The Federal Department of Labor is suggesting we should eliminate the minimum wage requirement for home health care workers, a testing ground to see if they can get away with eliminating minimum wage requirements for everyone.

A recent news story I read indicated that Michigan workers need to earn $25 per hour in order to afford rent. Currently, the minimum wage in Michigan is $12.48 an hour and Delta County is in the middle of a housing crisis.

History makes it clear that paying employees a living wage improves our economy. It reduces the number of people who must rely upon programs like Medicaid and SNAP, thus removing the overall cost to taxpayers for these programs. It increases the revenue the government collects in income tax. It also increases the amount of money everyday people can spend, as evidenced by the “stimulus checks” our government has sent out in the past in to “stimulate” the economy.

Before we had unions, middle class America was almost non-existent. You had the wealthy business owners, and you had the low-income laborers who worked on our farms, in our factories, in our lumber mills, and in our mines. They were deliberately kept poor, allowing the rich to become richer. It was, in a very real sense, a form of slavery, as workers were often forced to live in company-owned homes and buy goods from company-owned stores.

When the people finally rose up, formed unions and fought back, the middle class was born. The birth of the middle class created an economic boom the likes of which our country had never seen before. However, the middle class has been shrinking since the 1970s. Meanwhile, our federal deficit has gone from billions of dollars to trillions of dollars, with no end in sight for the ongoing increases.

The people earning minimum wages are also the very same people our government called essential workers during the pandemic shutdown. They were the ones ensuring our grocery shelves were stocked and our elderly and sick were cared for. Yet they are the lowest paid and most frequently disrespected workers in our country.

Meanwhile, the companies that own them make billions of dollars in profits every year and their CEOs make millions of dollars in compensation. For example, McDonald’s net profit for the first quarter of 2025 was just shy of $2 billion and Walmart’s net profit for 2024 was over $16 billion. Greed is the only thing stopping these companies from paying a living wage. And what would you do, if the minimum wage workers banded together and walked out on their jobs? Who would care for our elderly parent or grandparent in the nursing home? Who would ensure the grocery store shelves were stocked with the food you need?

It is long past time we showed these essential workers the respect they deserve and pay them a living wage!