Such was the claim of former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani, when he was confronted with the workers' demands to the raise the Minimum Wage.
Sounds more like the the workers were trying to "tear down that wall" to me -- tear down a towering wall of poverty, from which far too many never escape ...
We started with a pretty simple idea: If you work full time, you shouldn’t be poor,” recalled Jonathan Lange, an organizer with Metro I.A.F., the local affiliate [Industrial Areas Foundation].
None of this amused Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, [...] “They are trying to rebuild the Berlin Wall,” he roared. The Council overrode Mr. Giuliani’s veto, and he was characteristically intemperate. The groups that passed this bill, he growled, are sacred cows and “sacred cows make the best hamburger meat.”
This is a living wage with little room for life.
In Gilded City, Living Wage Proposal Still Stirs Fears
by Micheal Powell, NYTimes -- Dec 19, 2011
But wait, there's an updated chapter to this short-order story ...
That was 1996 when Giuliani took a stand for his base. Fast-forward to the present day -- same issue, only a different 1% Mayor:
[...] we may hear our billionaire mayor declaim on a ruinous proposal that several thousand low-wage workers could receive a wage of $10 an hour if they labor in developments irrigated with city tax subsidies.
“I think,” Michael R. Bloomberg said a few weeks back, “that when the government tries to too much interfere with the marketplace, it doesn’t turn out well.”
There is an indefinable something about a so-called living wage bill that puts New York’s leaders at risk of breaking out in socialist hives.
Funny they should try to raise a family in New York City with just the Minimum Wage backing them up -- Good Luck!
This handy Living Wage Calculator from Pennsylvania State University, says that for a Family of 4, living in Queens NY:
the Living Wage is $30.30 an hour.
and the Poverty Wage is $9.83 an hour.
Meanwhile the Minimum (legally required) Wage in that locale is $7.25 an hour.
-- That's some Berlin Wall, Rudy! Wonder which side of it, he's looking down from?
A wall of inequity keeping far too many working families in America from ever reaching their dreams ... dreams of simply living a normal life. ... Dreams of College. Of a Career. Of basic Opportunity. Of economic security.
And that is the way the 1% Mayors like it. A captive labor force, desperate enough to work for peanuts. Just to keep their families off the street.
Even so, such desperation is often not enough:
A living wage bill scarcely pulls a worker out of poverty, much less into working-class prosperity.
Margaret Passley, 50 and a Jamaican immigrant, has labored in home care for more than two decades. In 2002, she got a raise to $10 an hour: that is not to be confused with living well. She worked 50, 60, sometimes 70 hours a week to support her two children, and to try to hold onto a Brooklyn house she eventually lost to foreclosure.
What of your spare time? I ask. Can you take in a movie? She shakes her head. A restaurant? She chuckles.
“To be honest, I can’t afford that. I go to church,” she says. “For leisure time, I go to the park.”
Such are the indulgences, of working for near-poverty wages. Such is life in modern-day 99% America, for far too many of us.
What's a Living Wage? -- from the Living Wage Action Coalition
Living Wage NYC