The Fair Minimum Wage Amendment would raise the minimum wage to $7.25 in three steps:

- $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.