Just a moment to pause and update everyone: going back to 1968, workers have lost more than $357 billion because of the robbery due to the stagnant minimum wage.
Did you ever wonder what the minimum wage would be worth if it kept its value going back to 1968? Well, it would over $20-an-hour. And thanks to our friends at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, we can watch the loss tick by literally every second, counting the dollars lost by workers since 1968 because of the sinking value of the minimum wage.
This clock shows how “many dollars America’s minimum wage workers have lost since July 24, 2009 if the minimum wage had instead been raised to its 1968 level and then kept pace with inflation since then,” CEPR says (and if you’re reading this after it was posted, the clock will keep ticking and likely be above $358 billion…and more):
And every minutes, hour, day that goes by, the robbery continues.
This article originally appeared in workinglife.org on April 22, 2015. Reprinted with permission.
About the author: Jonathan Tasini on any given day, I think like a political-union organizer or a writer — or both. I’ve done the traditional press routine including The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Business Week, Playboy Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. One day, back when blogs were just starting out, I created Working Life. I used to write every day but sometimes there just isn’t something new to say so I cut back to weekdays, with an occasional weekend post when it moves me. I’ve also written four books: It’s Not Raining, We’re Being Peed On: The Scam of the Deficit Crisis (2010 and, then, the updated 2nd edition in 2013); The Audacity of Greed: Free Markets, Corporate Thieves and The Looting of America (2009); They Get Cake, We Eat Crumbs: The Real Story Behind Today’s Unfair Economy, an average reader’s guide to the economy (1997); and The Edifice Complex: Rebuilding the American Labor Movement to Face the Global Economy, a critique and prescriptive analysis of the labor movement (1995).
