CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Wages Haven’t Kept Up and Working Families Are Paying the Price

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

For years, Congress and elected officials across the country have sidestepped one of the clearest economic problems facing working families: the minimum wage no longer keeps pace with the real cost of living.

Today, even full-time work at the federal minimum wage doesn’t pay enough to rent a market-rate two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country. And too often, politicians have intervened to keep it that way.

For example, I live in Oklahoma, where the state minimum wage has been tied to the federal rate of $7.25 an hour since 2009. As a result, a full-time minimum-wage worker here earns about $15,000 a year before taxes — below the poverty line for an individual and wholly inadequate to survive.

This problem did not happen by accident.

In Oklahoma, some state lawmakers introduced bills to raise the minimum wage year after year — only to see those proposals die without a hearing or a vote. In 2014, the legislature went even further, passing a law that prevented cities and towns from raising local wages, even if local voters........

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