Quote of the Day, June 4, 2012
Today, 100 years after the first minimum wage law was passed, low-wage industries once again threaten to impoverish America’s workforce and derail the entrepreneurial ambitions of small business owners. And the American people have noticed. According to a recent poll, more than two-thirds of Americans support raising the minimum wage to over $10 per hour…There was nothing inevitable about the low-wage economy that we find in the U.S. today. What decades of experience tell us, however, is that unless we seriously acknowledge our responsibility to maintain the value of the minimum wage, we have little reason to expect anything different in the century ahead. — Christine Owens, Executive Director, National Employment Law Project from her piece at The Hill’s Congress Blog
The nation’s first minimum wage law was passed in Massachusetts 100 years ago today, June 4th, 1912. A federal minimum wage was established by and regulated under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
Today, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. A family cannot stay above the poverty line with one wage-earner, working full-time at minimum wage. In real dollars, the minimum wage today is less than it was in 1968.