Pa. and Calif. Activists Say, ‘Raise the Wage!’

by Mike Hall, Jun 5, 2006

The Pennsylvania state Senate is stonewalling a bill to raise the state’s minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.15 an hour, wage hike backers say. Today, if senators open and read their mail, they’ll find out how wrong they are.

Members of Working America, the AFL-CIO’s community affiliate, delivered more than 1,000 hand-written letters to nine state senators at the state capitol in Harrisburg demanding that the Senate vote on the legislation. The Pennsylvania House passed a minimum wage increase by nearly a three-to-one margin in April.

(Be sure to check out the AFL-CIO’s new America Needs a Raise website. It will keep you up to date on the latest news and give you facts, stats, information and tools you can use to help raise the wage.)

Working America, some 1 million members strong and growing, gives working families without the benefits of union membership the opportunity to join forces with the AFL-CIO’s nearly 9 million members in the fight for good jobs, health care, retirement security and more. The minimum wage letters were collected by Working America members in door-to-door canvasses in Allentown, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

“The working people we talk to day in day out feel very strongly about increasing Pennsylvania’s minimum wage,” said Daniel Mahr, canvass director at Working America’s Philadelphia office. “They’ve taken the time to write these letters because they want to see their elected leaders take action on this issue.”

After delivering the letters, Working America members joined members of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO and the Raise the Minimum Wage Coalition in a Capitol rotunda rally supporting the minimum wage increase.

The rally and letter-writing campaign are part of a larger America Needs a Raise campaign to increase the minimum wage at the federal level and in the states. The federal minimum wage has been stalled at $5.15 an hour since 1997.

Meanwhile, in California, the newly reconstituted Industrial Welfare Commission (IWC) will appoint a wage board to hear a proposal from the California Labor Federation to raise the state’s minimum wage by $1 to $7.75 an hour and protect it from inflation by indexing. The board also will consider a proposal from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) to raise the minimum wage without tying it to the cost of living.

The new wage board, which the IWC will name July 5, must have an equal number of labor and employer representatives and representatives from the public that have no ties to either group. Once selected, the board will hold a series of public meetings and propose a new minimum wage regulation.

Both the state Assembly and Senate have approved nearly identical minimum wage bills that include indexing and are expected to iron out the differences and send the wage bill to the governor’s desk. But Schwarzenegger twice has vetoed minimum wage bills with indexing provisions.

See our most recent coverage of state minimum wage actions here, here, here and here.
State action, though, does not absolve Congress. Click here to urge your U.S. representative to sign a discharge petition to bring the minimum wage increase to the House floor, and click here to become a citizen co-sponsor of the U.S. Senate bill to raise the wage.

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