Jeanette Smith is executive director of South Florida Interfaith Worker Justice. This coalition of clergy and lay leaders has worked to raise the minimum wage and to tie it to the rate of inflation.

Peter Arcidiacono is an assistant professor of economics at Duke University in Durham, N.C. Arcidiacono is the co-author of a 2004 study that concluded that increasing the minimum wage would decrease a worker’s chances of finding employment.

The Rev. Sandra L. Strauss, a Presbyterian minister, is director of public advocacy for the Pennsylvania Council of Churches. The council worked to build support for the state’s minimum-wage law, which involved a tiered series of increases.

Sara Niccoli is a program representative at the New York State Nurses Association, with experience in nonprofit management and policy advocacy dedicated to improving quality of life for working people. She is a former executive director of the New York State Labor-Religion Coalition.

Sheila D. Collins is a political science professor and director of the Master’s Program in Public Policy and International Affairs at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J. She is a co-founder of the National Jobs for All Coalition and author of Let Them Eat Ketchup: The Politics of Poverty and Inequality. Read a 2005 interview with Collins, in which she […]

Robert Pollin is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and co-director of the university’s Political Economy Research Institute. He is co-author of The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy. Read a June 2003 paper he wrote evaluating the impact of living-wage policies in a number of U.S. cities.

Richard B. Freeman is the Herbert S. Ascherman professor of economics at Harvard University in Cambridge. He also directs the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Freeman has written that research shows that increasing the minimum wages has little or no effect on the number of jobs available.

Kenneth A. Couch is an associate professor of economics at the University of Connecticut. He has done research showing that increasing the minimum wage reduces the employment of some of the most vulnerable categories of workers, including teenagers and adults who lack a high school degree.

Rabbi Michael Namath is program director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. The Religious Action Center is the Washington, D.C., office of the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism, a joint office of the Union for Reform Judaism (representing 900 congregations with 1.5 million Reform Jews) and the Central Conference of American Rabbis, whose […]