And raise it now!
case in point, look no further than a casino in NYC.
Jeannine Nixon looked as if she had hit the jackpot. Ms. Nixon, a customer relations representative at Resorts World Casino in Queens, had just learned that she would be making $40,000 a year, up from $22,300.
“It’s life-changing,” Ms. Nixon, her voice cracking, said on Thursday. “I can finally feel relieved.”
Ms. Nixon, who lives in subsidized housing, said she recently postponed a blood test because she could not afford to pay for it. A single mother, she takes two different buses every morning to take her son to school, before taking two other buses in the opposite direction to get to work. “If I had a car,” Ms. Nixon said, “it’d be a 15-minute ride.”
Peter Ward, president of the Hotel Trades Council, said, “This is the outcome we want, if we’re going to have gambling in New York.”
“We’ve worked to create a situation where the middle class is suddenly within reach of gaming workers,” Mr. Ward added, “not a bunch of minimum-wage jobs where people have to live on the dole to survive.”
In making his decision, the arbitrator selected by both sides, Elliott D. Shriftman, considered the success of the business, the paycheck necessary for full-time workers to sustain themselves, their spouses and their children without government assistance, and the company’s ability to pay.
“This will restore a path into the middle class for workers in that community that has been eroded over the last several years, given the broader changes in the city economy,” said James A. Parrott, chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal research group.
read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
You see, Unions do work. Math does work. Pay people more, and they will need less government assistance. Lives will improve, self esteem and family time will also benefit to the positive.
Its a win, Win, WIN!
Twenty bucks an hour seems about right. Elliott D. Shriftman has done the math, and the research. In a very poor area in New York City where rents are low compared to the rest of the city, it still takes 20 an hour to be able to live welfare free, or semi welfare free depending on how many dependents there are in the family. The federal minimum wage is so low, that it has become nothing more than a poverty ensuring wage in certain parts of the country.