Economic Justice: Increase the Minimum Wage
Disgrace: Time to Shrink Wage Gap

By Richard S. Gilbert, Interim minister,
First Unitarian Church of Ithaca
March 9, 2004

The 19th-century U.S. Senator Charles Sumner once wrote that in America, "There are appetites without dinners at one end of the table and dinners without appetites at the other."

America is the most inequitable of the developed democracies in distribution of income and wealth. New York is the most unequal state, not only with the greatest gap between the incomes of the richest fifth and the poorest fifth of the population, but also between the average wage and the minimum wage.

How much do we deserve? How much do we deserve of the economic resources for living the good life? The conventional wisdom says that the market fairly determines what each person gets, by virtue of their skill in the marketplace. Government should not interfere.

However, the marketplace is not God; it is not divinely ordained to allocate resources fairly. A sense of justice must attempt to balance the impersonal machinations of the market if we are to approximate fairness.

The United States has a growing chasm between rich and poor, and even between rich and middle class. Most of President Bush's tax cuts benefit the already wealthy, while the rest of us get a small rebate which already is more than exhausted in higher sales and property taxes.

To seek a remedy for low-income citizens of the Empire State, the New York State Labor and Religion Coalition and the Religious Task Force of the Tompkins County Living Wage Coalition sponsored the "Forty Hour Fast: Remembering Our Betrayed Workers."

For almost two days last week, I fasted to remind myself of the ever-gnawing hunger of poverty in the midst of plenty. Fasting is an ancient spiritual exercise designed to cleanse one's soul so that the focus can be on love and justice for the neighbor.

We urge the New York State Legislature and the governor to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.10 an hour in three steps over a three-year period.

This would mean that a full-time worker would earn $14,560 a year, slightly below the federal poverty threshold of $14,679 for a family of three.

That increase would directly benefit 691,000 New Yorkers, with 4,000 of them living in Tompkins County. While still a shameful income, it is a beginning.

The idea of a wage that will support a family is not new. St. Thomas Aquinas, back in the squalor of the 12th century, advocated a "just wage" which was not to be determined by the "higgling of the market," but by what served both the good of the worker and of society as a whole.

In the Middle Ages it was assumed a worker's wages would be enough to support a family. It is time America, the richest nation in the history of the Earth, caught up with that moral vision.

I was raised to believe that the American dream was that if you worked hard and long, you would be rewarded with enough resources for a basic standard of living. Not so. That promise has been denied to thousands of New Yorkers and millions of Americans.

Yet that effort is being opposed by people in high places. Why? We might get a hint from two recent developments. Richard Grasso, ousted President of the New York Stock Exchange, refused to give back some $128 million in retirement benefits he "earned" while president. Some believe that might be too generous a golden parachute.

Then there is the redoubtable Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan who, bemoaning the rampaging deficits President Bush and Congress have given us, says that the recent tax cuts ought to be made permanent. Unaccountably, he also says we ought to cut Social Security benefits to pay for them. Evidently Mr. Greenspan doesn't realize that there are millions of Americans whose very economic survival depends on those checks.

The examples of Grasso and Greenspan remind us of the moral insensitivity that superfluous wealth can inflict upon people. This is class warfare and the rich are winning.

How can we deny this modest increase in the minimum wage for the little people while the big people wallow in a redundancy of resources? This modest increase will at least be a step in helping the appetites at one end of the table be satisfied. Those with more dinner than they can eat at the other end are another matter for another day.

If you agree support S. 20 IS and H. R. 965 at the federal level, and Assembly Bill 9710 and Senate bill 3291A at the state level.

In the words of a Latin-American prayer:

"O God, to those who have hunger, give bread;
and to us who have bread, give the hunger for justice."

 

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