10 in 2010

Join Us in the Struggle for a Just Minimum Wage

A decent federal minimum wage can often mean the difference between survival and hardship to millions of Americans. Child-care providers, food-service workers, janitors, and health aides, all working full-time at minimum wage, will earn just $13,624 per year — a salary much too low to provide for their own basic needs of rent, food, and heat.

Is this the kind of nation we want to be, where the very people whose services we rely on daily are trapped in a cycle of poverty?

President Franklin Roosevelt and the U.S. Congress did not think so back in 1938, during the darkest years of the Great Depression. It was then that the federal minimum wage was created, putting a floor under workers' pay and ensuring that those at the lowest wrung of the American economy could attain at least a minimum standard of living.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., did not think so either, when, decades later, he referred to the minimum wage as one of the most fundamental issues of the day. He knew then that a fair wage is a moral issue, and a human right.

"We know of no more crucial civil rights issue facing Congress today than the need to increase the federal minimum wage and extend its coverage. A living wage should be the right of all working Americans."

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
to the U.S. Congress,
March 1966

But today, the minimum wage is still not a fair wage — economically or morally.

Recent steep increases in the cost of food and fuel, plus a lack of health care coverage, have contributed to many working families in the United States struggling to survive on wages that have not kept up with the real cost of living.

Wage Justice! Raise the minimum wage to $10 in 2010

Promoting the right to a living wage is a cornerstone of UUSC's Economic Justice Program. Over the past three years, UUSC has supported and collaborated with Let Justice Roll, a nonpartisan coalition of more than 90 faith, community, labor, and business organizations, to conduct grassroots minimum wage and living wage campaigns at the local, state, and national levels.

Now, UUSC and the UUA are working together to engage faith and community leaders in the $10 in 2010 campaign.

At the annual UUA General Assembly in June 2008, Unitarian Universalists expressed solidarity with Let Justice Roll and UUSC's Wage Justice! initiative by passing an Action of Immediate Witness to Raise the Federal Minimum Wage to $10 to 2010.

You can make a difference in the struggle for a living wage. Join the $10 in 2010 campaign today.

What Poverty Costs America

• Contrary to stereotype, the typical minimum wage worker is an adult over age 20. Most have high school diplomas or completed coursework beyond high school.
• An astounding 1 in 4 American workers are employed in jobs that pay poverty wages and provide minimal or no benefits. Nearly 60 percent of full-time minimum wage workers are women, often raising children.
• Childhood poverty costs the U.S. economy $500 billion annually, or 4 percent of GDP, due to loss of productivity and economic output, and due to expenditures on health conditions and crime associated with poverty.
• The United States is the only industrialized country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) where the wages of minimum-wage workers have not kept pace with inflation since 1997. Australia, Britain, and Ireland are among the countries with minimum wages equivalent to over $11 USD per hour.

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