AN ARIZONA MINIMUM WAGE – IT’S AFFORDABLE AND IT’S TIME By Carol Kamin, Ph.D., President and CEO, Children’s Action Alliance It is time for Arizona to join the ranks of the other 22 states that have adopted their own minimum wage by voting YES on Proposition 202. In November, Arizona voters will be asked to decide whether Arizona should adopt its own minimum wage law. Proposition 202, the Raise the Minimum Wage for Working Adults Act, calls for setting the minimum wage at $6.75 an hour effective January 1, 2007, with annual inflation adjustments occurring every January 1. The federal minimum wage has lost much of its value in the nine years since it was last increased. The $5.15 approved in 1997 is worth only $4.10 today. The typical person who would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage is an adult woman working full-time. She likely works in the retail trade or leisure and hospitality industry. Contrary to popular belief, these are not all entry-level jobs from which people quickly advance to higher paying jobs – many are jobs with little opportunity for advancement. They include waiters and waitresses, sales workers – and child care teachers. Over 303,000 Arizona workers would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage. Of these, 112,000 are married and 97,000 are parents. More than one half of the affected families rely on the minimum wage for all of their family income. We all should be particularly concerned about the impact on Arizona’s children. We know many of the 200,000 children who would be impacted by an increase in the minimum wage currently live in poverty. We also know poverty is costly for these children and costly for society. A child in poverty is more than three times likely to have poor health, five times more likely to die from an infectious disease, and at least twice as likely as non-poor children to be kept back in school. Increasing the minimum wage to $6.75 would mean $16.40 per week for the average worker, or just a little over $70 per month. That’s enough to fill the gas tank twice. It’s also enough to move a family out of poverty and toward stability. More than 560 economists, including several Nobel Laureates, support a modest increase in state minimum wages as a way to “significantly improve the lives of low-income workers and their families without the adverse effects that critics have claimed.” There’s another theory out there –that all businesses, and particularly small businesses, oppose increases in the minimum wage. According to a Gallup
survey conducted in May 2006, 86 percent of small business owners did not believe that an increase in the minimum wage would hurt their business. Children do well when their families do well. By voting YES on Proposition 202, Arizonans will soon have the opportunity to reward hard work and help 300,000 Arizona workers earn a more decent living for their families.
