The Living Wage

William J. Fitzgerald

Before we start, Yes small business people I know the whine, You can not expect me to pay that much. Well I do, if you can not pay what is fair and the only one who is getting rich get a sign that sayes "going out of business and someone may be able to take over your space who can.

The Living wage is the term used to describe the minimum hourly wage necessary for a worker to achieve a standard of living for the worker, the spouse, and a child to live above the poverty line. The problem is that in most states the percentage of workers is still way below the poverty line, and thus the different legislation is just window dressing. The amount of workers using their sweat equality to enrich corporations or individuals is appalling. A real living wage in this day and age would relieve the suffering of so many people.

I used first the living wage calculator and choose Arizona as the state to be singled out. I am in no way using any judgment on this state that I do not have for the others. I hold all states in contempt that this country would allow 2 working parents to work 40 hours each and still have their child go to bed hungry. Using this site we find that for the whole state of Arizona this family unit would have to make $17.07 per hour. With the state minimum wage at $6.75 and the poverty wage at $7.43, we can see that only one parent working would have to be making $35,513 per year. (Living wage) The first problem that we see is that this is based on a 40 hour week with no lunches taken out. If by the national average you only get 37.5 hours and you lose 2.5 hours for lunches, you are now only working 35 hours and that next 5 hours is not overtime. So our new wage becomes $19.51 and that is with the company paying the benefits, something that rarely happens any more. Now we see that with 2 parents working they need to at least be making about $10 dollars an hour and have free or low cost daycare. This calculation is based on food being reasonable and a housing cost of 700+ for a 2 bedroom. Now that may be possible in Arizona but her in NYC that is funny. The same family living in Los Angeles would need $22.00 an hour to have the same cost of living.

Now we look at the same family and see what threshold they must not meet to be eligible to receive food stamps. The Federal Government set 23,920 for a family of 4 or $13.14 an hour. Now for a family of 3, $19,838 or a salary of $10.90 or under is needed to receive government assistance. How many families do we know like that? These figures were provided by the Living Wage Resource Center. (Living Wage Resource Center)

Poverty levels in this country are getting closer to many homes with the recent problems in our economy. Many are getting closer everyday. I thought that we needed to know what those lines are, for family of 4 we get $18,400, $10.10 an hour and for our family of 3 we get $15,260 or $8.38an hour. We get these figures from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)

We have seen what the average family of 3 must achieve to get above this threshold and to stay above it. We see the wide range of programs that are available to the families that never achieve this threshold. We have Food stamps, WIC programs, National School Lunch Programs, and we have Job Corps for people under age 25. But where are the job and education programs for the people not on welfare or coming out of prison? Why do we continue to outsource good paying Jobs to other countries? Why Night after night in my store do I see "made in China" on 95% of all the boxes? The real problem with the current economy is that most people are not allowed to get to the level of living wage if the are not in a select few industries. With just one city, Santa Cruz, California we have very few places to look for a success story. In a day and age when the bottom 10% of all workers fell, not rise by 3.9% and the amount of jobs available in this wage range is growing at a rate of 25%. Every where you go you see statements like there are plenty of jobs out there. But what are they paying. Citigroup is just now lying off 40,000 people and this is after they already laid off about 150,000. The primary reason was greed in that they had the bulk of the Enron Monies that were lost.

References

http://www.livingwage.geog.psu.edu/results.php?location=4.

http://www.livingwagecampaign.org/index.php?id=1954.

http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/poverty.htm

http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/issueguides_livingwage_livingwagefacts