Too many of our fellow Californians know these facts all too well: Workers earning the minimum wage today have the lowest purchasing power in 40 years.
The raw truth is the minimum wage, $4.25 an hour, is a poverty wage in California.
Proposition 210 on the November ballot would raise the state's minimum wage in two stages.
As of March 1, 1997, the minimum wage would be $5 an hour; a year later it would go up to $5.75.
We support the increase for much the same reason we supported the increase in the federal minimum: It is necessary to provide a living wage for our lowest paid workers.
During the '60s and '70s, the minimum wage was set at a level that provided a full-time worker a high enough income to support a family of three at the poverty line.
Today, minimum wage workers earn $8,840 a year; the federal poverty line for a family of three is $12,980 a year. To earn that yearly income, a full-time worker must make $6.24 an hour.
The minimum wage mires workers in poverty; far too many minimum wage employees qualify for food stamps and welfare payments.
This poverty wage ends up penalizing some of our hardest working employees.
Since 1988, when the state's minimum wage was last increased, the sum has lost more than 26 percent of its value because of inflation.
As the real value of the minimum wage has gone down, salaries at the other end of the scale have jumped dramatically. Since 1988, the incomes of corporate CEOs have increased 108 percent; corporate profits have jumped 68 percent.
Raising the minimum wage is not only good for low paid workers, but for the economy as well.
A statement calling for the increase was signed by 101 economists from leading universities across the country, including three Nobel laureates and seven past presidents of the American Economics Association.
Conventional wisdom says that in creasing the minimum wage will reduce the number of jobs.
That wasn't the finding of economists who studied the results of the 1988 increase in California's minimum wage and the 1992 increase in New Jersey. They found increased levels of employment.
Oregon and Washington state, to cite two examples, both have higher minimum wages than California and lower unemployment rates.
The state department of social services estimates that an increase in the minimum wage to $5.75 will raise the in comes of poor working families, reducing the need for welfare payments to about 50,000 recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
The increase in the federal minimum wage to $4.75 an hour was a step in the right direction.
Proposition 210 takes us further down the road toward a healthier economy where fewer workers and their families are stuck in poverty.
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