You can find commercials, products and meetings sponsored by Weight Watchers all across American popular culture and the program can inspire strong devotion from its participants and employees. Helping people lose weight and become more healthy is a laudable goal that many people dedicate their lives to. But Weight Watchers is the target of numerous complaints that it underpays its employees and fails to pay them for many of the hours they work.

New York's minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. For food service workers who rely on tips, that amount is only $5.00. In some states, tipped workers make as little as $2.13 an hour. Check out this new video from New York City food service workers and members of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC-NY) who're raising awareness that the minimum wage needs to be raised.

Here's a look at some of the key battles in the states over the past week.

If New Hampshire’s lawmakers are “serious about encouraging New Hampshire's economic development, they will consider re-establishing the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation,” writes New Hampshire AFL-CIO President Mark MacKenzie in a column on SeaCoastOnline, a website for several state newspapers. 

In 2011, Republican legislators repealed the state’s minimum wage law. Rep. Carol McGuire (R) went so far as to suggest that there should be no wage floor at all and if an employer wanted to pay $5 an hour that was just fine with her.

At one time it was an economic tenet for America's worker: Work smarter, better, faster and harder and you’ll reap the rewards. That’s exactly what America's workers have done for the past four decades plus. But while worker productivity has soared, workers’ wages have been tightly tethered to the ground. So much that economist Dean Baker writes:

If the minimum wage had risen in step with productivity growth [since 1968], it would be over $16.50 an hour today. That is higher than the hourly wages earned by 40 percent of men and half of women. 

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Obama proposed raising the minimum wage to $9 per hour and indexing the wage to increases in the cost of living.

Here is an idea the House Majority Leader Eric Cantor needs to consider if he wants Republicans to stand up for the struggling American worker: Raise the minimum wage. The American Conservative published an intriguing piece by Ron Unz back in November advocating a minimum wage of $12. Cantor would be helped by reading it. In the article, Unz lays out why conservatives should favor such a move. Unz includes many arguments normally associated with “liberal” pundits about the direction of the American labor market and the type of jobs being created during this century—mostly low wage. And, he accurately argues why raising the minimum wage would not really effect America’s global competitiveness. He even points out how WalMart lobbied for the most recent increase of the federal minimum wage back in 2005 because it would boost the earnings of its customer base.

Here's a look at some of the key battles in the states from the past week.

Tomorrow, western New Yorkers will take a bus from Buffalo to Albany to call on the state's leaders to raise the minimum wage. 

At $7.25 per hour, New York's minimum wage remains decades out of date.
 A full-time minimum wage worker earns just $15,080 per year in New York—far less than what is needed to afford the state's high cost of living. 

Current and former employees of Flat Rate Movers and Mystique clothing stores received good news yesterday. New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman announced these 400 workers will receive restitution funds for unpaid overtime and minimum wage violations. The 306 current and former employees of Flat Rate Movers, a multistate moving and storage company with headquarters in New York City, are being paid $1.13 million. Approximately 100 employees of Mystique in New York City have also begun receiving restitution as part of a $950,000 settlement.