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| Topic: This is ridiculous!! | |
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Edited by
MsCarmen
on
Wed 05/14/08 09:28 AM
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I've been looking for a new job here recently and was comparing wage offers and I came across this article. I was shocked to say the least and wondered what other states are going through this? Here is a portion of the article. The rest can be found at
http://ga4.org/interfaithcenter/alert-description.html?alert_id=3474803 "The Virginia Fare Wage Act" Raise Virginia's Minimum Wage Raising the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour would benefit more than 150,000 workers in Virginia. Minimum wage employees in Virginia who work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, earn $10,700 a year, $5,400 below the poverty line for a family of three. Ten percent of Virginians are in poverty today - 740,000 people or 163,000 more than when President Bush first took office. The low level of the minimum wage is a key part of the problem. A worker in Virginia earning minimum wage must work 125 hours per week to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment. That would require working nearly 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. In fact, the current minimum wage does not provide enough income to enable minimum wage workers to afford adequate housing in any area of this country. It is a myth that increasing the minimum wage causes unemployment. In the four years after the 1997 minimum wage increase, Virginia experienced great economic growth. Nearly 265,000 new jobs were created. Unemployment dropped from 4.1 percent in 1997 to 2.4 percent in 2000. An increase in the federal minimum wage to $7.25 would help lift tens of thousands of hardworking Virginia out of poverty and toward more secure and more productive lives. No one who works full time should have to live in poverty. Virginia did finally pass a law to increase the minimum wage to $7.25, but that won't take effect until July 24, 2009. And now with the increase of gas and food prices, I'm wondering if that is going to help much. I also found out that even though Virginia is one of the lowest minimum wage states in the country, there are other states that don't even have a minimum wage law. So does that mean they can pay you as little as they want? I lived in New York for a short time and a reporter did an article that stated people who live in NYC needed to make at least $18.00 an hour in order to just make ends meet. The average person in NYC was making only $11.00 an hour. And I wondered why there are so many Americans that have to go on government assistance. Now I know. |
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I didn't know this. Best of luck in your job search.
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It is sad when it takes so long for Federal wage standards to go up, especially when the costs of everything else goes up overnight.
Some states do have higher minimum rates than the Federal rate, but if the state minimum is lower than the Fed rate, the employee is entitled to the higher of the two. Virginia is at $5.85 (which is the Fed rate) and will go up to $6.55 this July and $7.25 in July of '09. I remember when I was in the Army that there were many of the lower enlisted families who qualified for Federal assistance, that is very sad as well. We did get pay raises, but were never near the national pay rates for the types of job and hours we worked. Good luck, and take advantage of any Govt. program that we are qualified for! Your taxes pay for them, reap the benefits, if any. |
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The politics of Minimum Wage laws are fiercely debated all the time, especially here in the DC area. Minimum wages have always been far below the minimum wages needed for someone to live on, even with a forty hour per week job. The power of the moneyed interests, combined with those who are certain that a minimum wage causes unemployment and reduces small business activity has always been able to hold them down.
I'm not knowledgeable myself to be sure if either side is right. And yes, in areas with no minimum wage laws, they can offer you as little as they want. You can always go for a different job, however, just as you can go for a different job paying more here. The expectation of those who believe in the natural balancing of capitalism, is that wages will rise to meet the needs of the workers, because no one will work for a non-living wage. They have repeatedly proven wrong in this, from what I've observed. They don't take into account that people will live twenty to a single residence, in squalor, so that they CAN live on tiny wages, and that the rest of our society will pay a cost for requiring that they do so. I wish you luck, but don't expect any change in our lifetime in the politics of wages. |
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