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The Working Poor March 15th, 2005 By Marti Forman * Last week's US Senate defeat of two proposals to increase the minimum wage does not bode well for the new and growing segment of south Florida's population: the working poor. Our Federal legislators seem to have forgotten that the static $ 5.15 minimum hourly wage is just $ 10,712 per annum - some $ 5,000 below the poverty line, and an impossible wage to maintain one person, much less a family. Inflation has been growing at 2 or 3 percent annually, yet the minimum wage has not been increased for the past eight years - in glowing contrast to the self imposed $ 28,500 salary increase each Congressman and woman has received in just the past five years. Politicians boast that the level of new jobs created is booming. Few explain that many of these new employment opportunities are minimum wage jobs and hence feeding the ranks of the "working poor". A new term in our capitalistic lexicon, "The Working Poor" is a modern day concept with tragic results, where emergency food agencies such as The Cooperative Feeding Program www.FeedingBroward.org are left to handle the tragic human outcome. The principal service of The Cooperative Feeding Program is the provision of emergency food to close to 100 hungry families each day. The great majority of our clients illustrate how really outdated - yet still common - are the prejudiced stereo-types of the hungry as being lazy and uneducated. The modern truth is different as more and more of our beneficiaries are the working poor - one or two parent families with minimum wage jobs who simply do not have enough income to pay for their rent, food, and clothing. Ineligible for the ever lower levels of federal food support, these families often feel ashamed when referred to us, yet they are driven by the sound of their crying children who go to bed hungry. Their fragile reality of bare survival as "working poor" is shattered by a ubiquitous company downsizing, merger or a medical emergency (most have no health coverage). They are not lazy and are eager to work, but society's excuse of "staying competitive" in today's marketplace is also being used to keep wages to a point where minimum wage equates to less than a survival income. While there are still an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 people who, on any given night in America, lack a real home, the new and expanding silent majority is our country's hungry minimum wage working poor who are barely one paycheck from being homeless. The Senate must be shamed into reconsidering the level of the minimum wage in America. * Marti Forman is the CEO of The Cooperative Feeding Program in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida (954) 792-2328 
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