From Dissent, the history of support for a minimum wage and how it’s changed:
There is little disagreement that consumer spending is a critical driver of American economic growth. The recession that began in 2007, while precipitated by the meltdown in the financial sector, is at root a crisis of aggregate demand. The halting recovery has been punctuated by disappointing monthly job reports and—just as important—by gloomy predictions from the Conference Board’s monthly survey of consumer confidence. Even business surveys admit (here and here) that anemic consumer demand (not “job-killing regulations”) is holding back new job creation and economic recovery.
Yet, despite worries about sagging consumer confidence and shrinking paychecks, business leaders seem unconcerned about the declining standard of living of middle-class America, or about the growing number of American families slipping into poverty. Over the last generation, wages for middle-class workers haven’t budged, while compensation for corporate executives and owners is reaching stratospheric levels. Middle-class Americans are having a harder and harder time making ends meet. Most have little savings to take them through a bad patch. They are saddled with skyrocketing health care and education costs. They are underwater on their mortgages. Indeed, borrowing (on credit cards beginning in the 1980s, on home equity in more recent years) is often the last-best option to cling to a higher standard of living. Worse yet, most jobs created today don’t bring workers into the middle class. Nearly three-quarters of the jobs added during the recovery are in lower-wage occupations, like cashiers, stocking clerks, or food preparation workers.
Higher wages mean more consumer spending and more growth, but corporate America is focused, with increasing intensity, on driving wages further down. Important wage-stabilizing policies—minimum-wage laws and collective bargaining, among others—are under assault. Republican governors have declared war on unionized teachers, firefighters, and police officers—all solidly middle-class jobs. And they are looking to extend the reach of so-called “right-to-work” laws that strip private-sector workers of the ability to bargain for decent wages and benefits. Hostility to unions has become so intense that a simple proposal for workplaces to post information about the right to collectively bargain under federal law (as they already must do for minimum-wage, OSHA, and other worker protections) unleashed a torrential assault by the Chamber of Commerce.
Schizophrenia must be in the genes of all Republicans. Republican operatives agree, for the most part, that a military attack on Iran is nutz. Instead the US should “support Iranian labor unions” with boatloads of money “to assist them in overthrowing the regime.” Yet many of the speakers at the Republican convention said that the “power” of Americasn labor unions must be “reined in” because they have a “negative impact on our economy.” So the Republicans want American labor unions to be destroyed and Iranian labor unions to be made more powerful? Capitalists want the labor unions in America destroyed because lower wages and benefits allow for greater profits. Honest Republicans would rename their party the Capitalist Party. Unfortunatley there are no honest Republicans just like there are no honest Capitalists.
One more reason why it is so important to keep Obama in office for a 2nd term. The SCOTUS nomination of the next president will begin to turn the tide for generations to come. Labor relations and union issues, the immigration issue, Same sex marriage and abortion rights, among many others will be critical decisions of the Court during the next four years.
When one considers the fact that W had the entire Congress AND the Court working in his favor for 8 years, it partly helps to understand how this country continued toward being a country with a dwindling middle class and a rising poverty rate, while the ultra-rich became richer. Democrats MUST win in November.
The rich are apex predator atop the economical food web. They are every successful in feeding off this web to the point were the web is starting to shrink. They cannot see that their future is connected to ours. As the economy shrinks the rick will use their political power to collect a greater and greater share of the income causing the economy to shrink even further. Of course there is a limit to the portion of the economy the rich can take, its the starvation limit, this is where large segments of the population start to starve to death. At this limit there won’t be space for a lot of rich people. The difference between rich and poor countries is the difference in inequality of wealth, nothing else matters.