From Tom Paine
By Isaiah J. Poole

The second of three annual minimum-wage increases enacted by Congress goes into effect today, raising the wage floor to $6.55 an hour. Late Wednesday the Campaign for America’s Future focused on this positive development for workers in its latest issue alert.

As we cheer that increase, it’s important to gear up for the next fight: a permanent indexing of the minimum wage to inflation.

The next Congress will face that decision even as the final stage of the 2007 legislation raises the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour a year from now. Sen. Barack Obama has said that he would propose such an indexing if he becomes president, and the idea has strong support among congressional Democrats. But don’t underestimate the fight that has to be waged to get that accomplished.

Ten states—Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington—have already indexed their minimum wages to the federal government’s consumer price index. But the lower house of the Wisconsin state legislature earlier this year killed legislation that would have indexed that state’s minimum wage. The arguments used against the measure are all of the old arguments conservatives always use when the topic of increasing the minimum wage comes up: low-skilled workers will lose jobs, African-American unemployment will go up, and costs will go up significantly for consumers.

The most credible economic studies prove that the dire predictions by conservative ideologues and business interests have never panned out after previous minimum wage increases. That includes one just released by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California at Berkeley that helps to rebut some of the claims often made that minimum wage increases lead to higher teen-age unemployment.

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