Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Denogean: It may take ballot box to boost minimum wage

ANNE T. DENOGEAN

Tucson Citizen

There apparently are taboo topics in the Arizona Legislature. Sex, religion and politics (of course) are fine fodder. So are patriotism and illegal immigrants.

The question of raising the minimum wage, however, is not a subject the Legislature cares to discuss.

For at least four years running, bills have been introduced to establish a state minimum wage above the federal minimum or to refer the issue to the ballot for the voters to decide.

"We have been unsuccessful at even obtaining a committee hearing," said Rebekah Friend, president of the Arizona AFL-CIO.

As a result, the AFL-CIO and other organizations, acting as the Arizona Minimum Wage Coalition, are working on a petition drive to put the issue on the ballot in November.

They have until July 6 to gather 122,612 signatures, and say they are about halfway there.

The bill would require employers to pay at least $6.75 an hour, $1.60 more than the current minimum. Small increases linked to inflation would follow each year.

Businesses with less than $500,000 in gross annual revenues would be exempt.

The Tucson Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, along with the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, is firmly against an increase to the minimum wage.

"We believe the market should rule what wages are paid to workers," said John Dougherty, director of governmental affairs for the Tucson organization.

"A large majority of minimum wage workers are students, people with second jobs," he said.

Rarely is there a family trying to subsist on the wages of one minimum-wage worker, he said.

An increase hurts businesses and creates job loss among those it seeks to help, Dougherty said.

Friend paints a different picture of minimum wage workers.

In Arizona, she said, 74 percent of workers earning less than $7 an hour are adults.

Fifty-eight percent of minimum wage earners are women and about a quarter of the women are single mothers, Friend said.

"It's clear that they are supporting families," she said.

Tucsonan Charlotte Peper is co-chairwoman of the state Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a member of the coalition pushing the petition.

Peper found out what it's like to support a family on minimum wage when her husband was injured in the mid-1980s.

She had four young children and a job paying $4.25 an hour.

"We lost our home, a trailer in Three Points. We lived in the back of a pickup, a borrowed cab-over-camper, until we could build a 20-by-20 wooden shed to live in," she said.

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