(photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
This week on CounterSpin: It’s not clear where the fight to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour stands in Congress right now, but while politicians do what they need to do, no one’s forcing news media to drown out discussion of the economic and historical sense, the simple rightness of lifting the wage, in smaller-bore talk about current political “feasibility.” Polls show wide public support, across party lines, so it’s only elite media forcing the idea that those opposing this overdue move are “moderate.” While a federal minimum wage increase would affect millions of workers and the social fabric, it would have particular impact on one “essential” yet somehow expendable group: Black women. We’ll talk about that with economist Michelle Holder, associate professor of economics at John Jay College/City University of New York, and author of the report The Double Gap and the Bottom Line: African-American Women’s Wage Gap and Corporate Profits.
Watts Labor Community Action Committee, 1965
Also on the show: The fact that news media can even host a debate around just how poor it’s OK to let a person be who works a full-time job in a wealthy country is a sign of the perverse nature of media’s storytelling on poverty. But media also distort the history of responses to poverty in this country, which has always included recognition that it’s about power, and not just money. We talked about some of this crucial but scarcely discussed history a few years back with Alice O’Connor, professor of History at University of California/Santa Barbara, director of UCSB’s Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality and Democracy, and author of, among other titles, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in 20th Century US History. We’ll hear some of that conversation today.
