Endorsing Proposition B
The Peace and Justice Commission of the St. Louis Archdiocese announced its official endorsement of Proposition B, the Missouri statewide ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2023.“ As stated in this year’s Labor Day Statement from the USCCB, ‘Just Wages and Human Flourishing,’ the Church’s traditional teaching holds that wages must honor a person’s dignity and ability to contribute to the common good of civil society and family well-being. Every worker has a right to a just wage according to the criterion of justice, which St. John XXIII described as wages that give the worker and his family a standard of living in keeping with dignity of the human person,” stated Marie Kenyon, director of the Peace and Justice Commission. “Missouri’s current minimum wage is too low to honor this teaching. We have thousands of our sisters and brothers across the state working hard to raise their families, but still living in poverty. We must do better. We must raise the minimum wage.” Missouri’s minimum wage is currently $7.85 an hour — which translates to earnings of just $314 a week, or barely $16,000 a year before taxes
