Richard Wolff on Raising the U.S. Minimum Wage

Economist Richard Wolff explains how the current minimum wage offers less advantage for workers than it did decades ago, and how an increase would benefit not only low-wage employees, but the overall American economy.

“You’ve taken the folks at the bottom — the people who work hard, full-time jobs — and you’ve made their economic condition worse over a 50-year period, while wealth has accumulated at the top,” Wolff tells Bill. “What kind of a society does this?”

A professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, and currently visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School, Wolff has written many books on the effects of rampant capitalism, including Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It.

Watch the full conversation between Wolff and Bill Moyers on this weekend’s Moyers & Company.