Portside

As a home-care worker, Rosemarie Rumbley is on the front lines of the fight to provide quality health care to those who need help taking care of themselves — mostly people with disabilities and elderly men and women, like our parents or grandparents.

Because Rosemarie, 57, is a union member, she has health benefits and is paid more than many home-care workers. But she is still paid poverty-level wages — around $10 an hour despite 30 years of service — and sometimes has to juggle caring for two or three clients in a desperate attempt to make ends meet. For a woman her age, this is a grueling pace, but she needs to keep working to pay the rent, eat and survive.

These are the jobs of tomorrow: Home care is the fastest-growing job and health care is the fastest-growing industry in America. The men and women who care for the aging population need good, middle-class, family-sustaining jobs, rather than hopeless poverty traps.

That’s why, on April 15, Rosemarie and thousands of her colleagues will join low-wage workers from outpatient clinics, Rite Aid drugstores and other industries like fast food, airport passenger services and retail all across the country to demand a $15 minimum wage and the right to join a union. The Fight for $15 has grown from a November 2012 strike by 200 fast-food workers in New York City to a global movement spanning many industries — and it is getting bigger every day.

Why? Because the public knows that a higher minimum wage is necessary to close the widening inequality gap where the rich get richer and the rest of us either tread water or drown.

A January report from the Economic Policy Institute found that from 2009 to 2012 — the first three years after the Great Recession — the average income for the top 1% grew 36.8%, while the average income for the rest of us fell 0.4%. That means Wall Streeters, hedge funders and other billionaires are pulling in even more money while the people who cook their food, clean their airports or care for the sick and elderly continue to struggle to support themselves and their families.

At the same time, worker productivity has soared, while wages have barely moved. The EPI says that between 1973 and 2013, worker productivity grew 74.4%, while hourly compensation rose just 9.2%. And it’s getting worse: The EPI found that since 2000, productivity was up 23%, while wages stayed pretty much flat.

Wage stagnation and income inequality destabilizes our economy and our democracy. Our economy is growing, but only people in the top 1% are benefiting from it. We must get back on the right path again, back to the days when the middle-class was strong, when union membership was high and before “income inequality” and “the tale of two cities” became rallying cries for millions of low-wage workers across America.

We need to renew the social contract that if you work hard in America, you should be able to live with dignity and provide a better future for your children. Hard work needs to count for something again.

Raising the income floor will not only lift many low-wage workers out of poverty, but will also help address the inequality gap and further spur our economy. This is a moral obligation. We simply cannot allow people like Rosemarie to work hard, sometimes doing two or three jobs, while remaining mired in poverty.

In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said it was “criminal” to have an economy where people worked full-time for part-time wages. Sadly, the same holds true today.

I urge you to join Rosemarie, myself and the tens of thousands of others in the streets in New York City and across the country on April 15 to fight for an economy that works for all of us.

George Gresham is president of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, which represents over 400,000 healthcare workers and is the largest local union in the U.S.