On Friday, Oprah Winfrey dedicated her national talk show to the issue of minimum wage, focusing on the plight of workers and families who face great difficulties merely subsisting on such low pay. The federal minimum wage has been locked in at $5.15/hour for the past nine years.
The show’s panel featured Morgan Spurlock, director of Super Size Me and the TV series 30 Days, Morgan’s fiancee Alex Jamieson, and Beth Shulman, the former vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.
Among the highlights of the show was this exchange between the panelists. Watch it:
WINFREY: It’s a real tragedy. I think you’re absolutely right. This is what people need to know. This is why New Orleans happened. This is why it happened, because you have people who were working — service people — minimum wage jobs. Working people who didn’t have the resources to go anywhere. That’s the point. That’s the point.
SHULMAN: Absolutely. And Katrina can be “” is every city in the United States.
WINFREY: Yes, yes.
SHULMAN: Every city. And we can make different choices that ensure that the American dream is a reality for all these millions of Americans.
WINFREY: And so what should we be doing?
SHULMAN: First, we need to raise the minimum wage. As you said, Oprah, the minimum wage is at $5.15 an hour.
WINFREY: That’s so crazy.
SHULMAN: You can’t go to the store and buy a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk for that, let alone take care of your family.
This November, several states will get the chance to vote to raise their minimum wage, including Arizona, California, Montana, Nevada, and Ohio. More info at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center.
UPDATE: More from the Notion.
A full transcript of the segment is below:
WINFREY: Beth Shulman is the former Vice President of the United Food and Commercial Workers union. She is the author of the book “The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans.” We were just saying when you came to sit here it makes you cry. I was saying, yeah it makes me cry, but I think it should make us want to do something. We should stop crying about it and do something about it.
SHULMAN: Absolutely. The real tragedy — [applause]
WINFREY: It’s a real tragedy. I think you’re absolutely right. This is what people need to know. This is why New Orleans happened. This is why it happened, because you have people who were working — service people — minimum wage jobs. Working people who didn’t have the resources to go anywhere. That’s the point. That’s the point.
SHULMAN: Absolutely. And Katrina can be — is every city in the United States.
WINFREY: Yes, yes.
SHULMAN: Every city. And we can make different choices that ensure that the American dream is a reality for all these millions of Americans.
WINFREY: And so what should we be doing?
SHULMAN: First, we need to raise the minimum wage. As you said, Oprah, the minimum wage is at $5.15 an hour.
WINFREY: That’s so crazy.
SHULMAN: You can’t go to the store and buy a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk for that, let alone take care of your family. So we need to raise it. In states even here in Illinois, they have raised it above the federal level.
WINFREY: But this is amazing to me. I don’t know. Maybe y’all can speak to this, Morgan and Alex. You have 30 million people who are living on minimum wage. Why wouldn’t this be a priority? Why wouldn’t this be a priority in government if you’ve got 30 million potential voters who are living on minimum wage?
SHULMAN: Well, Americans really support a raise in the minimum wage, and there are campaigns across America in states like Michigan and Ohio and Arizona.
SPURLOCK: It’s the corporations that don’t support a raise in the minimum wage.
WINFREY: Yeah.
SHULMAN: But Americans do, and that’s who we should speak for is Americans. So everyone here can go out and support the minimum wage hike.
WINFREY: How?
SHULMAN: Write your congressman and senator and say it’s time to have a raise in the minimum wage.
WINFREY: But even if you raise the minimum wage, as was so — as we saw in Morgan’s piece, even if you raise the minimum wage and so you’re making $7 an hour, that still is not enough.
SHULMAN: Absolutely.
WINFREY: There seems to me to be a lack of — so the positions that you value the most as we’re saying for paramedics and teachers’ aides, people who are with your children, people who are in the hospital with your family, that there is no value placed on them. That seems to be askew.
SHULMAN: That is the disconnect because these are the jobs that are the most essential jobs to our lives, like teachers’ aides and emergency techs and nursing home workers and childcare workers. These are central to all of our lives. Yet they are the ones that can’t make it. One of the things we can do is ensure that every American has health insurance. We have seen in every one of these stories people not having health insurance and then ending up in huge debt.
WINFREY: In your case, you can’t have anything go wrong.
SHULMAN: Absolutely.
SPURLOCK: And the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States isn’t credit cards. It’s health care.