low-wage workers by encouraging employers to hire undocumented immigrants instead. Rather than pitting workers against each other, Congress should pass laws that make the minimum wage a fair wage and strengthen and enforce the right of all workers to organize and form unions.”
AFSC is a founding member of the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign (www.letjusticeroll.org), a network of more than 70 faith, labor and community groups working to raise federal and state minimum wages. The coalition played an important part in recent successful campaigns in Arkansas, Michigan and West Virginia, which raised the minimum wages in those states.
“The base pay for a congressperson is $168,500,” noted Rick Wilson, director of AFSC’s West Virginia Economic Justice Project, who played a leading role in the successful drive to raise the minimum wage in that state. “Contrast this to the experience of a single mother of two who earns $10,712 a year, working 40-hour weeks without a break.”
“The single mom would have to work 15.7 years at 40 hours per week to earn what the congressperson does,” Wilson notes in his blog, at www.goatrope.blogspot.com. “In fact, she’d have to work about 641 hours just to make as much as the congressional cost-of-living increase.”
In addition to a minimum-wage increase, AFSC is campaigning for a “moral budget” based on fair tax policies and adequate funding for social programs. It recently co-published, with the National Council of Churches, “A Just Minimum Wage: Good for Workers, Business and Our Future” by Holly Sklar and the Rev. Dr. Paul Sherry.
That report counters arguments against raising the minimum wage, and highlights the important role of a higher minimum wage in helping the U.S. move toward a “high-road economy.” The report is available in .pdf format at www.afsc.org/economic-justice/, or from Dorothy Lazenbury-Gibbs, at 215-241-7048.
http://www.afsc.org/ |
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Hold Clean on $2.10 Minimum Wage Increase, AFL-CIO Tells Members of Congress |
by AFL-CIO
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
24 Jun 2006
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WASHINGTON - June 23 - “There is no good reason for preventing a House vote on a clean $2.10 increase in the minimum wage,” the AFL-CIO’s legislative director said in a letter sent today to all members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The federal minimum wage has been frozen for nine years.
Republicans have come under increased pressure for their blockade of a minimum wage increase. Yesterday a majority of the Senate, 52 members, voted for a $2.10 increase in the minimum wage with no “poison pills” attached to prevent its passage, and “it is widely believed that a majority of the House also supports the $2.10 increase,” the letter notes. But there have also been hints that the Republican House leadership is considering a lesser increase with poison pill provisions designed to provoke opposition.
A 2005 study by the Economic Policy Institute showed that a lesser minimum wage increase would affect a minimal percentage of the population and fail to restore the purchasing power of the minimum wage. A second study released jointly by EPI and the Center on Budget and Policy Priority just this week showed that the purchasing power of the minimum wage has now hit a 51-year low.
Samuels pointed out that the $2.10 increase is a moral imperative in light of the $3,300 congressional pay raise cleared in the House last week.
“Increasing the minimum wage is a statement about how we as a society value hard work,” Samuel wrote, “half-measures designed to benefit as few workers as possible are simply inadequate.”
“There is simply no excuse for using parliamentary maneuvers and ‘poison pills’ to prevent a clean vote on a clean $2.10 increase in the minimum wage,” he concluded.
http://www.aflcio.org/ |
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Democrats Finally Wake Up to Need For Minimum Wage Hike |
by Ralph Nader
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
24 Jun 2006
|
Whatever led to the metastasis of corporate demons inside the brain of the Democratic Party over the last thirty years, it has paid off in the business establishment. The cost of freezing the minimum wage has deprived millions of working Americans of trillions of dollars for their necessities of life.
A few Democrats, most prominently Senator Edward M. Kennedy, have championed keeping the minimum wage up with inflation for years. But the Republicans and the somnolent Democratic Party have combined to defeat Kennedy's bills over and over again.
Last year the federal minimum wage at $5.15 per hour was $3.50 below in purchasing power of what it was in 1968. Today's minimum wage has the lowest purchasing power since 1949 when economic productivity per worker was a fraction of what it is today, when the super-rich corporate bosses had not become hyper-rich averaging over $8000 an hour.
Add no health insurance for the working poor and there are added pressures on livelihoods for parents and children.
The last increase to $5.15 per hour was in 1997. Except for one year of restraint, members of Congress have zipped their annual pay grab through the House and Senate every year. Just the increases in that period amount to about three times the annual minimum wage income for millions of American laborers. No wonder poverty has been on the increase.
The abdication of the Congressional Democrats, even when they were the majority and Clinton was President, on the living wage matter has cost them as well. More than any other single issue, save possibly health insurance for all, their reluctance to boldly and visibly champion the living wage has cost them the Presidential and Congressional elections.
People want politicians to STAND FOR THE PEOPLE, not grovel beneath the corporations.
Mindful of the political appeal of the living wage issue in our country since the onset of the industrial age, I sent an open letter in May 2004 to the Democratic leadership-Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Senator Tom Daschle, urging them to pledge that members of their Party would resist all future raises for the lawmakers until the federal minimum wage was restored to its 1968 purchasing power. Hardly revolutionary.
But for Pelosi and Daschle and their leadership circle, that was too much alienation of the Wal-Marts, the McDonalds, other fast food and retail chains, and their allies. They never responded to my letter and, along with John Kerry, plunged headlong to defeat in November. Meanwhile, though opposed by Governor Jeb Bush and the fast food chains with big television gadgets, a Florida referendum raising the minimum wage by a dollar won with a 72% majority in November.
Twenty-one states lately have raised their minimum wage above the federal minimum. None have reached the 1968 purchasing power level yet.
The Democrats finally sense the minimum wage issue to be a bright line position with the retrograde Republicans whose ideological heads are in the sands. But look how long the Democrats took to wake up their earlier political history.
At last, led by Senator Kennedy, they are attaching amendments to legislation and last week got 52 Senators to back raising the wage to $7.25 in three stages. At that level, minimum wage workers would earn an additional $4,370 a year to support their families.
However, the Republican filibuster opposition can only be overcome by getting 60 votes, so Kennedy has a ways to go. But the issue is getting hotter, though far from being visible to most Americans, including poor families.
The best thing going for the Democrats' November prospects is bonehead John Boehner, Republican majority leader of the House who has dug in his heels. His spokesman, Kevin Madden, said Congressman Boehner "remains convinced that a minimum wage hike will destroy jobs." Rep. Ray Lahood (R-IL) is trying to convince his leader, John Boehner, that raising the minimum wage "is a no-brainer. It's just something that we should do."
The loss of jobs argument is the Republican fig leaf hiding added bundles of campaign dollars that ooze intro the Party's pores when the minimum wage remains frozen in time. As one wag put it, by that reasoning, the Republicans should push down the minimum wage to add more jobs.
Princeton economists blew that "job loss" claim out of the water after the 1997 increase. In the four years after the last minimum wage increase, 11 million new jobs were added including 600,000 restaurants jobs.
More to the point is the public philosophy that working full-time should provide enough income for your family's necessities. There is also the matter of simple fairness. Wal-Mart's CEO made $12,000 an hour, plus perks, in a recent year, while hundreds of thousands of his workers were making between $6 and $9 per hour, with very few if any benefits.
Rest assured, neither the Democratic nor the Republican leadership will stop their annual pay raise. The House already has passed their pay grab. Shame is a rare commodity when it comes to the moral authority to govern.
Why do we let them get away with such Marie Antoinette values? |
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