Minimum Wage Goes Up This Week
QuestionGirl July 21st, 2007 - 4:42 pmWOOPTYFUCKINDOO! Who can live on $234.00 a week? And I’d guess most of these jobs provide no medical coverage. I got news for congress. Raising minimum wage in the next two years to just above $15,000 before taxes is no big accomplishment. Not even close to catching up to the cost of living. Who can own a car, put gas in it, buy food, pay rent and utilities, clothe oneself, pay your own medical expenses, and MAYBE have have enough left over for a little entertainment or leisure???? I’m glad it’s going up, but what a friggin joke.
Then there’s our ever sacrificing congress of millionaires, who refused to give themselves a raise of $4,400 (which amounts to about 37% of a minimum wage workers annual income) until the minimum wage bill was passed. God they are so very caring and concerned about the low income workers in America, aren’t they? Makes my heart flutter……
The cost-of-living raise gets lawmakers back on track for automatic pay raises after a fight between Democrats and Republicans last year and again in January killed the pay hike due this year. That was the first interruption of the annual congressional pay hike in seven years.
The blowup came after Democrats last year fulfilled a campaign promise to deny themselves a pay hike until Congress raised the minimum wage. Delays in the minimum wage bill cost every lawmaker about $3,100 this year.
WASHINGTON - Fast-food waitress Fawn Townsend of Raleigh, N.C., knows exactly what she is going to do if her salary goes up with Tuesday’s increase in the federal minimum wage: start saving for a car so she can find a second job to make ends meet.
“My goal personally is to get a vehicle so I can independently go back and forth to work and maybe pick up extra work so I can have that extra income, because minimum wage is not cutting it,” said Townsend, who is 24 and single.
“Being a single person, you can’t pay all your bills with one minimum wage job.”
Many lawmakers, along with advocates for low-wage workers, are celebrating the first increase in the federal minimum wage in a decade. Yet many acknowledge that raising it from $5.15 an hour to $5.85 will provide only meager help for some of the lowest paid workers.
About 1.7 million people made $5.15 or less in 2006, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“The reality for a minimum wage worker is that every penny makes a difference because low-wage workers make the choice between putting food on the table and paying for electricity or buying clothes for their children,” said Beth Shulman, former vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.
“Saying that, it’s clear going up to $5.85 is not enough to really make sure that people really can afford the things that all families need,” said Shulman, author of “The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans.”
Minimum wage workers will get an additional 70-cent boost each summer for the next two years, ending in 2009 at $7.25 an hour. That comes to just above $15,000 yearly before taxes for a 52-week work year.
More at YahooNews
