By Ralph C. Carmona- an adjunct professor at Southern Maine Community College and vice president of the Adjunct Faculty Chapter of the Maine State Employees Association. He can be contacted at: ralphcarmona@gmail.com.

When adjunct professors have to scrap for a living wage, it is time to fight for a secure middle class.

My city, Portland, like the state of Maine and America, faces an economic concentration of inequity that threatens our democracy. The nationwide drive for $15 fast-food wages, however, offers a path that might fundamentally make democracy more equitable and less volatile.

At a recent rally in New York, an African-American fast food worker said that this “Fight for $15” union effort is at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement because it is about human dignity involving the poor and workers of color. It reflects a time when the Rev. Martin Luther King urged that union wages be central to civil rights and the 1964 March on Washington. His last days were spent marching with sanitation workers for better wages.

“I am a human being,” thundered a Puerto Rican immigrant home care worker at a Boston union rally in July. “Be a leader; go for it! Do it together; you are a union. If you don’t do it as friends, who will? My children are human beings. Like Martin Luther King, I gotta dream. And I will fight for that dream of $15 for you because we are all human beings!”

Quality work is not just about impoverished workers. As an adjunct professor at Southern Maine Community College, I see this issue negatively affecting part-time instructors. Continue reading →

By Evan Belanger, Read the full BDN article here.
Aug. 24, 2015

Voting 6-1 on Monday, the City Council approved a resolution expressing support for an ongoing petition drive aimed at increasing the state’s minimum wage for the first time since 2009.

The Maine People’s Alliance is gathering signatures to force a citizen-initiated referendum on the November 2016 ballot after failing for years to push the item through in Augusta. “We’re not doing that because we have a deep love of direct democracy that overwhelms all else. We’re doing that because it is our only option at this point,” Mike Tipping, communications director for the MPA, told the City Council in July.

With councilors Joe Baldacci and Patricia Blanchette absent from Monday’s meeting, Councilor Gibran Graham cast the only dissenting vote, arguing that the council’s time would be better spent supporting that actual ballot initiative and not just the petition effort.He also said that passing a local minimum wage immediately would do more to support the MPA’s statewide effort. “I think no other support could be given that would be of greater consequence than showing that the minimum wage can be raised and needs to be raised earlier,” Graham said. Continue reading →

by Ezra Klein on May 28, 2015, read full article on VOX

There is no state in the union where a full-time, minimum-wage worker can afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment for less than 30 percent of his paycheck (which is a standard measure of housing affordability).

That’s the depressing takeaway from a new report by the National Low-Income Housing Coalition. The paper includes this map tallying the hours a worker would have to put in at her job each week to rent a one-bedroom apartment without it eating more than 30 percent of her wages:

In Texas, a minimum wage worker needs to put in 73 hours a week to afford a one-bedroom unit. In California, it’s 92 hours. In the District of Columbia, it’s a solid 100 hours.

Continue reading →

By Ramona du Houx

From an article in Maine Insights:

The City Council’s Business and Economic Development Committee took new action on August 18th to progress the minimum wage issue.

Earlier this year, Bangor City Councilor Joe Baldacci’s proposed an ordinance that would increase the local minimum wage from $7.50 per hour to $8.25 per hour on Jan. 1, 2016, and eventually increase it to $9.75 per hour in 2018. After that, the Bangor minimum wage would fluctuate with the consumer price index to keep up with inflation.

At the meeting a compromise proposal authored by Councilor Josh Plourde was discussed that included a council resolve to support the Maine People’s Alliance referendum on the November 2016 ballot that would increase the minimum wage statewide to $12 an hour.

The compromise does not exempt tipped workers, workers under the age of 18 or businesses with five or fewer workers. Baldacci is in favor of these changes but he would prefer to enact a local wage hike sooner than waiting for the referendum of 2016 to pass. Too many local citizens need a minimum wage increase — now.

“We are moving in the right direction. The right direction is raising people’s wages. Sometimes this process takes longer than any of us like. But I try to keep my eyes on the prize. And the prize here is raising wages for hard working people,” said Baldacci. Continue reading →