by Mike Hall, Jul 11, 2006

Minimum wage workers in Pennsylvania and North Carolina are going to get a raise as a result of the hard work of union and community activists who mobilized to move lawmakers to action. 

Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell (D) signed legislation July 9 to increase the state’s minimum wage by $2 an hour to $7.15 an hour, in two steps. North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley (D) says he will sign a bill that won final approval from the state Legislature yesterday hiking the Tar Heel State’s minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.15 an hour.

Easley calls the bill “a great piece of legislation,” and Rendell says of all the bills he has signed, “nothing gives more satisfaction than this one.”

In Arizona and Ohio, where the AFL-CIO’s America Needs a Raise campaign is in full swing to bring the issue to voters in November, union members and community activists rallied with former Sen. John Edwards (D) in Phoenix and Tucson yesterday and in Columbus and Cincinnati over the weekend. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney joined Edwards at a gathering of the community activist group ACORN.

Meanwhile in the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican leaders are working on their latest bait and switch tactics. Instead of a straight and clean vote to raise the decade-old $5.15-an-hour federal minimum wage to $7.25, as called for in legislation (H.R. 2429) from Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), Republicans are expected to offer a smaller wage increase and tack on “poison pills.” Those poison pill amendments could include changes in labor law that would eliminate overtime pay for millions of workers, exempt workers from the increase or even add tax breaks for businesses. That’s the same tactic Senate Republicans used last month.

As soon as we find out what scheme they hatch, we will let you know.

But after 10 years of Republican roadblocks to raising the minimum wage—which now is at its lowest value in more than half a century—activists in the states are taking up the battle. In Arizona and Ohio, minimum wage increases are headed for spots on the fall ballots. The Arizona measure would increase the minimum wage to $6.75 an hour and the Ohio initiative seeks $6.85 an hour.

At an Electrical Workers union hall in Phoenix, Edwards told about 250 people:

This is not all that complicated. In the United States we should not have people working full-time and living in poverty.

A full-time minimum wage worker earns just $10,712 a year. The poverty level for a family of three is $15,577 a year. (FYI, Congress has given itself more than $35,000 in raises since 1997, the latest due to kick in this January. Read more.)  

In Columbus, Sweeney joined Edwards at the national convention of ACORN, a long-time advocate organization for raising the minimum wage and a major partner with the AFL-CIO union movement in the current state campaigns around the country.

Sweeney told the group:

The AFL-CIO is proud to be a partner with ACORN in communities across our country and proud of the work we are doing together…I want you to know that the AFL-CIO will be fighting at your side until we raise the minimum wage in every state, until the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are rebuilt, until every immigrant family in our country has full rights and benefits and a guaranteed path to citizenship.

Click here to read Sweeney’s full remarks.

In Colorado, Missouri, Montana and Nevada, measures to raise those states’ minimum wage also are expected to win spots on the fall ballot. In Massachusetts, the House and Senate have passed separate minimum wage bills that need to be reconciled.

In California, the Industrial Welfare Commission must decide between a proposal to raise the wage to $7.15 an hour with indexing to protect it against inflation, backed by the California Labor Federation and other worker advocates, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s (R) raise proposal without indexing.

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