Why shouldn’t work provide the dignity of a living wage?

As I was flipping through TV channels after church on Super Bowl Sunday, I happened to pause long enough to hear the lead story on PBS’ Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. It was a brief overview of religious groups’ reactions to President Obama’s State of the Union speech, noting mixed responses, especially to his call to raise the minimum wage.

“But others, including religious conservatives, argued this would hurt businesses and lead to more unemployment,” the announcer said. Disgusted, I flipped the channel.

“Since when,” I wondered aloud, “did Judeo-Christian traditions mandate care of business? The charge is to care for people.”

Make no mistake -- this as a moral issue. If people work, and in today’s economy some are working two or three jobs, they should earn enough to supply their basic needs. In other words, they should earn a living wage.

Instead, more Americans have become victims of our Wall Street economy that measures success via the annual financial statement’s profits and shareholder dividends. Long hours, benefit cuts and wage freezes have become accepted means to increase corporate profits. Workers are simply resources to be exploited.

As David Cooper reports for the Economic Policy Institute in “Raising the Federal Minimum Wage to $10.10 Would Lift Millions out of Poverty and Provide a Modest Economic Boost,” “It is important to also recognize that today’s minimum wage has not fallen to exceptional lows out of economic necessity. Over the past 45 years, the U.S. economy has vastly expanded, and productivity (our ability to produce goods and services for the same amount of work) has more than doubled.”

He also debunks the belief low wage jobs are held by teenagers with no need for an income. He writes: “This is patently false: The workers who would be affected by increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 earn, on average, 50 percent of their family’s total income.”

In an article on the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, introduced by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, Jared Bernstein and Sharon Parrot of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reinforce these findings: “ . . . the vast majority of those who would benefit are adults, most are women, and their families depend on their paychecks . . . . This reflects the fact that the low-wage workforce has gotten older and more highly educated in recent decades . . .”

In fact, as Jim Hightower notes in an article about college teachers last week, “The sorry secret of higher education -- from community colleges to brand-name universities -- is that they've embraced the corporate culture of a contingent workforce, turning professors into part-time, low-paid, no-benefit, no-tenure, temporary teachers.”

The real reason for low wages and temporary jobs is to exponentially increase profit for a few, not add value to products and services. If Americans truly value the dignity of work, we will demand all workers are paid fairly for their labor.