The real minimum wage has fallen 53% since 1968
Inflation always hurts the working class — both those employed and unemployed — the worst. The war on Iran has caused the cost of gasoline to jump 50%.
Not everyone has a car or truck, but everybody has to eat. Over the past year, from April 2025 to April 2026, the price of ground beef has gone up nearly 15%.
Coffee rose by 18.5%. The price of fresh vegetables increased by 11.5% while tomatoes cost almost 40% more than a year ago.
Worse may be coming. The war has cut off much of the natural gas that’s used as a feedstock in nitrogen-based fertilizers. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is warning that a worldwide food price crisis could erupt in six months.
In 2025, the World Food Program estimated 720 million people suffered “chronic hunger.” That’s twice the population of the United States.
Trump and Netanyahu are starving Palestinians. One out of five children in Gaza City suffers from severe malnutrition.
There’s also hunger in the United States. More than 50 million people in the country depend on food pantries. Millions of workers who can’t afford to shop at supermarkets anymore depend on 99-cent stores instead.
Falling wages create billionaires
Meanwhile, the purchasing power of the federal minimum wage — what it can actually buy — has fallen 53% since 1968.
The Black liberation movement drove the labor movement forward in the 1960s. As chair of the House Education and Labor Committee, Harlem congressperson Adam Clayton Powell Jr. pushed to have those employed in service industries — like hospitals and laundries — covered by minimum wage laws.
On Feb. 1, 1968, the federal minimum wage was raised to $1.60 per hour. That was a poverty wage back then but to equal its buying power, you would need $15.58 per hour in April, 2026.
Yet the federal minimum wage has been frozen at $7.25 per hour since 2009. That means minimum wage workers are cheated $8.33 every hour or $333 per 40-hour week.
If the poorly-paid employee was able to work 52 40-hour weeks, that amounts to annual wage theft of $17,326.40. That’s criminal.
This goes hand-in-hand with wages and salaries falling from almost 65% of the total economy in 1970 to just 56.8% in 2023.
No wonder the number of U.S. billionaires skyrocketed to 924. They’re able to steal more. Their total stash amounts to at least $6.9 trillion.
That represents more than $20,000 for every person living in the United States. It’s important to remember that at least half of this loot is stolen from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America. It’s reparations money.
- Philip Randolph wanted a $21.70 minimum wage
When the corporate media recounts the historic Aug. 28, 1963, March for Jobs and Freedom — where Dr. King gave his “I have a dream” speech — it almost never mentions the 10 demands of the march.
Demand No. 8 was “a national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living. (Government surveys show that anything less than $2.00 an hour fails to do this.)”
The U.S. Department of Labor determined this $2 per hour figure to be a rock-bottom minimum.
Two dollars an hour in 1963 is worth $21.70 in April, 2026. That’s three times what the current federal minimum wage is.
Philip Randolph, the longtime president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, championed the minimum wage demand. He was the director of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with Bayard Rustin as his deputy.
Randolph led the March on Washington movement in the 1940s that forced President Franklin Roosevelt to establish the Fair Employment Practice Committee. It opened up jobs for Black workers.
Some states have established minimum wages above the federal level. Twenty states — including Indiana, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin — haven’t.
The minimum wage in New York City is $17 per hour. That still won’t pay for housing in a city where the cheapest one-bedroom apartment goes for $2,000 per month.
In California, the minimum wage for fast food workers in national chains like McDonald’s is $20 per hour. But McDonald’s employees in Denmark get at least $22 per hour and are guaranteed six weeks of paid vacation per year.
That’s because these Danish fast food workers are union members. The labor movement needs to organize fast food workers coast-to-coast.
A real living wage is much higher than these figures. Experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have determined two working adults living in Manhattan (New York), with two children each, need a minimum hourly wage of $40.61.
Winning that is no more impossible than gaining an eight-hour work day and a five-day week for most workers. We have to intensify the people’s struggle on all fronts.
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