In the run-up to the inaugural, President-elect Obama said he would continue the practice, whatever its origins. But several atheist groups filed a suit to remove the words from the oath on the grounds that it violates the separation of church and state. They were also joined by prominent atheist and activist Michael Newdow, who lost a […]

David Neumark is an economics professor at the University of California, Irvine. Neumark co-authored a July 2005 analysis called “A Decade of Living Wages: What Have We Learned?” That report concludes that living-wage laws have increased salaries of the lowest-wage earners, but there have been some adverse effects too, and more policy changes are needed to […]

Rabbi Jonathan Klein is executive director of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, an interfaith group from the Los Angeles area that advocates on behalf of the working poor.

David Card is a professor of economics in the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California at Berkeley. He and a colleague, Alan B. Krueger, did research on the impact of an increase in the minimum wage in New Jersey on fast-food restaurants. They found that a small increase in the minimum wage did […]

David Coss is mayor of Santa Fe, N.M. He supported Santa Fe’s much-debated living wage legislation.

David Reynolds is a labor program specialist with the Wayne State University Labor Studies Center in Detroit. He has conducted several studies on living-wage laws and campaigns.

Aaron Yelowitz is an associate professor of economics at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. He has written about unintended consequences of living-wage legislation – saying, for example, that paying higher wages can lead to the loss of other benefits for low-income families – and testified as an expert witness in 2004 regarding living-wage legislation in […]

William P. Quigley is a law professor and director of the Law Clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University New Orleans. He is the author of Ending Poverty as We Know It: Guaranteeing a Right to a Job at a Living Wage.

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.