A Congress with Marie Antoinette Values: The Politics of the Minimum Wage

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.

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