PHILADELPHIA - June 21 - Following Congress’s eighth pay raise since 1997 and the defeat today of minimum-wage legislation in the Senate, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization and co-recipient of the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize, urged the U.S. House of Representatives to raise the federal minimum wage. Since Congress last raised the minimum wage in 1997, its real value has eroded more than 20 percent.

AFSC is also calling on House members to reject an estate tax “compromise” expected to be brought to the House floor on Thursday. The legislation, introduced by House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R-CA), would exempt estates worth as much as $5 million - $10 million for couples - from taxation indefinitely.

Joyce Miller, AFSC assistant general secretary for justice and human rights, said: “After years of favoring the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers, Congress can show it cares about ordinary people by voting to raise the minimum wage and reject a ‘compromise’ that would starve social programs of needed money by gutting the estate tax.”

The Service Committee supported an amendment by Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) to the Department of Defense authorization bill, which would have raised the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour. On Wednesday, the Senate rejected that amendment by six votes, and also an amendment by Senator Michael Enzi (R-WY) that would have coupled a smaller minimum-wage increase with devastating anti-worker provisions.

A person who works 52 weeks a year, 40 hours a week at the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour earns just $10,700 - $6,000 below the federal poverty level of $16,660 for a family of three. Sixty-one percent of minimum wage workers are women.

“The minimum wage is a moral issue,” Miller added. “By keeping the minimum wage a poverty wage, Congress is compounding the race and gender discrimination that disproportionately tracks women and people of color into low-wage jobs.”

“Some members of Congress have argued that raising the minimum wage would hurt low-wage workers by encouraging employers to hire undocumented immigrants instead. Rather than pitting workers against each other, Congress should pass laws that make the minimum wage a fair wage and strengthen and enforce the right of all workers to organize and form unions.”

AFSC is a founding member of the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign (www.letjusticeroll.org), a network of more than 70 faith, labor and community groups working to raise federal and state minimum wages. The coalition played an important part in recent successful campaigns in Arkansas, Michigan and West Virginia, which raised the minimum wages in those states.

“The base pay for a congressperson is $168,500,” noted Rick Wilson, director of AFSC’s West Virginia Economic Justice Project, who played a leading role in the successful drive to raise the minimum wage in that state. “Contrast this to the experience of a single mother of two who earns $10,712 a year, working 40-hour weeks without a break.”

“The single mom would have to work 15.7 years at 40 hours per week to earn what the congressperson does,” Wilson notes in his blog, at www.goatrope.blogspot.com. “In fact, she’d have to work about 641 hours just to make as much as the congressional cost-of-living increase.”

In addition to a minimum-wage increase, AFSC is campaigning for a “moral budget” based on fair tax policies and adequate funding for social programs. It recently co-published, with the National Council of Churches, “A Just Minimum Wage: Good for Workers, Business and Our Future” by Holly Sklar and the Rev. Dr. Paul Sherry.

That report counters arguments against raising the minimum wage, and highlights the important role of a higher minimum wage in helping the U.S. move toward a “high-road economy.” The report is available in .pdf format at www.afsc.org/economic-justice/, or from Dorothy Lazenbury-Gibbs, at 215-241-7048.

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