By: Marc H. Morial
President and CEO
National Urban League
Back in November, the African American community, which mobilized and turned out in
record numbers to vote, played a major role in achieving the transformation that has
taken place on Capitol Hill. With the 110th Congress in full swing and its first female
House Speaker in U.S. history in command and blacks in prominent leadership posts,
it's time for lawmakers to make good on their election-year rhetoric. So far so good.
Under the tutelage of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the U.S. House
recently passed by an impressive 315-116 margin legislation raising the minimum
wage to $7.25 an hour over the next two years . I must commend Speaker Pelosi and
her cohorts for rallying the ranks to follow through on their election-year promises. I
also must applaud them for producing a clean bill free of concessions to the business
community in the form of tax breaks.
As I said back in July during the National Urban League's annual conference in Atlanta,
increasing the minimum wage is a small but necessary step toward narrowing the
economic divide between minorities and whites in the United States. The current
federal wage of $5.15 an hour has been in place since 1997. When adjusted for
inflation, it is at its lowest level since 1955. Under the bill that won House approval,
Americans now working full time at minimum wage can expect to see their earnings
rise nearly 47 percent to $15,070 a year, nearly $5,500 above the poverty line for
individuals.
Overall, 13 million workers (10 percent of the U.S. workforce) are expected to benefit
from the wage hike, 16 percent of them African Americans.
More than half of states already require employers to pay workers an hourly wage
above the federal minimum level. And according to a recent Associated Press-AOL
News poll, 80 percent of Americans surveyed support a hike.
Our federal lawmakers need to bring our nation's lowest-wage earners out of the 1950s
and into the 21st Century. These workers can barely support themselves let alone their
children. Ten years of inaction by Congress has thrown more and more Americans off
the road to economic prosperity and into the trenches of poverty. If we fail to
acknowledge their hard work, we risk exhausting their hopes of achieving the American
dream.
Now, the pressure lies upon the U.S. Senate to follow the House's lead and give our
nation's working poor a needed raise. And the chamber's members must do so without
the addition of sweeteners to quell the concerns of small business interests convinced
that a higher minimum wage would imperil their bottom line and, as a result, increase
unemployment. Such fears are unfounded, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute. The
group found that from 1998 to 2003 the number of small businesses in ten states with
minimum wages higher than the $5.15 an hour actually grew at a faster rate than their
counterparts in other states
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