100 years on – Low wages continue to impoverish many

US Minimum wage laws, from Image:Blank_US_Map.svg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Christine Owens – Low-wage work is nothing new — but, as we arrive on the 100 year anniversary of the first minimum wage law passed in the United States, we must recognize an even more dispiriting fact about the low-wage workforce: It could have been a thing of the past.

The first minimum wage law in the United States was established on June 4, 1912 in Massachusetts. More than a dozen states would follow over the subsequent 10 years, and by 1933 the new U.S. Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, wrote an essay to make the case for a federal minimum wage.

There was nothing inevitable about the low-wage economy that we find in the U.S. today. What decades of experience tell us, however, is that unless we seriously acknowledge our responsibility to maintain the value of the minimum wage, we have little reason to expect anything different in the century ahead. more> http://tinyurl.com/c3gtkwu

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As Greece stares into the abyss, Europe must choose

By Maria Margaronis – As I write, the Greek parliament is preparing to vote on the bond swap agreed with the country’s private creditors and on the new deal with the EU and the IMF, which would lend the country €130bn in exchange for cuts that slice the last little bits of flesh from the economy – including a 22% reduction in the minimum wage and 150,000 public sector job losses by 2016. Without the deal, Greece will default by March; with it, the country will sink into a still deeper depression, with no end in sight. more> http://is.gd/LLz3o1

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