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The Living Wage Movement
February 26, 2006 2:07 AM

Sooner or later, Americans will wake up and start demanding a minimum wage in this country that is high enough to actually pay some bills. How on earth can we have workers in this country only making $5.00/hour? Left up to its own device, the free market will take advantage of the fact that some workers will work for next to nothing rather than starve. But sometimes they sure seem close to starving even when making the minimum wage.

This recent article in the New York Times follows the nascent Living Wage movement that we will be hearing about much more often as we venture into this new century. The following two paragraphs give you a taste of what this is about:

Santa Fe has been one of the Living Wage movement's crowning achievements. This month the city's minimum wage rose to $9.50 an hour, the highest rate in the United States. But other recent victories include San Francisco in 2003 and Nevada in 2004. And if a ending bill in Chicago is any indication, the battles over wage laws will soon evolve into campaigns to force large, private-sector businesses like Wal-Mart to provide not only higher wages but also more money for employee health care.

It is a common sentiment that economic fairness -- or economic justice, as living-wage advocates phrase it -- should, or must, come in a sweeping and righteous gesture from the top. From Washington, that is. But most wage campaigns arise from the bottom, from residents and low-level officials and from cities and states -- from everywhere except the federal government. ''I think what the living-wage movement has done in the past 11 years is incredible,'' David Neumark, a frequent critic of the phenomenon who is a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, told me recently. ''How many other issues are there where progressives have been this successful? I can't think of one.''

Read the entire article for a primer on this topic about which you might not have heard much.

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