The Living Wage Petition for Dutchess County

Do you think that the minimum wage in Dutchess County should be $10 an hour-- to make sure that no one who works forty hours a week has to live in poverty? Such an initiative would help turn our local economy around in the current de facto recession by putting more money into the pockets of middle and low-income workers-- so that they would spend it at local businesses.

San Francisco has a citywide minimum wage of $9.36 an hour which was implemented over time, initially exempting small businesses and nonprofit agencies. San Francisco officials have recently confirmed with us the fact is that the high minimum wage there has helped, not hurt, local businesses; see "The Economics of Citywide Minimum Wages: The San Francisco Model" by Michael Reich, Arindrajit Dube, and Gina Vickery (Labor Center at Berkeley):
http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/research/minimum_wage.shtml ;
http://www.sfgov.org/site/mayor_index.asp?id=71032 .

A number of local leaders of faith (and dozens of others across the county) have in the past endorsed our call to make sure that all workers who are employees of companies that do business with Dutchess County get paid a living wage (see "View Signatures" at our petition here: PetitionOnline.com/MLKToday).

Dr. Martin Luther King's words ring true here today in 2008 now more than ever in the face of the current recession:

"There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American whether he is a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer. It is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis getting part-time income. We are tired of working our hands off and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate with daily basic necessities of life. We know of no more crucial civil rights issue facing Congress today than the need to increase the federal minimum wage and extend its coverage. A living wage should be the right of all working Americans."
[ http://www.MLKOnline.net/quotes ; http://www.CommonDreams.org/views06/0114-25.htm ]

Specifically, regarding the need for a$10/hour minimum wage, Rep. Maurice Hinchey himself was quoted as follows on the need for exactly this in Robert Kuttner's new book, "The Squandering of America" (p. 301):

"My purpose here is not to write a platform, only to suggest the immense political value of bold policies that would offer practical help to regular Americans, even if enactment is not on the near horizon. Congressman Maurice Hinchey, a populist Democrat who was elected by a Hudson Valley district including depressed cities such as Kingston, a seat that had been safely Republican since 1910, argues that Democrats need policies that break the prevailing paradigm. Hinchey suggests, among other policies like universal health care, an immediate increase in the minimum wage to $10 rather than the $7.25 that Democrats got Congress to approve for 2009. 'If I went out into the streets of Kingston,' Hinchey told me, 'and said to people that the minimum wage is not going up to $7.25 until 2009, they would say to me, 'That is all you Democrats are going to do? Why did I vote for you?'"

Dutchess County's own Eleanor Roosevelt drafted this into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights six decades ago-- adopted by the United Nations December 10, 1948.

"Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."
[ http://www.udhr.org/UDHR/default.htm ]

Dutchess County's own President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's stated this in his Economic Bill of Rights speech January 11, 1944:

We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people-whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth-is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure. We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all-regardless of station, race, or creed. Among these are...the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation...the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation."
[ http://www.FDRHeritage.org/bill_of_rights.htm ]

If you agree that Dutchess County's leaders need to implement a countywide $10/hour minimum wage here to help revitalize our local economy, sign on to this petition, and send a letter to [email protected]

Joel Tyner
County Legislator
Clinton/Rhinebeck
324 Browns Pond Road
Staatsburg, NY 12580
[email protected]
(845) 876-2488