Commentary: Demand $15-an-hour minimum wage in Pa.
When I was a young organizer working on the streets of Harlem 20 years ago, I made $10 per hour. At the time, I thought I had it hard. Yet today, in 2016, the law of the land is a $7.25 minimum wage. This is a travesty.
It doesn't matter if you live in Harlem, West Philadelphia, or East Marlborough, you cannot survive on $7.25 an hour. And you certainly can't raise a family on it without government assistance.
Someone working 40 hours a week - full time - would earn just $15,080 a year. How can anyone support themselves, much less a family, on that income? This is not even including businesses that cheat their workers and give them just under 40 hours a week so they don't have to give them benefits or pay them overtime.
There are more than three million mothers and fathers in this country just barely getting by even though they work full time, and the majority of these workers are women and people of color. They earn so little that they rely on food stamps to feed their families and Medicaid to take care of themselves and their loved ones.
These are not the unemployed. These are the overworked and underpaid - and they deserve a raise.
Clearly, a raise in the minimum wage is long overdue. But this time, rather than passing another incremental bump that barely keeps up with inflation, why not guarantee workers a wage they can actually live on? Why not pay workers $15 an hour?
That's what a group of brave fast-food workers said when they walked off their jobs in New York City almost four years ago; they demanded $15 and a union. Soon, the protests spread to other cities. Then last year, Bernie Sanders launched his campaign for president and put inequality front and center. He forced a serious conversation about how to make sure all Americans can make enough to live on.
Bernie ran on a platform of closing the gap between the rich and poor, and I was proud to endorse him. While many dismissed his campaign, Bernie built a national movement and shifted the terms of the debate from a minimum wage to a living wage.
Just a few years ago, even the most liberal Democrats were only calling for $10 an hour. Today, a $15 minimum wage is part of the national party platform. If that's not a political revolution, I don't know what is.
The minimum wage in Pennsylvania of $7.25 is woefully outdated, and painfully out of touch with the modern cost of living. A full-time job should be enough to keep a family above the poverty line, but at $7.25, it doesn't even come close.
Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would instantly lift millions of Americans out of poverty, and help more than a million workers in Pennsylvania alone. It would strike a powerful blow against inequality, and take a giant step toward creating an economy powered by good jobs, not Wall Street greed.
This isn't just a political issue - it's a moral one. No one who works full time in the United States should be living in poverty. That's not who we are. Every American who is willing to work deserves the dignity and security of a living wage.
For decades now, we have paid many of our hardest-working people a poverty wage, all in the name of making businesses richer. Now it is time for our leaders to start looking out for the people at the bottom of the economic ladder, so all families and children have access to the great dream of this country.
What Sanders started, we need to finish. It's time to stand with working families and demand a $15 minimum wage in Pennsylvania and for all workers from coast to coast.
Benjamin Jealous is a former president and CEO of the NAACP and is a visiting professor at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs.@BenJealous