A proposal before Congress to strengthen the minimum wage would help low-wage workers while having little impact on employment, our new report explains. Here’s the opening:
Author: WHES
Church World Service applauds passage of food aid funding and reforms
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Seeking ways to help the poor and childless
Last Friday at the Food Bank for New York on 116th Street, I caught a glimpse of the many shapes of need.
It is expensive to be poor. Minimum-wage jobs are physically demanding, have unpredictable schedules, and pay so meagerly that workers can’t save up enough to move on.
Fifty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson made a move that was unprecedented at the time and remains unmatched by succeeding administrations. He announced a War on Poverty, saying that its “chief weapons” would be “better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities.”
A girl’s escape
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — She was a 13-year-old girl who said she was beaten daily by strangers who forced her to work unpaid in their home, and she wanted to escape.
2013’s top humanitarian issues and books
YEMEN & SYRIA REMAIN THE LARGEST NEGLECTED EMERGENCIES Aid agencies see no end n or solution for Syri a (which received only 1/3 of fund s sought by the UN’s $4b in 2013 ), where 120,000 have died & 6.5m displaced
Raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 would lift wages for millions and provide a modest economic boost
Earlier this year, EPI released an analysis of the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, a bill introduced by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) that would raise the federal minimum wage in three incremental increases of $0.95 from its current level of $7.25 per hour to $10.10 per hour (see Cooper and Hall 2013).
In the war on poverty, a dogged adversary
When President Lyndon Johnson declared his war on poverty on Jan. 8, 1964, almost exactly 50 years ago, 19 percent of Americans were poor.
Syria falls into an abyss. The US stands by as a dictator starves his people.
IT’S BEEN seven weeks since Secretary of State John F. Kerry charged that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was waging “a war of starvation.” Hundreds of thousands of people in areas controlled by rebel forces were under siege by the government, which was refusing to allow in supplies of food and medicine. “The world must act quickly,” Mr. Kerry warned, because the regime’s tactics “threaten to take a humanitarian disaster into the abyss.”
US opposition to ambitious Indian program a ‘direct attack on the right to food’
BALI, Indonesia — In the lead-up to this week’s World Trade Organization negotiations, the Obama administration has tried to block the implementation of a new program approved by the Indian government that could help feed its 830 million hungry people in a cost-effective way.
