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Philly minimum wage workers tell of tough choices
A minimum wage of $7.25 an hour in Philadelphia is just not enough to live on, workers told acting Secretary of Labor Seth Harris at Philly AFL-CIO offices today. Organized with help from the Philly Unemployment Project, a group of women — and 60 percent of minimum-wage earners are women, Harris noted — described choicing between various utility payments, food and shelter, bunking with family members and going winters without heat.
Philly minimum wage workers tell of tough choices
A minimum wage of $7.25 an hour in Philadelphia is just not enough to live on, workers told acting Secretary of Labor Seth Harris at Philly AFL-CIO offices today. Organized with help from the Philly Unemployment Project, a group of women — and 60 percent of minimum-wage earners are women, Harris noted — described choicing between various utility payments, food and shelter, bunking with family members and going winters without heat.
Harris was in town to gather support for President Obama's push to increase the minimum wage to $9 per hour and to index it to the cost of living, an initiative the president announced in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. "That would be a 24-percent pay increase for some of the hardest-working and lowest-paid people in American society," Harris said.
Cheryl Henderson, a baggage handler at the airport who has been making $7.25 for three years, said she and her son could get a place of their own, instead of crashing with family, if she could take home anextra $1.75 per hour. Tracy Mulvehill called her old minimum-wage job at Parx Racetrack "degrading." And Jessica Nuñez said her life as a minimum-wage worker with two jobs is filled with constant choices: "Do I want to feed my kid? Do i want my kid to have school supplies? … Do I want him to have a roof over his head?"
Shedeya Ivy, who works at McDonalds and Rave movie theater while attending Community College of Philadelphia, has been staying with her grandmother. She says the raise would ease what's become constant worrying: "With $9, I could do a lot. I oculd make sure my grandmother is OK."
Harris said he would bring their comments back to D.C. to help the president address the "myths" that opponents bring up every time this debate is opened — like that minimum wage earners are mostly middle-class teenagers delivering pizzas after school. "We hear them every time. They just roll them out."
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