GROUPS SEEK ‘LIVING WAGE’ HIGHER THAN N.Y. TARGET
Last year’s call by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to raise the state’s minimum wage from $8.75 to $10.50 per hour falls far short of an actual “living wage,” according to a coalition of activists.
The groups Citizen Action, Working Families, End the New Jim Crow Action Network and Hudson Valley Progressives, as well as Civil Service Employees Association, joined forces Thursday at Ulster County’s Business Resource Center in the town of Ulster to release the new 2015 Job Gap Report called “Low Wage Nation.”
“Workers are falling short financially, and there are few living-wage jobs to go around,” said Kat Fisher, lead organizer for the Kingston chapter of Citizen Action, a nonprofit social reform group. “We share a growing concern over the proliferation of lowwage jobs in upstate New York. It is a dangerous trend. Without action, the living-wage crisis will only continue to worsen.”
“Working a full-time job should allow any single adult to pay for the basic necessities of life,” said Phillip Leber, Hudson Valley regional political director of the Working Families Party. “The frank truth is that’s not happening. Let’s face it, $8.75 an hour is just not going to cut it. Nobody could survive on that. It’s nearly impossible to raise a family even on $13 or $14 an hour, especially in a state as expensive as ours.”
According to the report, published by Alliance For a Just Society, individual New Yorkers living upstate currently require $18.47 per hour to get by without public assistance. A total of 61 percent of New York jobs fail to meet that criteria, with only 58,410 living-wage jobs statewide, which is one out of every eight jobs.
If you want to have kids, the picture grows more grim. One child raises the price tag to $27.13 per hour, and 76 percent of New York jobs fall below a living wage. For two children, 86 percent fall short in compensation as the living wage jumps to $36.52 per hour (or $33.01 for two adults, with one working and one staying home).
Activists say the answer is more higher-paying jobs. They singled out Wal-Mart as the worst culprit in America’s corporate workforce but also included most other national box-store chains.
Leber said the wealthiest 1 percent of the population have captured all of New York’s income growth since the 2008 financial crisis.
“It is high time for working families to get their fair share of that income growth, and we need it now,” Leber said.