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Coretta King Calls for Increase in Minimum Wage

March 24, 1987 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) _ Coretta Scott King called on Congress to raise the minimum wage so that a family of three does not remain under the poverty level when the breadwinner works 40 hours a week year round.

Mrs. King, co-chairperson of the National Committee for Full Employment and Full Employment Action Council, reminded a Senate labor subcommittee Monday that the current minimum wage of $3.35 an hour has not been raised in six years.

″One has to look at realities,″ she told the Senate employment and productivity subcommittee. ″How much does it cost to live? It (the minimum wage) still is not adequate to take care of a family. I wonder how the average family makes it. You can’t get a balanced diet.″

Society will suffer if the minimum wage is not raised, she said.

″If people aren’t paid adequately to work, society will pay in other ways,″ she said. ″You will pay to mend broken lives or by incarceration. ″

Mrs. King, widow of slain civil rights leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., testified on legislation that would establish a program to create three million minimum-wage jobs in locally run public works projects.

Subcommittee chairman Paul Simon, D-Ill, who introduced the measure, said the workers would earn $464 a month for 32-hour, four-days-a-week jobs with the fifth day set aside for training and permanent job hunting.

″That’s more than welfare payments in all but three states,″ said Simon.

Mrs. King said, ″You’re trying to improve the system and it will help, but it is not the solution. Nothing will help until there is a comprehensive plan.″

She said people must believe that the compensation they receive ″is commensurate with what others in both the public and private sectors receive for comparable work.″

″In some cases and in some communities this may very well be the current or future minimum wage,″ said Mrs. King. ″Let us not assume, however, that people who find themselves unemployed at any given point in time are intrinsically less valuable than others who were in the right place at the right time.

″Equal pay for equal work is a long-standing value in the American economic system and must not be undermined,″ she said. ″Certainly we can and should peg wages at the entry level for similar work.″

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