E-Mail This Article to a Friend Bucking for a raise (continued)
	Mother’s pay GWENDOLYN OLIVERA has already told her three young children that Santa Claus is going to be a little poor this year. The 28-year-old single mother, who lives in public housing in Worcester and works 30 hours a week at a Honey Farms mini-market, earns $9 an hour. She uses that $270 a week to pay for food, rent (in government-subsidized housing, she’s required to pay 32 percent of her income), health-care bills, and child care — leaving little extra money, even for Christmas presents to give to her nine-, seven-, and five-year-old children. Olivera, a high-school graduate who has also taken a professional hospitality course, earns more than two dollars per hour above the state’s minimum wage — she started at $6.25, and has moved up to earning $9. Still, she struggles. "I have to make a choice, what I have to pay for — the baby sitter, the food, or the bills" she says over the phone one afternoon after work. Often, she puts "the priority on the baby sitter. Because if I don’t pay the baby sitter, I have no income." When the children get out of school as early as 1:30 p.m., and their mother works long hours just to make ends meet, it presents more problems than just the financial ones, adds Luz Ramirez, a friend of Olivera’s who held a low-wage job before she started working in the Worcester office of Massachusetts Neighbor to Neighbor. The sad irony is that many parents work long hours and multiple jobs to provide for their children, only to find that "they have no quality time to spend with their families," Ramirez says. "They can’t have the special moments that you need to have a healthy family." This is one of the hardest parts for Olivera, who says she regrets not being able to do things with her children, such as taking them to the movies or to go skating. Similarly, Ramirez says she regrets having been unable to spend more time with her youngest daughter, a 17-year-old during whose childhood Ramirez was working almost all the time. "Sometimes I feel like I wasn’t there for her as much as I was there for the others, because I was working so much," she says. Now, her daughter sometimes resists her authority with barbs like, "What do you know?" and "You don’t know me." And that’s only one of the ways in which hundreds of thousands of women in Massachusetts, whose situations are just like Ramirez’s and Olivera’s, are affected by any increase in the state’s minimum wage — even as their children are affected in turn. "I would like to see more help for the single mother, because I’m pretty sure they’ve got a lot of mothers in the same conditions, like me," Olivera says. "I’d like to see more support for the child care, something more stable for the rent, because the prices are always getting higher. I would like to see better-paid jobs. "I would like to go one day to my bank," she says of the future, "without thinking if we’re going to have enough this week." — DF

THAT OPPOSITION comes mainly from business owners, who claim that if they have to pay higher wages, they won’t be able to hire as many workers. But Harvard economics professor Lawrence Katz says that argument has been largely disproved.

"Obviously, anything that raises the cost of hiring for employers could reduce their likelihood of hiring [workers]," he admits. "There’s a tradeoff, potentially, between trying to provide more income in the form of a higher wage ... to workers who are struggling to support their families, and potentially discouraging employers." But, he continues, "What we know, both from changes in the federal minimum wage and from state changes in the minimum wage, is that for the most part in the United States, at the type of level we’re looking at [for] the minimum wage today, the impacts on employment are pretty minimal."

Others argue that increases in the minimum wage would do more to help teenage or college-age workers from middle-class families than to help low-income families. According to Katz, however, "the typical minimum-wage worker is a single mom, struggling to keep the family going, or a couple of parents in a low-wage family."

Indeed, more than 60 percent of the workers who would be affected by a higher minimum wage are women, according to the MBPC. Many who come to the Women’s Industrial Union are in fact college-age or slightly older (in their 20s and early 30s), says Sheelah Feinberg, director of advocacy and MassFESS at the union. But most of these women have only a high-school diploma or GED equivalent, and many don’t speak English.

"Women, particularly single mothers, that are hard hit have a lot of reasons for why they don’t make ends meet," Feinberg says. "It’s not for lack of trying. It’s from a lack of training and from a lack of jobs available to them. For women, sometimes the greatest barrier is self-esteem: ‘I’m worthy of going out and trying to get a better job. I don’t want my child to see me by example not doing well. I don’t want that to happen, so I’m going to go get the education and training programs, I’m going to navigate the system, and I’m going to get better for my family and myself.’ "

Real Cuts–Real People–Real Pain: The Effects of the Fiscal Crisis on Women and Girls in Massachusetts, a new MBPC report released this week, drives home how severely budget cuts have affected women in the state. It’s all part of the same damaging web, says Kathleen Casavant, chair of the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women, the independent state agency that co-produced the report.

"Why is this like this?" she asks. "Because the current minimum wage has not met the standard of need for women," which leaves them needing more government assistance. And when that government assistance — child-care grants, adult-basic-education funds, Medicaid support — isn’t available, it’s even more difficult to break out of the cycle.

Many workers are forced to work more than one job to make up the difference. And since 60 percent of the workers are women, and more than one-third are the sole wage-earners for their families, it’s safe to assume there are quite a few single parents out there who are forced to choose between spending time with their children and earning enough money to bring them to the doctor. Or who don’t have the time to go out and get education and training that will help them get better jobs. Or who have trouble navigating the state’s confusing work-support system.

"If you think about a single mother, or you think about a two-parent family with two kids, that are making minimum wage — how do they even begin to think about paying for their kids to go to college?" Casavant asks. "Can they stay home and help their kids in school so they can go to college?"

ONE OF THE most significant benefits of moderately raising the minimum wage in Massachusetts (by implementing the MBPC’s suggested two-phase $1.50 increase, for example) would be what Katz calls the "spillover effect," or the impact such an increase would have on other low-income workers. Chris Tilly, economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, describes the minimum wage as a floor — and says raising that floor forces employers to raise other low wages in order to maintain the incentive-building "wage gap."

So even those workers who aren’t earning the bare minimum would stand to gain from a $1-to-$2 increase. McLynch estimates that workers up through the 20th percentile of wage-earners — those who earn wages into the $9 range — would see an increase in their paychecks. And more money in people’s pockets is good for the economy, says Harris Gruman, director of Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts, a grassroots policy organization. He calls raising the minimum wage "as good a way to strengthen the local retail economy as you can come up with," but acknowledges there might be some reticence when it comes to prioritizing a wage-hike bill.

"The public loves the minimum wage, but most people don’t benefit directly from it," Gruman says. "They love it because they think it’s right. It’s like a feel-good thing. But that doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily go as far to make it happen."

But, supporters say, it’s the least they can do to make sure those who are most affected by the minimum wage get a fair shot. "In 1912, Massachusetts was the first state to pass minimum wage, and it was to prevent exploitation of [female workers]," Casavant says. "And if you think about it, it’s 2004, and we haven’t accomplished that yet. And we’re still talking about a minimum wage affecting women more than men, and I think it’s pretty outrageous."

Deirdre Fulton can be reached at dfulton[a]phx.com