E-Mail This Article to a Friend Bucking for a raise For low-income workers, the Massachusetts minimum wage just doesn’t add up BY DEIRDRE FULTON

If you are a college-age worker without a college education, or a female (especially a single mother), minority, or immigrant worker, there is a good chance you are getting screwed by the economy.

That’s because the state’s minimum wage — which you’re more likely to make if you fall into any of the above categories — has languished at $6.75 per hour for three years. And, according the national consumer-price index, inflation has made it worth 50 cents less now than in 2001.

Minimum-wage workers are finding themselves able to buy less and less, as basic costs rise but their paychecks stay the same. The longer the wage stays stagnant, the wider the gap grows between what people need and what they can afford. In fact, according to a new report by independent research group the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, unless the state legislature votes soon to raise the minimum wage, by 2007 its real value — that is, its dollar figure adjusted for inflation — will drop to its lowest levels in decades.

Activists, economists, and legislators alike agree that a minimum-wage hike is overdue. Two-phase legislation raised the wage by 75 cents in 1999, and again in 2001, bringing it to today’s $6.75. However, that legislation failed to address the problem of inflation, meaning that the minimum wage hasn’t kept up with the skyrocketing cost of everything from milk to rent to day care.

"When people are ... working in many cases well over 40 hours a week, and still not able to make ends meet — something’s wrong with that formula," says State Senator Marc Pacheco, who co-sponsored a bill filed December 1 that would raise the minimum wage.

A SINGLE person earning $6.75 per hour and working full-time (40 hours a week for 50 weeks) would earn a total of $13,500 per year, putting her well above the US Census Bureau’s official federal poverty level of $9573. But, as anyone living in Greater Boston (or anywhere else in Massachusetts, for that matter) knows, yearly minimum-wage earnings are wildly inadequate for even the most basic necessities. Despite the perception that we currently live in a renter’s market, housing remains unaffordable for many when rent alone can eat up more than a third of their income. The federal poverty standard is based on a formula that fails to factor in the rising cost of transportation, child care, health insurance, and countless other essentials. And, since it’s a national standard, there’s no accounting for regional differences.

That’s why, in 1998, the Massachusetts-based Women’s Educational and Industrial Union developed the Massachusetts Family Economic Self-Sufficiency Standard (MassFESS), which factors in those real-life expenses. To meet that standard, a single person living in Boston would need $21,362, a single parent with one school-age child would need $36,480, and a family with two working parents and two children would need $47,018. So, one full-time minimum-wage job would account for about 38 percent of what a single parent needs to survive in Boston.

And the situation is only going to get worse, says Jeff McLynch, a Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center analyst. "As you go forward in time, [the minimum wage] loses more and more value," he says. For this reason, the MBPC advocates raising the wage, and its report suggests three ways to do so here in Massachusetts. Looking at these options offers a glimpse of how inadequate the wage really is.

• The first option would simply make up the wage value lost to inflation since 2001. The minimum wage would go up to $7.65 per hour by 2007 — in other words, McLynch explains, "it gets us back to where we would have been," had the 1999 legislation provided for rising costs.

• The second option — and the one that Arlington representative James Marzilli has proposed in a bill to be considered in the legislature’s upcoming session — would replicate the 1999 increase of a $1.50 two-phase raise, resulting in a wage of $8.25 per hour in 2007.

• The third option — the least realistic politically, but the most transformative economically — would take the state’s wage to its 1968-level peak, when the hourly wage was $1.60 — the 2003 equivalent of $8.46 per hour.

All these options would include a provision to "index" the wage to inflation, requiring the state to adjust the wage each year according to inflation rates reported by the national consumer-price index. Such a condition was originally part of the 1999 legislation, but "there’s been enough opposition over the years that to compromise to get it passed, the indexing has come out," Pacheco explains.