On Feb. 26, just weeks after a new Bush administration took power, over 450 leaders of the Catholic peace and justice community, Call To Action’s Dan Daley and Claire Noonan Bates among them, assembled in Washington for the annual Social Ministry Gathering. “We come to a new Congress and new Administration with an old mission — to speak for the voiceless, to defend the needy, to build community, to protect the earth and to build peace. We bring to these new leaders an old message — the moral measure of our society is how ‘the least among us’ are faring.” With that, John Carr, Secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference (USCC) Office of Social Development and World Peace, dispatched the assembly to Capitol Hill for Congressional lobbying on several priority issues, including these:
Minimum wage hike
Now at $5.15 an hour, the minimum wage has not been increased since 1997, and its real buying power stands 30 percent below its 1968 peak. Half of the country’s 11.9 million minimum wage workers live in households with annual incomes of below $25,000 a year, and 18 percent survive on less than $10,000 a year. An increase in the minimum wage would benefit 83 percent of female-headed households, especially those who have been eliminated from the welfare roles. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Rep. David Bonior (D-MI) have introduced identical bills in the Senate and House (S. 277 & H.R. 665) which would raise the minimum wage to $5.75 within 30 days of passage, and then boost it to $6.25 in 2002 and $6.65 in 2003. The Senate bill is expected to reach the floor in early June. Check NETWORK’s Legislative Action Center (right, this page) for current developments.
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| Overseas development aid as a percentage of gross national product (1999). Among 22 industrialized nations, the U.S. was the least generous donor. |
Debt relief and development aid
Last year an international coalition organized around canceling the debt of some of the world’s poorest nations won a major victory when the U.S. appropriated $435 million for debt relief. An additional $375 million is needed over the next two fiscal years to satisfy the international debt relief agreement the U.S. signed in Cologne. The USCC and other advocacy groups like Bread for the World are trying to use the victory on debt relief to focus the U.S. foreign aid strategy on poverty relief. Currently, the U.S. allocates only 0.1 percent of Gross National Product to overseas development aid. That is the lowest of all industrialized nations, and far short of the United Nations 0.7 percent target (graph above). Furthermore, only 55 percent of that total is directed at poverty relief. The rest is allocated for strategic purposes. A major priority for the justice community is to secure $1 billion in increased development and education assistance for sub-Saharan Africa. In early May, Reps. Jim Leach (R-IA) and Donald Payne (D-NJ) introduced H. Con. Res. 102 to that end. See Bread for the World’s “Africa: Hunger to Harvest” resources (right, this page) for the latest developments on the bill.
End the embargo against Cuba
The U.S. Catholic bishops, in solidarity with the Cuban bishops and the suffering people of Cuba, have never supported the embargo. They argue that the principal effect of the embargo has been to strengthen Castro’s control, while simultaneously exacerbating the poverty of the Cuban people through food and health care deprivation. Support for lifting the embargo is growing in Congress, with a bipartisan majority seeking to end some of the restrictions affecting travel and the sale of food and medicines to Cuba. More information about the sanctions and the USCC position can be found on the bishops’ website: www.nccbuscc.org/sdwp/international/econsancback.htm