mediacrit.com

If you are fortunate enough to not be working at the minimum wage, you might be shocked to learn that it’s still $5.15 an hour. The last time the wage was raised was 1996-97, when it was raised from $4.25.

That puts us at seven years since the last minimum wage increase, making this the second-longest period without an increase since the federal minimum wage was introduced in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. (The longest period without an increase was during the 1981-1990 Reagan era. President George H.W. Bush worked in a bipartisan effort—who does that anymore?—to finally raise the minimum wage that had been stalled at $3.35 for nine years.)

What has the media got to do with this? Well, nothing, and that’s the problem. To date, the major news networks that the Vanderbilt University Television News Archive tracks (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN) have done a total of two stories in 2004 on the issue of minimum wage. In those two stories (one by ABC on the Democratic primary candidates in January and the other by CBS on Bush and Kerry’s positions on the minimum wage in July), the television news coverage related mainly to candidates’ positions on the minimum wage issue.

But, as you may have noticed, the candidates haven’t spent much time talking about the economy or the minimum wage. Instead, we have been audience to ongoing lies and embarrassing truths about Swift boats and unexplained absences from Reserve duty. And, unfortunately, the broadcast and cable news media – and the print news media to a lesser extent – only seem to be covering the stories that are spoon fed to them by political spinmasters. So, a major story about federal inaction and the erosion of the minimum wage goes unreported.

Perhaps if we insist on revisiting the Vietnam War era, then we should talk about this: according to the Economic Policy Institute, a full-time worker earning the minimum wage back in 1968 would have made the equivalent of $15,431 today. That’s 44 percent more than today’s full-time minimum wage worker, who makes $10,712 a year – $8,138 below the poverty level for a family of four, more than $4,958 below the poverty level for a family of three, and $1,778 below the poverty level for a family of two.

Last year, the minimum wage was worth just 34 percent of what the average worker earns – the lowest ratio in 40 years. By contrast, corporate CEOs have received an 80% increase in compensation in the last decade.

The Economic Policy Institute (a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C.) calculates that about 13 percent of the U.S. workforce is low-wage workers (earning between $5.15 and $7.99 an hour). Lest you think that minimum wage earners are teenagers who don’t need a raise money, 87 percent of low-wage workers were 20 years of age or older, almost half (47 percent) are married or have children, and on average, their earnings contribute more than two-thirds of their total family income. These are the people who play by the rules, but still end up impoverished because the minimum wage isn’t even close to a living wage.

Earlier this year, a bill was introduced in the House and Senate to raise the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7 per hour in three increments: to $5.85 sixty days after the bill’s enactment, to $6.45 one year after the first increase, and to $7.00 one year after the second increase. In Iowa, the increase would benefit about 104,000 workers, about 7.5 percent of the state’s workforce, by 2006.

If the news media won’t talk about the state of the minimum wage, maybe they will if the presidential candidates and their handlers start to talk about it. Tip to Bush and Kerry: if you want Iowa’s hotly contested seven electoral votes, start telling the story of the more than one hundred thousand people in this state who aren’t getting a fair wage.