Legal Momentum, the nation's oldest women's rights organization, is pleased that the U.S. House of Representatives today passed legislation to increase the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour over 26 months. We applaud this down payment on what working American families so desperately need, and call on the Senate and Bush Administration to pass and enact a clean version of this legislation. "We hope that the House and Senate will continue to fight for these families as more remains to be done, including indexing the minimum wage for inflation, and creating opportunities for education and training for working families so that the pathways to opportunity and selfsufficiency are open to all," says Lisalyn Jacobs, Legal Momentum's Vice President for Government Relations.
A rise in the minimum wage is especially important for women, who are disproportionately affected by poverty:
- Sixty-one percent of minimum wage earners are women. Overall, women are twice as likely as men to earn the minimum wage.
- More than 9 million women would benefit from the proposed minimum wage increase to $7.25 per hour.
- Women account for most of the full-time workers in some of our nation's lowest-paying jobs: maids and housekeepers (87%), food servers (66%), cashiers (75%), and child care workers (93%).
- In 2005, female-headed households had a poverty rate of 29%.
In addition to a minimum wage increase, Legal Momentum calls on Congress and the Administration to strengthen federal and state policies so that post-secondary education, targeted skills-training and adult literacy programs successfully enroll and serve more low-income working adults. "We look forward to working with leaders to ensure that federal and state policies reward work through pay and benefits sufficient to support families. Resources need to be expanded to provide greater access to important benefits such as health care and child-care support services. And the federal government needs to take a realistic look at the definitions of poverty, selfsufficiency and low-income in order to comprehensively approach this problem," said Jacobs.
