America's Shame

MINIMUM WAGE: AMERICA'S SHAME

As The Nation's editor Katrina vanden Hevel notes: "The GOP just shafted the working people of America. By rejecting an attempt to raise the minimum wage, the Republican-controlled Senate showed that it is far more interested in lining the pockets of its campaign contributors."
She writes: "The 52-46 vote was eight short of the 60 needed for approval. (The measure drew the support of eight Republicans --four of these are up for reelection in the fall.) Sen. Edward Kennedy's amendment would have raised the wage from the current $5.15 an hour to $7.25 - the first raise in a decade.

'The minimum wage,' as economist Gwendolyn Mink, makes clear, 'is supposed to guarantee an income floor to keep full-time wage-earners out of poverty. But today, the federal minimum wage guarantees abject poverty for workers... nearly $6,000 per year below the federal poverty line for a family of three.' But the vast majority of Republican Senators, several of them millionaires several times over, don't care about poverty or the well-being of their working class constituents, What they really care about is that they're sitting pretty, having voted themselves another raise --to $168,500 --on January 1."