The Black American Party advances the producer class of the Black American community — through ownership, enterprise, constitutional principle, and economic solidarity. What is good for Black Americans is good for all Americans.
The party supports a living minimum wage for all laborers - and treats it as a floor beneath the ownership agenda, not a substitute for it.
The Black American Party supports a living minimum wage for all laborers. Not a symbolic increase and not an indexed adjustment to a number that stopped meaning anything - a wage a working adult can actually live on.
The federal minimum wage has been 7.25 dollars an hour since July 2009. Everything a person buys with it - rent, food, insurance, transport, childcare - has moved considerably since then. The wage floor has therefore fallen every single year for well over a decade without a single vote being taken, which is a convenient arrangement for everyone except the person standing at the register.
Black American workers are concentrated in exactly the occupations where that floor is the operative wage: care work, food service, retail, warehousing, sanitation, hospitality. When the floor stops functioning, it stops functioning on us first and most.
A minimum wage that does not support a household is not a wage floor. It is a public subsidy to the employer, paid by the taxpayer through the food and housing assistance that a full-time worker should not need. The firm books the profit and the public covers the shortfall.
This party regards that arrangement as a transfer running in the wrong direction, and it is worth noticing that a genuine living wage would reduce public assistance rolls rather than expand them. The welfare chapter and this one are arguing the same point from two sides.
This platform argues at length that the objective is ownership rather than receipt, and someone will read that as an argument against wage policy. It is not.
Nobody accumulates capital from a wage that does not cover the month. There is no saving, no down payment, no seed capital and no risk-taking from a position of total exposure - and every business this party wants Black Americans to start has to be funded by someone who had something left over. A living wage is the precondition for the ownership agenda, not its competitor.
It also matters on the other side of the counter. Black-owned firms sell overwhelmingly into Black American communities. A community that cannot pay cannot buy, and thin margins in our commercial districts are downstream of thin wages in our households.
This party's own constituency includes people who sign paychecks and for whom a wage increase is not an abstraction. That is a real tension and we will not pretend it away.
The answer is not to make the wage the small firm's problem alone. It is the rest of this platform: capital on terms a Black American firm can actually meet, procurement and contracts that produce revenue rather than sympathy, and circulation that keeps the dollar in the district long enough to be earned twice. A firm with real revenue can pay a real wage. A firm kept undercapitalized on purpose cannot, and it is undercapitalization we should be angry about.
The party has not named a figure, a phase-in schedule, a regional adjustment method, or a position on the tipped credit. A living wage is necessarily a local calculation, and the party will state its formula when the work supports it rather than picking a round number that polls well.
The Black American Party supports a living minimum wage for all laborers - a wage a working adult can actually live on, not a symbolic increase.
It has been 7.25 dollars an hour since July 2009 while costs rose, and Black American workers are concentrated in the occupations where that floor is the operative wage.
Yes. When a full-time worker still needs food and housing assistance, the firm books the profit and the public covers the shortfall - a transfer running in the wrong direction.
No. Nobody accumulates capital from a wage that does not cover the month. A living wage is the precondition for saving, seed capital and risk-taking.
The answer is capital on meetable terms, procurement revenue and dollar circulation. A firm with real revenue can pay a real wage; the problem to be angry about is deliberate undercapitalization.
Every community teaches through its symbols. Ours are largely being chosen for us.
There is a difference between art that depicts a community's problems and an industry that manufactures them for sale.
We are the most valuable talent pool in global entertainment and among the least represented in its ownership.
The most commercially successful degrading portrayal of Black Americans in history is one we perform ourselves.
The same pattern as entertainment, with shorter careers and worse advice.
A community that treats intelligence as suspect has agreed to lose.
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