The forum will begin at 7 p.m. Monday in the City Hall Council Chambers, according to a press release for the event.
The event is free and open to the public.
Joseph Varga, a professor of Labor Studies at IU, will speak at the forum.
“We would ideally like to see people with questions about low-wage work attend, as well as workers earning low wages,” Varga said in an email. “We would also like to see policy makers and representatives from local and state government.”
Mark Stoops, D-Bloomington and Jessica Fraser, the program manager at the Indiana Institute for Working Families, will also speak at the forum.
In April, Senate democrats introduced the Raise the Wage Act, which would gradually increase the federal minimum wage to $12 per hour by 2020.
The proposal would also eventually eliminate sub-minimum tipped wage afforded to restaurant servers and other service industry workers.
The Raise the Wage forum actually advocates more than doubling the minimum wage to $15 per hour, according to the press release.
Varga said in the email that an increase in the federal minimum wage to either $12 or $15 per hour would be beneficial to anyone making less than that amount in their current job.
Workers in service fields such as restaurants, hotels and retail are the obvious beneficiaries of a wage gap, Varga said, but workers in manufacturing, transport, lawn care and construction would also see their wages rise.
“According to the Economic Policy Institute, a $12 minimum wage would affect 35 million workers,” Varga said. “Any raise in the minimum wage also tends to drive up all wages. The $15 figure is based on careful studies that show that amount, based on 30 plus hours of work per week, is the bare minimum needed for single wage earning families to live decently in most major metropolitan areas.”
Varga said some cities have already begun increasing their minimum wage to $15 over a three-to-five year period.
He said the forum will also discuss worker organization — specifically, the ability to bargain collectively for better working conditions and wages based on local living costs and industries.
“While most of us (the organizers of the event) see raising the minimum wage as important, we would also like to see, and even prefer, if workers had the ability to bargain for higher wages through workplace organizations,” Varga said.
Varga said the two groups that sponsored the forum, South Central Indiana Jobs with Justice and Bloomington Moral Mondays, try to improve work conditions for low-wage laborers.
“So while we would be happy to answer questions and concerns from people interested in the issue, the forum is being organized to build a powerful coalition of citizens who can advance the cause of low wage workers,” Varga said. “We would like attendees to leave the forum with ideas about how to organize to aid low wage workers in achieving better conditions, and for workers themselves to have ideas about how to organize and assert power in the workplace.”
