The coup in Honduras - and the at best grudging and vacillating
support in Washington for the restoration of President Zelaya - has
thrown into stark relief a fundamental fault line in Latin America and
a moral black hole in U.S. policy toward the region.
What is the minimum wage which a worker shall be paid for a day's labor?
Are you better off than you were 40 years ago? Not if you're a minimum-wage worker.
It would take $9.92 today to match the buying power of the minimum wage
at its peak in 1968, the year Martin Luther King died fighting for
living wages for sanitation workers.
In
today's dollars, the 1968 hourly minimum wage adds up to $20,634 a year
working full time. The new federal minimum wage of $7.25 comes to just
$15,080. That's $ 5,554 in lost wages.
On March 18, 1968, two weeks before his murder, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
told striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn., "It is criminal to have
people working on a full-time basis getting part-time income." He said, "A
living wage should be the right of all working Americans."
What would Dr. King have thought of a $6.55 federal minimum wage in 2009,
when the 1968 minimum wage is worth about $10 in today's dollars?
