Memo to Congress: The Working Poor Need a Raise

Americans are divided about many things, but on at least one issue they stand united: During the past decade, polls have consistently shown that Americans overwhelmingly want Congress to raise the minimum wage. According to a report earlier this year from the Pew Research Center, 83 percent of the American public -- including 72 percent of Republicans and 75 percent of those who earn over $75,000 a year -- favor boosting it to more than $7 an hour. But, since 1997, Congress has refused to act, leaving the minimum wage stuck at $5.15 an hour.

Frustrated by Congress' intransigence, a growing number of states have made an end run around Washington. Before Election Day, 22 states had enacted laws -- by passing ballot measures or by legislative action -- to raise their minimum wages above the federal level.

On November 7, voters in another six states -- Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and Ohio -- approved measures to raise state minimum wage levels by $1 to $1.70 an hour. But in each of these six states, voters took another important step. They agreed to increase the minimum wage each year by indexing it to inflation. Four other states -- Oregon, Florida, Washington and Vermont -- had already approved minimum wage laws that are not only higher than the federal level, but also include annual cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs). Washington State's minimum wage, now $7.63, is the nation's highest.

Nancy Pelosi, who will become Speaker of the House in January, has pledged to hike the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour as one of the Democrats' first acts after taking control of the House and Senate. This would give at least 6.6 million low-wage workers a direct pay increase; millions more will have their wages hiked because the floor has been raised.

But with the Democrats now in a stronger position in Congress, many union leaders and community groups want them to push not only to raise the federal minimum wage, but also to include a path-breaking cost of living adjustment, so that inflation doesn't continue to erode its purchasing power.

Since 1997, when Congress last raised the minimum wage, its buying power has declined by 20 percent. The federal minimum wage is now the lowest it's been since 1955 (in inflation-adjusted dollars). The highest during that period was in 1968, when it was worth almost $8 an hour in today's dollars. Progressive Democrats in Congress should up the ante and demand a minimum wage hike to at least the poverty level -- $20,000 a year, or $9.60 an hour -- with a COLA clause, too.

"Periodically adjusting the minimum wage to keep up with inflation just makes common sense," said John J. Sweeney, President of the AFL-CIO, a major proponent of hiking the wage.

"Whenever we have given them the chance, a large majority of voters -- including large numbers of Republican voters -- voted for minimum wage increases with indexing," said Maude Hurd, president of ACORN, the national community organizing group that has played a key role in many of the state-level minimum wage battles. "The President and Congress should follow their lead."

In November 2004, ACORN and several labor groups led a successful battle in Florida to raise the minimum wage by one dollar to $6.15 an hour and to increase it annually based on the consumer price index. There, where Bush beat John Kerry by 381,000 votes, voters favored the minimum wage increase by 3.1 million votes -- or 71.3 percent to 28.7 percent -- despite the opposition of the state's business community and Governor Jeb Bush.

ACORN and its union allies then looked for other key states in this year's races where they could not only win ballot measures to hike the minimum wage with a COLA provision but also target voter mobilization efforts to increase turnout among likely Democrats -- a liberal counterpart to conservative efforts to put anti-gay marriage measures on the ballot.