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Seven Days at Minimum Wage

“7 real people with 7 real stories of living on the minimum wage, hosted by Roseanne Barr and sponsored by the AFL-CIO and ACORN.” Ã¢â�¡â��

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 22nd, 2006 at 8:26 pm and is filed under little imbroglios. It has had 357 views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response here, send a trackback from your own site, or rate this post right here:

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2 Responses to “Seven Days at Minimum Wage”

Mike Doyle Says:
October 23rd, 2006 at 10:32 pm
Thanks for your mention of 7 DAYS. I’m one of the people who interviewed the workers in the video blog. It’s hard to hear someone sit there and tell you that they have to decide whether they can eat dinner tonight so that their kids can eat, because they’re trapped in a poverty-wage job. Even $10 an hour doesn’t go that far these days, especially in urban America. I just can’t fathom how some of the people we videoed actually make it.

And the worst part is, some of the time, they don’t.
Mike Doyle Says:
November 6th, 2006 at 11:49 pm
Thanks again for covering 7 Days at Minimum Wage. With Election Day finally upon us, I wanted to let you know what the project team is up to in support of the six minimum-wage ballot initiatives in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and Ohio.

I won’t kitchen-sink you with all the details–you can browse the 7 DAYS project website for that, at http://www.sevendaysatminimumwage.org/site/?page_id=23 . But if you do click through, you’ll find information about phone banks, door-knocks, prayer vigils, canvassing, election observations, and watch parties sponsored by ACORN and AFL-CIO throughout the six key states. (You can also find a lot of this last-minute info on ACORN’s http://www.raiseswages.org and AFL-CIO’s http://www.americaneedsaraise.org ).

It’s obvious why these increases are important: an hour of human labor should cost more than a Starbucks venti latte. That the federal government thinks it’s ok to pay you or me or anyone else $5.15 an hour is positively obnoxious–and most of those hours are below full-time and without health insurance.

I know I’m angry about that, and sad for the way the people we interviewed are forced to live because the law says it’s ok to keep them earning below the poverty line. I know how deeply that fact affected me through my work on 7 DAYS. If the project touched just one other person out there to go to the polls and help raise their local minimum wage, then I know we’ve accomplished what we set out to do.

Please remember the folks we interviewed when you consider your state’s or your city’s minimum wage…or the next time you tip anyone, anywhere, for that matter. Do click through and see how to support minimum-wage increases in your state. And most of all, thanks for watching. Good luck to everyone on November 7!

Peace…