Pennsylvania employees deserve more than minimum

As much as I love this state with its two playoff-worthy football teams and yearly obsession… As much as I love this state with its two playoff-worthy football teams and yearly obsession with some infernal ground rodent that never fails to predict six more weeks of crappy weather, sometimes I wonder about good ol’ PA.

As we work toward achieving successful economic futures, ones that include good jobs, the employment offered to us now is almost exclusively in the form of minimum and low-wage jobs. And in Pennsylvania, minimum wage is the federally mandated minimum — the exact amount necessary to insure we can’t sue the state in federal court.

Sure, we students are not without resources. There are always the Novum studies that may pay several hundred dollars for only one weekend of work. An enema study alone is worth $800. The truly impoverished among us can sell hair, blood and semen or eggs, but probably not all at the same time.

Shy of these desperate solutions, it is very difficult for a student here to pay the rising cost of college tuition year after year, especially if parents aren’t providing a bulk of the funds.

This is the reason, among others, that there has finally been talk in Harrisburg recently about a possible minimum-wage hike. The hike, which would, after two years, raise the paltry $5.25 to the marginally less anemic $7.15.

The only problem is that Gov. Ed Rendell thinks the hike will put Pennsylvania at a competitive disadvantage by having a higher minimum wage than neighboring states and is instead hoping the matter gets resolved federally. He’s probably worried people here would just blow the extra money on buying a series of Punxsutawney Phil commemorative plates. That, and state Republicans also fear any sort of increase in spending.

But think about it: What sort of jobs pay minimum or low wages? Mostly the kind that involve some employee giving customers items off the dollar menu, and ones that involve students here on campus vegetating at desks. These jobs probably are not likely to migrate to West Virginia should our state legislature raise the wage.

Most states in New England, including New York and Massachusetts, have already raised their minimum wages past the federal minimum. And if you don’t see a link between New England’s higher wage payments and their football team winning the Super Bowl, then you obviously need to study economics a bit more.

When one takes the time to make adjustments for inflation — as I’m sure so many of us are fond of doing in our spare time — we can see that people earning the minimum wage today make roughly what they did in 1979. Our state has made no progress for 25 years in paying people who do arguably some of the worst jobs.

Considering that the 72 percent of people earning minimum wage are older than 20 — all of whom can’t be college students — a good number of adults who work are barely making ends meet. Just imagine trying to raise a family of four — the average size of a family — on a $5.25-an-hour paycheck. Many find themselves working two of these low-paying, full-time jobs just to afford rent and utilities, let alone any of the consumer goods we all enjoy, such as cable and computers.

Don’t get overly excited yet. It is likely to take a few years for all of the politicians to discuss the bill, flip it upside down, reread it, add on amendments to it proclaiming that state cardboard officially be corrugated and do whatever else it is that our representatives do.

Hopefully, at some glorious point in the future of our state, we will be known throughout the country not as that state which is obsessed with groundhogs and the Amish but as that state that pay its employees $7.15 an hour.

Sam Morey doesn’t even make $5.25 an hour because he doesn’t have a job. E-mail him at smorey88@hotmail.com.