Opinions

Increasing Alaska's minimum wage: A moral question, not economic one

A dedicated mother bicycles through the cold Anchorage streets at midnight. She has just finished her shift at work, and is on her way to see her children. But she is not on her way home. Despite her full-time job, this hard-working mother can't afford a car or even a bus ticket, so it's no surprise that she can't afford a home. She's pedaling through the dark to spend the night on a church floor, one of many in Anchorage participating in the Emergency Cold Weather Shelter program. When she arrives, she will kiss her children, then sleep on the floor for a few hours, before waking early to head off to her next shift.

This is one face of the minimum-wage earner in Alaska: Hard-working, dedicated, and trying to care for her children, but unable to make ends meet because despite working full-time, her paycheck leaves her below the poverty line, desperately seeking a fighting chance, and crying out for justice.

This November will provide an opportunity to provide that justice, by voting to increase the minimum wage. This is an opportunity to stand with and for these hard-working families and to provide them not with luxury or excess, but with social justice. Even at the increased level, life at minimum wage will be difficult. But it will be one step closer to a workable wage, with which a mother can provide a child a bed instead of a floor.

In various places across the country, minimum wage increases have been enacted and measured, and the results are convincing: Raising the minimum wage stimulates the economy and reduces dependency on tax-funded welfare programs. But the issue is not exclusively an economic one. This is a moral issue, and as faith leaders, we are calling on Alaskans to raise the minimum wage on moral grounds.

The poor people suffering around us are not a social condition to be endured. They are not a demographic to be avoided. They are our brothers and sisters crying out for social justice, and we have a duty to hear that cry and to care for them. This is done through personal efforts and charitable giving -- and also through our political and economic structures. Poverty is not the result of random circumstance, nor is it the result of poor people not working hard enough. Poverty exists because we allow it to. The responsibility is ours -- and so is the power to change it.

Here in Anchorage on a daily basis, mothers tuck in their children under borrowed blankets on strangers' floors. Every day, parents anxiously wait in line at the food bank, praying that they'll get in before supplies run out. They endure judgmental glares as they pay in food stamps. Still others work back-to-back shifts, while their children take a taxi across town to school, not knowing what "home" they'll be sent to at the end of the day. They are working hard. They are crying out for justice.

Rev. Matt Schultz is pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Anchorage. He sits on the steering committee of Christians For Equality, and he moderates the interfaith group "Better Together."

The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.

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