Monday, March 07, 2005

Minimum Wage Increase

Congress has two bills proposed to increase the minimum wage coming up. One by the Democrats and one by the Republicans... guess which one favors the wage earners and which one that favors business.

The Minimum wage, frozen at $5.15 an hour for the past 8 years, is well overdue to a raise. Someone who makes minimum wage, working 40 hours a week, makes a grand total of $10,712 per year (without vacation). A person cannot live on this. Most of these workers depend on overtime pay to raise their salary to a somewhat sustainable level. But, the Republican backed bill would do away with overtime in favor of "flex time." This means, instead of paying you overtime, your employer now owes you unpaid time off. So, if someone works 50 hours one week, instead of getting time and a half for the 10 hours of overtime, they get to take 10 hours off next week... oh, the joy.

The Republican bill would increase the minimum wage to $6.25 per hour ($13,000 per year) and the Democrat's bill would raise it to $7.25 per hour ($15,080 per year). Additionally, the bill would allow business to count a workers tips as part of their wage increase, thus netting the worker nothing.

Major Republican leaders like Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert oppose any increase at all. They claim that it would lead business to lay off masses of workers (even though this has never happened since minimum wage was created).

It is time to increase the minimum wage to a "living wage"

Senate to Vote on Minimum Wage Proposals

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