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Fair Minimum Wage Amendment
FAIR MINIMUM WAGE ACT OF 2005
The Fair Minimum Wage Amendment would raise the minimum wage to $7.25 in three steps:
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- $5.85 60 days after enactment
- $6.55 one year after enactment
- $7.25 two years after enactment
- Three million more Americans are in poverty today than when President Bush first took office. Today, more than 34 million people live in poverty, including 12 million children. Among full-time, year-round workers poverty has doubled since the late 1970s from about 1.3 million then to 2.6 million in 2002 an unacceptably low minimum wage is a key part of the problem.
- Minimum wage employees working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, earn $10,712 a year, $5,000 below the poverty line for a family of three. The current minimum wage fails to provide enough income to enable minimum wage workers to afford adequate housing in any area of this country.
- Every day the minimum wage is not increased it continues to lose value, and workers fall farther and farther behind. Minimum wage workers have already lost all of the gains of the 1996-1997 increase.
- Today, the real value of the minimum wage is more than $3.00 below what it was in 1968. To have the purchasing power it had in 1968, the minimum wage would have to be nearly $8.50 an hour today, not $5.15.
- In the past seven years, the salaries of lawmakers have gone up by $23,400 Giving themselves six raises while minimum wage workers continue to earn just $10,700 a year with no raise in those same seven years.
- Nearly 7 million workers would directly benefit from the proposed minimum wage increase:
- 35% are their families sole earners;
- 61% are women and almost one-third of those women are raising children;
- 15% are African American; and
- 19% are Hispanic American.
- An increase to $7.00 an hour for full-time, year-round workers would add $3,800 to their income. A gain of $3,800 would have an enormous impact on minimum wage workers and their families. It would be enough money for a low-income family of three to buy:
- More than a year of groceries;
- over 9 months of rent;
- a year and a half of heat and electricity; or
- full tuition for a community college degree.
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History clearly shows that raising the minimum wage has not had any negative impact on jobs, employment, or inflation. In the four years after the last minimum wage increase passed, the economy experienced its strongest growth in over three decades. Nearly 11 million new jobs were added, at a pace of 218,000 per month. There were six million new service industry jobs, including more than one and a half million retail jobs, of which nearly 600,000 were restaurant jobs.
- A fair increase is long overdue. Congress should act as quickly as possible to pass a minimum wage increase that reflects the losses suffered as the result of our shameful inaction in the past. No one who works for a living should have to live in poverty.
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