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Minimum wage goes up, but still below `living wage'

The good news for low-wage workers is that the minimum wage went up 50 cents an hour on Jan. 1. The bad news is that even at $6.50, that wage isn't close to being enough to live on, according to the findings of a new study.

Trying to live on minimum wage, particularly if you have a family, is troublesome at best. In many cases it can't be done. Long ago, it seemed that minimum wage was mostly the concern of teenage burger flippers. In today's more complicated economy, unskilled adults have trouble finding the traditional blue-collar family-wage jobs; many families need two low-paying jobs or more to survive, and there is little money available for anything but necessities.

For other minimum-wage workers, however, the situation is not so dire; some are students; some are entry-level workers trying to develop employment skills; and some are working second jobs to augment the primary salary of a spouse.

In Oregon last week, 107,000 minimum-wage workers saw their wage increase to $6.50 per hour. It was the third and last of a three-step, $1.75 increase in the minimum wage approved by the voters in 1996. At $6.50, Oregon's minimum wage is the highest in the nation.

And contrary to the doom-and-gloom scenarios sketched by its business-association opponents when it was on the ballot -- the increase hasn't produced any traumatic results. Local business owners quoted in a Mail Tribune story were almost blase about its effects.

Though it means more money for some workers, the minimum wage is not close to a "living wage."

A "job gap" study by the advocacy group Oregon Action found that nearly half of Oregon job openings don't pay that living wage. Overall, in four Northwest states surveyed, 4 out of 10 workers earn less than the living wage.

THE GROUP CALCULATED $10.07 per hour as the "average minimum" for a single adult to live on without public assistance. The amounts differed for larger families; the living wage was calculated at $17.13 for a single parent of two.

The study ranked Jackson County among the state's more expensive places to live. Southern Oregon's higher cost of living, and its lower-than-state-average wages, make the shortage of living-wage jobs more pronounced. Sadly, many new retail-sector jobs don't offer that illusive living wage. And the trend toward part-time employment also means fewer benefits, such as medical insurance, for many workers.

Our Tuesday editorial on a new study into "family wages" incorrectly credited the group Oregon Action for having done the research into what it takes to support a family in Oregon and the Northwest.