Published: July 29, 2008

BALTIMORE - Last week the minimum wage rose to $6.55 an hour. That’s a 40-cent raise for people in Maryland living in deep poverty and being hit hardest by the skyrocketing price of milk, bread and gas. Minimum wage earners will take what they can get, but $16 more a week doesn’t help much.

It’s not just minimum wage earners who are having a harder time, but one-third of all Americans who are struggling to get by on low wages. And the number of low-wage jobs — primarily service jobs in hotels, food preparation, home health care and office cleaning — is growing. In the next 10 years, at least 5.3 million new jobs in our country will pay low wages unless something is done.

About 1.1 million people in Maryland, mostly from Baltimore, are struggling to raise their families on low wages. No longer is it just unemployment, but also the rising tide of low-paying jobs that accounts for Baltimore’s high poverty rate of 20 percent. Too many people are juggling multiple jobs, working more hours than they can count and still not making enough to pay their bills.

And as the number of working poor grows, so does the number of millionaires — now 10 million in the United States after the fifth consecutive annual increase. A smaller portion of this group, the top 1 percent of households, takes home 21.8 percent of all income — more than double the 8.9 percent rate of 30 years ago. This is the highest concentration of income in the hands of the wealthiest 1 percent since 1928, a year before the great stock market crash.

At no time in our history has the disparity in personal income been so wide, and in no other industrialized country today does the disparity even come close. Record-high chief executive officer compensation is more than 400 times the take-home pay of an average American worker. For an industrialized country like ours, there is no parallel to this growing income divide between the highest- and lowest-paid workers. Corporate executives in England, for instance, make half as much as American business leaders while the lowest-paid workers there earn a higher wage than their American counterparts.

As we look toward the upcoming election, which will put the fate of our country in new hands, we must demand national policies to change the disturbing direction of our economy before it derails entirely. Pegging the minimum wage to a percentage of median income would raise it and then keep the lowest-paid workers on pace with future increases of the rest of the work force. This would help move more families, regardless of whether their jobs are privately or publicly funded, closer to the living wage standards established by Maryland. Expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit — a budget cost that would easily be offset by closing tax loopholes for the very wealthy — would also help low-income families teetering on the brink of poverty.

Aside from government action, companies, particularly those benefiting from tax breaks, must raise pay in low-wage industries if we are to make an immediate and wide-scale effect on poverty. Government programs alone will fall short of the mark, and unions have shown they can work with business responsibly to bring low-wage workers out of poverty.

In Maryland, low-wage union workers make 15 percent more in wages than their nonunion counterparts and are 25 percent more likely to get employer-paid health care and a pension. But joining a union can be hard for many workers who fear employer retribution. Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would replace organizing elections with private ballots with publicly signed cards, would help low-wage workers join the union and get the raises they need.

We’ve long held to the notion that having a job means you can make ends meet. But unless steps are taken to address the growing imbalance in our economy, we could wake up one day in a city of just the very rich and the working poor.

Valarie Long is vice president of Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union. With more than 100,000 members, Local 32BJ SEIU is the largest private-sector union on the East Coast.