By Mark Bittman
New York Times, July 26, 2013

... a rapidly increasing number of food industry and other retail workers are now fighting for basic rights: halfway decent pay, a real work schedule, the right to organize, health care, paid sick days, vacations and respect. Next week, organizers say, we’ll see a walkout of thousands of workers at hundreds of stores in at least seven cities, including New York and Chicago. ...

They don’t have much else. Those making minimum wage ($7.25) and just above have less buying power than their peers did in the...

Business Record (Des Moines, IA), July 25, 2013

A nationwide coalition of small business owners is advocating an increase in the federal minimum wage as a route to building a stronger economy. At a press conference Wednesday in Washington, D.C., representatives with Business for a Fair Minimum Wage marked the fourth full year since the minimum wage was last increased. Adjusted for inflation, the current $7.25 per hour minimum wage is lower than it was in 1956 at $8.58, or in 1968 when its inflation-adjusted value was $10.74, the organization said.

Among the coalition's members...

Op-Ed By Jon Cooper
The Hill, July 24, 2013. Distributed by American Forum. Detroit News, Houston News group, New Jersey Today, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Fall River Herald News, many more 

As a business owner who runs a manufacturing company with 150 employees, I strongly support increasing the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at just $7.25 an hour since July 24, 2009. It will provide concrete benefits to businesses and will strengthen our overall economy.

Fair wages are part of the formula for success at my company, Spectronics Corporation, the world's leading manufacturer of...

Op-Ed By Jim Wellehan
Portland Press Herald, Maine Voices, July 24, 2013

Our tax base and social safety net would benefit, and investment in schools and infrastructure would rise.

AUBURN — Lamey-Wellehan, the shoe company my dad started in 1914, has grown over the years with longtime employees who enjoyed their job and lived a good life.
Their children were friends of mine growing up, and we were one community. We felt safe and welcome in each other's neighborhoods and homes. That is a culture worth preserving.

It's a culture that depends on people believing...

MSNBC All In With Chris Hayes, July 24, 2013

WATCH SHOW

Excerpt:

CHRIS HAYES: Joining me now is Lew Prince, co-owner of Vintage Vinyl in St. Louis. He met with Pres. Obama along with other small business owners last year. Shanita Simon Toussaint, a shift supervisor at a KFC in Brooklyn, New York and Dorian Warren, an assistant professor at Columbia University and specialist in labor law. Great to have you all here. 

Lew, the argument we hear coming from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce whenever minimum wage is on the table is, you`re going...

By W. Scott Bailey
San Antonio Business Journal, July 24, 2013 

Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, a national network of owners and executives, is calling on federal officials to raise the nation’s minimum wage to help strengthen the economy.

Backers of that plan say the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is lower than it was in 1956 at $8.58, when adjusted for inflation. As a result, current minimum-wage workers have less buying power than their counterparts did decades ago.

“We cannot build a strong economy with wages worth less than they...

By Dave Jamieson
Huffington Post, July 24, 2013

Workers toiling in low-wage jobs marked a dispiriting anniversary on Wednesday: It's now been four years since the last time the federal minimum wage was raised. ...

President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats have proposed raising the minimum wage and pegging it to inflation ...

A group of companies that back the Democratic proposal, called Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, launched a petition Wednesday for businesses to pledge their support for a raise.

… if Congress doesn't send Obama legislation to sign by the end...

By Diane Stafford
Kansas City Star, July 24, 2013

On a day when President Barack Obama spoke in favor of a higher minimum wage, a small group of worker advocates in Kansas City issued a similar call.

“We’re telling real people’s stories,” said the Rev. Donna Simon, pastor of St. Mark Hope & Peace Lutheran Church at 3800 Troost Ave. “Most people are surprised to hear about the difficulty of living on $15,000 a year.”

That’s about what a federal minimum-wage earner makes, working 40 hours a week for $7.25 an hour. That’s been the...

Star Democrat (MD), July 24, 2013

Business for a Fair Minimum Wage Monday said today, July 24, will mark four years without an increase in the federal minimum wage since it was set at $7.25 per hour in 2009.

Business for a Fair Minimum Wage supported the last increase in the minimum wage and believes another makes good business sense, a representative said. ...

Read more

Copyright 2013 Star Democrat

By Matt Murphy
State House News Service, July 24, 2013

While the House and Senate were busy Wednesday finalizing a tax-raising transportation funding bill, the makings of the next big debate on Beacon Hill were taking shape outside the State House walls. Advocates for a minimum wage increase gathered to announce their plans to push for a ballot question in 2014 to raise the minimum wage to $11 an hour if the Legislature doesn’t act before then, while the National Federation of Independent Business released a study predicting that such a wage hike by 2015 tied...

By James Dorn
Forbes, July 22, 2013 

... In marking the fourth anniversary of the last increase in the federal minimum wage, on July 24, 2009, a number of business owners and executives associated with Business for a Fair Minimum Wage are showing their support for another increase.  In a media advisory released on July 19, several members expressed the belief that “a fair minimum wage makes good business sense.”

Jon Cooper, who owns Spectronics Corporation, makes the following case for the minimum wage increase: “As owner of a manufacturing company with 150 employees, I know...

By Steve Jagler
Biz Times, June 26, 2013 

In the digital era, corporate brands can rise or fall in a heartbeat. However, one branding maxim seems to be holding true: Corporate brands start internally, and the ways employees are treated often have consequences in shaping that brand externally.

Case in point: The discount retail industry. Seattle-based Costco Wholesale Corp. pays its employees an average wage of $20.89 per hour and provides health care insurance benefits to 85 percent of its staff, according to a recent analysis by Bloomberg Businessweek. Costco employees pay premiums that amount...

By Clarence Page
Chicago Tribune, Syndicated, numerous papers, June 19, 2013

... In the nation's capital, the local Fast Food Forward protests have a special federal flavor, and it's aimed directly at the White House. They're urging President Barack Obama to sign an executive order that would require contractors in federal facilities to increase what they pay their employees.

Among the real people it would affect is Melissa Roseboro, who joined a strike in May from her job at the McDonald's in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. She works 35 hours a week, she told...

By Matt Murphy
State House News Service, June 11, 2013

Boston - Efforts to boost the minimum wage for the first time in five years drew huge crowds to the State House Tuesday where Senate President Therese Murray has given the issue a boost this year with her support for addressing the gap between a “living wage” and what minimum wage workers earn.

A hearing before the Joint Committee on Labor and Workforce Development, co-chaired by Sen. Daniel Wolf and Rep. Thomas Conroy, drew throngs of proponents and a smaller group of critics to Gardner...

New England Cable News (NECN), June 11, 2013

(NECN: Peter Howe, Boston) - After the company she was working for lost a special-needs driving contract with the MBTA, Patricia Federico of Weymouth, Mass., has been scraping by on a little more than $8 an hour working 21 hours a week at a cinema.

So her motivation for coming to the State House Tuesday to join hundreds lobbying for an increase in the state minimum wage was intensely personal.

"The immediate reason is, I desperately need the $11 an hour," Federico said in an interview outside...