The unanimous vote by the Massachusetts House and Senate to override Governor Mitt Romney's veto of minimum wage legislation making Massachusetts the first state to set a statutory wage of $8 (in 2008) sends a strong national message that the battle to raise the minimum wage over the poverty level still continues to gather momentum.
The House vote was 152 to 0, and the Senate vote was 38 to 0. "For those of us that care about the minimum wage, it's simply an issue of fairness, of economic justice," said Senator Mark R. Pacheco (D-Taunton), the chief sponsor of the Senate bill that originally, before being watered down, sought to raise the minimum wage to $8.25 in 2008 with an annual COLA thereafter. See http://www.boston.com/....
The Governor's press secretary Eric Fehrnstrom assailed "an increase that substantially exceeded the rate of inflation...that was too much, too fast."
The Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center found that 315,000 workers would be affected by the increase. Of these, 75% are 20 and older, 60% are women, and almost half work full-time.
Carl Nilsson--a spokesman for low-income advocacy organization Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts--said "In Massachusetts, we've provided the blueprint for what the rest of the country should be doing. I think we all agree that people who are working hard and playing by the rules shouldn't be living in poverty."
The Massachusetts bill still falls below that historically minimal standard, however. $8 an hour for a 40 hour week translates into $320 per week, $16,640 a year--just $40 a year over the current poverty level for a family of three. By 2008, the poverty level will have risen dramatically due to inflation. Assuming 4% annual inflation, the 2008 poverty level will be be about $18,000 a year.
Neither the federal government or any legislature in the country, as things now stand, can meet the poverty level for a family of three with an established minimum wage level.
The latest to publicly announce this fact--well known in the blogosphere--is Mike Ettlinger, director of economic analysis for the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. The Economic Policy Institute helped give state minimum wage activists a national perspective by holding a conference dedicated to state minimum wage increases, which I attended as the lead sponsor of Pennsylvania's House bill raising the minimum wage to $7.15, in Minneapolis last fall.
"If your measure of success is eliminating poverty, I am not sure that anything that is really under consideration right now is going to do it," Ettlinger says. See http://www.jacksonholestartrib.com/....
I will be introducing legislation specifically setting forth minimum wage targets for Pennsylvania to hit the out of poverty for a family of three level, the traditional standard. That would take us somewhere around $9.50 by 2010. I have already introduced that takes us there by formula, without mentioning specific ultimate numbers for annual minimum wages. Based on the many minimum wage increase battles I have engaged in--with dramatic successes in 1988 and 2006--I think it is easier to mobilize public support for legislation that gives specific numbers.
The massive battle waged in Massachusetts by Governor Romney and business interests to first water down, and then stop or delay what proved to be inevitable, shows the difficulty of establishing new national standards as Massachusetts just did.
But it is a task we must pursue if we want to make a significant dent in reducing poverty, getting people off welfare and into the workforce, and generally raising the standard of living for workers in low-wage jobs. No minimum wage increase can remotely get minimum wage workers into solid middle-class status, but removing them from poverty would be a significant accomplishment of which we could all be proud.