The federal minimum wage just increased to $6.55 / hour on Thursday. While this increase will make a big difference in the lives of millions of people, it still leaves the minimum wage far below where it was in 1968, when the minimum wage reached its peak value in real terms.
An excellent overview of the issue can be found online in the 2005 report, "A Just Minimum Wage: Good For Workers, Business and Our Future" [PDF] by Holly Sklar and The Rev. Dr. Paul H. Sherry. It was produced by the American Friends Service Committee and the National Council of Churches USA in support of the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign, and combines a moral/religious perspective along with an empirical economic one that draws both on published data and on the views of enlightened business leaders.
This first chart from the report puts the current situation with the minimum wage in stark perspective:
The 1968 peak is not an accident, as I have written previously about how the 1968 election was a curious variant on the key phenomena of realigning elections. What made 1968 different was that, rather than creating a unified re-alignment of voting blocks, it produced something never seen before in American politics-- a de-alignment of voters that produced a predominant pattern of divided government. (See charts on flip). This pattern did not give outright power to the Republicans, but it did largely stymie the power of Democrats to make major improvements in power of government to make life better for the majority of Americans. And nothing showed this more clearly than the way that the minimum wage has stagnated since 1968.
