Every day in these hard times, grocery workers and delivery drivers, health care aides and cleaning staff, child care workers and fast food cooks go to work for $7.25 an hour, the federal minimum wage. It’s been $7.25 since July 24, 2009. That’s 11 years without an increase – the longest period in history without a raise.
Some people say we can’t raise the minimum wage now because times are hard. Well, if we hadn’t raised the minimum wage in hard times, we wouldn’t have a minimum wage to begin with.
The federal minimum wage was enacted in 1938 during the Great Depression to put a floor under wages nationally and boost the economy by increasing consumer purchasing power.
President Franklin Roosevelt called the minimum wage “an essential part of economic recovery.” He said millions of workers “receive pay so low that they have little buying power. Aside from the undoubted fact that they thereby suffer great human hardship, they are unable to buy adequate food and shelter, to maintain health or to buy their share of manufactured goods.”
The minimum wage reached its high point in buying power back in 1968, when it was worth $12.06 in today’s dollars, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator.
Minimum wage increases have been too little, too late to keep up with the rising cost of living, much less provide workers a fair share of economic growth since the 1960s.