Raising the minimum wage helps non-minimum wage workers...

Labor Needs to Improve Conditions for Nonunion Workers, Official Warns

by Steven Greenhouse

New York Times - June 23, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/nyregion/23workers.html

Ed Ott, the executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council, an umbrella group for the city's labor unions, has an unexpected and unnerving warning for New York's more than one million union members.

He warns that their wages and living standards will be threatened unless the city's unions do far more to lift the incomes and living standards of the city's nonunion working poor, including restaurant workers, supermarket cashiers and taxi drivers.

"Going forward, if we don't raise the standards for the lowest-paid workers in the city, and there are literally hundreds of thousands of them, our own levels that we achieved - of wages, pensions and time off - they're not sustainable," said Mr. Ott, whose group is a federation of 400 union locals. "For a working class that is going to be making minimum wage or slightly above, what's going to happen is that as taxpayers, that will create a social base for an attack on our own standards."

Mr. Ott's remarks, made in a recent speech at City University and in a follow-up interview, were an impassioned plea as well what he said was a "wake-up call" to the city's labor movement. New York's union movement has far more members than any other city's, although it is widely viewed as less aggressive in unionizing and helping low-wage workers than the labor movements in Los Angeles and several other cities.

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Six Reasons to Support the Campaign to Raise the Minimum Wage

1. ECONOMIC GROWTH: Raising the minimum wage is a proven way for cities to improve living standards without adversely impacting the economy or business community. Santa Fe, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Albuquerque have raised their citywide minimum wage and their economies continue to thrive.

2. HUMANITARIAN VALUES: People shouldn’t have to choose between rent, groceries and medicine. Families in Greensboro have to earn more than three times the current minimum wage ($6.15/hr) just to meet the Living Income Standard.

3. DEMOCRATIC PROCESS: Communities should have the ability to decide a minimum standard for wages. Real democracy happens when ordinary people exercise control over the issues that effect their lives. The citizens initiative process enables a more direct democracy that we should engage and expand.

4. MORALITY: Everyone who works should earn a descent wage. In a community as wealthy as ours, it is morally reprehensible that working people would not have their basic needs met.

5. CONSUMER IMPACT: Raising the minimum wage to $9.82/hour would have very little effect on the costs of products and services -- no more than 1/2 a percent to 2% overall. Experience in other communities that have raised the minimum wage above the surrounding area have shown that this is easily covered by a combination of small price increases, increased productivity from happier, more stable workers, and increased sales to people with greater spending power.

6. WILL OF THE PEOPLE: Over eight thousand members of the Greensboro community have already signed on to support raising the minimum wage. Let the people’s voice be heard!