When Reggie Grier saw in his AFT e-Activist e-mail that some prominent senators were planning a rally Nov. 16 on Capitol Hill in support of raising the minimum wage, he knew he had to be there.

Reggie Grier (with hat) gets a front-row seat at the Senate rally on the minimum wage (see links below to video clip). Photo by Bill Burke/Page One.

The president of the AFT retiree chapter at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J., squeezed into the Senate chamber with dozens of other AFT members and community activists to cheer on Democratic Sens. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles Schumer of New York as they vowed to shift into high gear in January and raise the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour (see links below to video clip).

AFL-CIO president John Sweeney entrusted the senators with the job, noting that since members of Congress last raised the minimum wage a decade ago, they have given themselves nine pay raises, which is "nothing short of immoral" while the minimum wage bumps along at its lowest value in 51 years. "Brothers and sisters," Sweeney said, "it's time to bring everyone up."

[Add your voice to thousands of AFT members who have signed the petition urging congressional action on the minimum wage.]

"All of you have done your work," Kennedy told the crowd. "Now it is up to us to do ours." Singling out school paraprofessionals among the men and women who work hard at the most difficult jobs in America, he promised to restore fairness to the workforce: "Anyone who works 40 hours a week 52 weeks a year in the richest country in the world should not live in poverty."

Clinton said she's heard enough excuses about why Congress can't give America a raise. No minimum wage, no more congressional raises, she said. "Are we ready to let justice roll?" she asked. "We may not be tanned and rested, but we're ready. We've been working for this day, and now it's coming."

Like Clinton and Sweeney, the Rev. Paul Sherry, anti-poverty coordinator with the National Council of Churches and co-author of A Just Minimum Wage, called the current wage immoral. He said the Rev. Martin Luther King never would have believed it would be worth less now than it was in 1963.

"A job should keep you out of poverty, not keep you in it," he declared, and quoted the prophet Amos 5:24: "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."

AFT e-Activist Reggie Grier, a retired Army colonel and member of the AFT since 1980, said he'd advise the senators to "keep on truckin'."

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November 17, 2006