7 Days @ Minimum Wage: 15 Million Workers Trapped at or Near Minimum Wage

by Mike Hall, Oct 29, 2006

If Mallory McCarty wins a pay raise from her current minimum wage of $5.15 an hour to the $6.85 an hour as called for in a Nov. 7 Ohio ballot initiative, she says she’d finally have some extra money to set aside to learn new skills:

I either hang clothes, cashier, put clothes up or I am a sorter….You stand all day and I get a 45-minute break.

But all that hard work barely covers McCarty’s basic living costs:

I pay $200 every two weeks for rent and food, gas, lights and I have a phone bill…and I have to buy two bus passes to get to work….I have to watch what I spend every check. I’m living pay by pay.

Cleveland resident McCarty, who is the final feature on the video blog (vlog) “7 Days at Minimum Wage,” sponsored by the AFL-CIO and ACORN, is among millions of workers looking to this fall’s election with anticipation as voters in Ohio and five other states vote on ballot initiatives to raise their states’ minimum wage. They also will have the opportunity to send people to Congress who will raise the federal minimum wage.

As comedienne Roseanne Barr notes in the introduction to McCarty’s story:

Fifteen million workers in this country are trapped at or near the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, with no increase in the last 10 years even though Congress voted itself nine pay raises in that time. Remember, Congress is supposed to work for you. What you can do is support the minimum wage movement. We have initiatives to raise the minimum wage on ballots in six states, Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and Ohio. So go vote “Yes” on Nov. 7.

That’s what McCarty is counting on as a stepping stone out of the minimum wage job trap.

…it’s hard to for me to get by paying my rent and food and stuff. I have to put that first, of course. I don’t have any spending money for myself, to save for a car or college…If I was to get a raise to $6.85, it would help me a lot to save money in the bank.

During the past year, the AFL-CIO union movement’s America Needs a Raise campaign has led the drive to raise the minimum wage on the state level through legislation or the ballot initiatives and through congressional action on the federal level. Thanks to that mobilization, today more than 80 percent of Americans believe that it’s time to give workers a raise and back the drive to boost the minimum wage.

The vlog with McCarty’s and six other workers’ stories will run through Election Day at http://sevendaysatminimumwage.org/. The 7 Days vlog event was scheduled to end Oct. 30, but we’re extending it after getting an overwhelming response. The stories have received more than 10,000 video views, won daily honors on YouTube and have been picked up by the mainstream media and the blogosphere alike. 

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