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.

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.