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.

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.