Monday, April 21, 2008
Students from the School of Social Welfare passed out peanuts and information on Wescoe Beach to raise awareness of Kansas’ minimum wage Friday.
The project, referred to as “Current-See,” is an effort to educate Kansans about the state’s minimum wage, which is $2.65 an hour and the lowest in the United States. The federal minimum wage is $5.85 an hour.
Contributed Photo
Students and faculty trace their hands and place their signatures inside them as part of a petition against Kansas state minimum wage. The current wage, $2.65 an hour, is the lowest in the country, and hasnt changed since 1988.
The group of students, who took on the task as a project for their “Social Policy and Program Analysis” class, also collected handprints and signatures as part of a petition for Kansas legislators.
“It’s more of an impact petition,” said Shelly Schloer, Leavenworth senior.
Schloer said that during the semester her group had followed Kansas Senate Bill 466, which attempted to raise the state minimum wage to $7.25 an hour by August 2009.
“We even went to legislature day and watched it get shot down,” Schloer said.
Rupaleem Bhuyan, assistant professor of social welfare, said that the class and its projects gave students a good look at how social welfare works.
“The purpose of the class is to learn hands-on how social workers can have an influence on social policy,” Bhuyan said.
Bhuyan said other projects in her class this semester concerned sexual violence, autism and immigration. She also said that a couple years ago, students in a previous section of the class earned national recognition for their influence on state legislature in getting a bill passed.
Bhuyan said Current-See’s work could help raise more public awareness about the state’s minimum wage and pressure state legislators into raising it. She said she felt that a lack of public knowledge on the subject hurt Senate Bill 466.
Wichita senior Elise Seely said the group was working closely with “Raise the Wage, Kansas,” a group lobbying to get Kansas’ minimum wage raised to the federal minimum wage.
“They’re actually going to take our petition and use it as part of their way to raise the minimum wage in different cities in Kansas and then hopefully in the capital,” Seely said.
The information the group passed out with the peanuts included a look at the struggle for a single parent on Kansas minimum wage to provide for her and an infant. The group estimated that the parent would have to work 19 hours per week to afford basic necessities, including food, diapers, baby formula and toilet paper. The parent would still have to find a way to afford rent, transportation and utilities.
Kansas law requires all employers whose businesses produce interstate commerce to pay employees at least the federal minimum wage. The Kansas Department of Labor estimates that at least 17,000 Kansans work for less than the federal minimum wage.
— Edited by Matt Hirschfeld
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