Introduction to Living Wages

Also see 'Labor Rights & News'

In 2007, Progressive Maryland lobbied hard and succeeded in passing the nation's first statewide living wage law. The new law shows that Maryland is serious about rewarding work and helping families, and sets the example for more states and Congress to do the same. This law strengthens the ladder for tens of thousands of families living in poverty to climb into the middle class. In the 2006 election, Maryland's voters endorsed just such action.

Progressive Maryland has been fighting to pass legislation to give working families a raise from our very founding. In the last five years, Progressive Maryland has:

The new law requires large for-profit state service contractors to pay their workers enough to make a decent living and feed their families without Food Stamps. In urban counties the rate is a modest $11.30/hour ($23,500/year), and $8.50/hour in rural counties, for full-time work. The principles that living wage laws rely on are the following:

As taxpayers, we have a say in where our money goes: we should be creating living wage, not poverty wage, jobs with our tax dollars.
Any company that receives a contract with a city, county, or the state of Maryland should be providing good, living wage, jobs for Marylanders.
Instead of paying Maryland workers poverty wages and forcing them to rely on state programs in order to make ends meet, we should pay them a wage that reflects the cost of living and the value of their labor.
No one who works full time should have to live in poverty.

PM will continue to fight to raise wages so we have healthy families in Maryland and a permanently expanding middle class.

Also see 'Labor Rights & News'

A union worker holds up a sign supporting a Living Wage.

A man holding a small child wears a sticker reading

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The Maryland Progressive

Quote of the Month

"The America over which FDR presided was home to mass organizations of the unemployed; farmers' groups that blocked foreclosures, sometimes at gunpoint; general strikes that shut down entire cities, and militant new unions that seized factories. Both communists and democratic socialists were enough of a presence in America to help shape these movements, generating so much street heat in so many congressional districts that Democrats were compelled to look leftward as they crafted their response to the Depression.

During Lyndon Johnson's presidency, the civil rights movement, among whose leaders were such avowed democratic socialists as Martin Luther King Jr. and James Farmer, provided a new generation of street heat that both compelled and abetted the president and Congress to enact fundamental reforms... In America, major liberal reforms require not just liberal governments, but autonomous, vibrant mass movements, usually led by activists who stand at or beyond liberalism's left fringe. No such movements were around during Carter and Clinton's presidencies... It might well be too little too late, but without left pressure from below, the Obama presidency will end up looking more like Carter's or Clinton's than Roosevelt's or Johnson's."

- Harold Meyerson, Wash. Post Jan. 8; Without a Movement, Progressives Can't Aid Obama's Agenda

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