Peter Roskam: No Friend of the Working Man

Over this past summer, the majority Democratic Congress voted to ammend the Fair Labor Standards Act, providing an incremental increase in the minimum wage. The minimum wage had been set at $5.15/hour since 1997 when it was last increased. It increased to $5.85 effective July 24th. It will increase again to $6.55 on July 24, 2008 and to $7.25 on July 24, 2009. This modest assistance to laborers was long overdue, increases having long been blocked by a Republican-controlled Congress.

Now a full-time job paying $5.15/hour yields an annual salary of $10,712. Imagine a single man living here in Du Page County and earing minimum wage for his full-time labor. My modest 2-bedroom apartment rents for $960 but our worker will have to set his sights lower. I’ve seen 1 bedroom’s renting for $600, but I suppose there are cheaper ones out there. Let’s say a minimum wage worker can rent one for $450. That’s $5400 per year. Our worker still has $5312 left for other expenses.

Now food. Let’s see. Groceries are pretty expensive. Seems I can’t get out of the grocery store without spending $20 and I shop a few times per week. But our worker is going to have to be careful. The Department of Agriculture says that in August 2007, the U.S. average cost for a low-cost meal plan for a male aged 20 to 50 was $46.40 per week, or $2413 per per year. So our worker still has $2899 left over for other essential expenses.

What about transportation? Our worker is going to need to get back and forth from his job. I’m afraid a car is going to be too expensive but Du Page county has passable bus service (for the moment anyway). At $3.00 per round trip the annual cost of going too and from work is about $750. This leaves $1663 for other expenses.

Health care is another basic need. Let’s assume our worker is lucky enough to be employed by a company that offers health insurance to it’s minimum wage workers (not a very likely scenario). If it is like my employer, the cost is about $80/month to the employee. That’s $960/year.

Ok great. That leaves a generous $703 per year to cover heat, light, taxes, health care co-payments, clothing, toiletries and miscellaneous expenses. A pretty optimistic scenario but it serves the purpose here.

Now consider Peter Roskam. Prior to being elected to Congress in 2006, Roskam was a personal injury attorney, a partner in the firm Salvi, Roskam & Maher. He was also a member of the Illinois state senate. During 2005, according to his House financial disclosure, Roskam earned $615,000 from his work as an attorney. His salary from the State of Illinois was $66,390, making a total earned income of $681,390. Lawyers work a lot of hours so if we assume he worked an average of 80 hour/week, 50 weeks/year, he earned about $170/hour for his labor about 33 times the hourly rate of our minimum wage worker.

Now what kind of an man, earning 33 times as much for his labor, could look a minimum wage worker in the face, a fellow human being who works full time in some thankless job and still doesn’t earn enough to pay for the minimum necessities of daily life, and say “you don’t deserve a raise”? Peter Roskam is that man.

Roskam voted to deny that modest raise to minimum wage workers. His rationale: “Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy and employ as many as eighty thousand people in our district. I voted to protect these employers by opposing a measure which would raise the minimum wage without protecting small businesses. Raising the minimum wage increases the cost of doing business and lowers the number of employees a small business can employ and the number of hours they can employ them. Any minimum wage increase should include protections for these small businesses to they can continue to grow and add employees at respectable wages”.

Now in my estimation, if you want to get at the truth about where a Republican is coming from on economic matters, you can listen to what he says and substitute “big business” anywhere he says “small business’ and you’ll pretty much be at the heart of the matter. The Bush administration and the Republicans in congress have demonstrated by their actions time and time again that big business is ther constituency.

But even if we take Roskam at his word, is it just to insist that workers work for unlivable wages to protect small business owners?

No it is not. Simple justice demands that if a man works full-time he should receive enough return from his labor to provide himself with the basic necessities: food, shelter, clothing, and health care. If he does not, something is seriously wrong and something needs to be done to make it right. Peter Roskam looked at that wrong and refused to make it right.