Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) today introduced the Rebuild America Act. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says the bill would "achieve shared prosperity by putting America back to work, rebuilding our infrastructure, repairing our safety net and insisting that shared sacrifice start at the top—with Wall Street and the wealthiest Americans."

Let’s say you’re earning the $7.25-an-hour minimum wage. How many hours would you have to work to equal what a year of college costs? How about a year of family health insurance premiums?

The Center for Economic and Policy Research has crunched the numbers and they’re not pretty.

Add another bad Arizona measure to the growing list of bills being dropped because of public outcry. Yesterday, after public pressure from Arizonans, extreme lawmakers in the House decided to kill a resolution that would have forced a ballot measure to repeal the state's minimum wage and hurt low-wage workers in the process.

The nearly 2 million home care workers—about 92 percent of whom are women—who take care of the elderly and people with disabilities often work 12-hour days and 60 to 70 hours a week. But they are seldom paid overtime and their net income is often less than the minimum wage. Unlike workers covered by federal labor laws, they are not paid for all the hours they are on the clock, witnesses told a U.S. House hearing Tuesday.

Surprising as it may sound, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney earlier this year said something that all of us in the progressive world—and in most worlds—agree with: It's time to raise the minimum wage and protect its value by indexing it against inflation. But....

Watch CBS Phoenix affiliate KPHO reporter Elizabeth Erwin reveal the utter lack of effort the GOP majority in the Arizona state Legislature has put forth to create jobs.

This is a cross- from Steve Cooper at the We Party Patriots blog.

As states like Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, and New York are looking to raise the minimum wage, they are meeting opposition from well-funded political groups who seek to increase corporate profit. Despite the swath of misinformation painting the minimum wage is a “job killer,” John Stoher of The American Prospect points out that the minimum wage is not even growing at the speed of inflation:

Donna Gratehouse, who blogs at Democratic Diva and elsewhere on all things Arizona, sends us this.

Raise your hand if you were supporting yourself and maybe helping to support your family when you were 18. I know I was, so I can’t fathom what the Arizona Legislature is thinking by putting forth a ballot referendum that would allow employers to pay workers under 20 years of age substantially less than the state’s minimum wage. Currently it is at $7.65 an hour but this recent measure, if approved by voters, would allow businesses to pay teens and young adults as little as $4.65 an hour.

This is a cross-post from Jared Bernstein’s blog, On the Economy. Bernstein is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) and, from 2009 to 2011, was the chief economist and economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden.

I’ve always thought the national minimum wage is a lot more important than most people tend to think. By definition, it sets a floor on the low end of the job market, though to their credit, many states now set their minimums above the federal level of $7.25 (Washington State clocks in at a cool $9.04). So it’s a floor, not a ceiling.

In response to protests by foreign students exploited in a factory subcontracted by the Hershey Company and advocacy by the AFL-CIO and our allies, this week the U.S. State Department announced that it will make major revisions to a guest-worker and cultural exchange visa program and barred participation by a major player in the program, the Council for Educational Travel, USA (CETUSA).