Life at America's bottom wage
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As he sought a new life, he credits God and Tina with helping him forward. The church here has also been a haven of support.
The gathering on this night is not for formal worship but for a mix of activities. Mrs. Hosier settles in for some games of Bingo. As John heads to a vending machine and treats the family to drinks, a friend hands Tina a little gift. It's a typical-looking mug, but it makes her smile when it turns out to be a music box, too.
Meanwhile, Donald has joined some older children throwing a football in the parking lot. Other youngsters are dressed as angels, rehearsing a play to be performed on Sunday.
The Salvation Army is the core of this family's world. They don't have a car, but live within walking distance of both the church and the store where John works.
The store is a source not only of a paycheck, but also of used goods available at deep discounts.
The family also gets substantial government aid, for everything from clothing to food and healthcare. But paying their bills is a stretch, the Hosiers say.
Rent is $400 a month for their modest, yellow-sided home. They've lived there just a few months, so they're still figuring out how much to budget for utilities. And medical costs add up each month.
Donald takes medicines to cope with hyperactivity, and Hosier lists a range of ailments of his own, from asthma to an ulcer.
The state's Medicaid program covers many of these health costs, but the medications all require small monthly copayments that add up, John says.
"It's hard on a small income," he says. "You've got to get out and hustle and bustle to make a living."
When they need to go on an errand, the Hosiers rely on a Volunteers of America van, or ride with friends and relatives.
Life without a car
Mrs. Hosier says they'd like to get a car of their own, but that remains a far-off goal.
Their discretionary spending, for now, is on smaller items: some music CDs and for Donald on his birthday a toy truck and Spiderman underwear.
They like life in this quiet city that has long been a gateway for east-west and north-south commerce. Riverboats, railroads, and semitrailer trucks have successively rolled through this town. The historic brick downtown has given way to Wal-Mart on the edge of town as the new trading post for commerce.
The city was also the end point of the Trail of Tears, by which the Cherokee and Creek nations were forcibly resettled in the 1830s and '40s. In 1969, country legend Merle Haggard immortalized it a different way when he sang "I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee."
Oklahoma, like the rest of the states, got its first taste of a federally mandated minimum wage in 1938, during Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. It was 25 cents at the time - worth about $3.57 in today's dollars - and was adjusted upward, at infrequent intervals, in an effort to keep pace with rising costs of living.
The current level of $5.15 was reached in 1997, and Congress has never waited so long to raise it.
As a result, the purchasing power of a minimum-wage paycheck is now at its lowest point in half a century.
Also earning the minimum: teenagers
The people who earn minimum, or close to it, are as different as John Hosier and Megan Sistanich.
She also lives in Muskogee but is still in high school. She's earning $5.15 an hour at a downtown cafe called Breadworks. She aims to go to a nearby college and become a pharmacist, which almost certainly would mean much better pay in a few years.
Serving behind the counter here, taking orders for sandwiches and baked goods, is her first job. She's using the money for a cellphone and a coming band trip to Texas.
Drawing on government data on the American workforce, labor economists highlight several patterns in the low-wage workforce:
• Most workers don't work the minimum wage for very long. Of workers who are 10 years into their careers, only about 13 percent have spent half or more of their career earning within $1.50 of the minimum wage, according to a 2001 study.
• Minimum-wage workers are concentrated in low-skill service-sector occupations, including food service, retail, and motel housekeeping. Among Labor Department occupations, "leisure/ hospitality" leads the pack with 14.3 percent of workers earning $5.15 or less per hour. (Workers in some occupations such as food service can earn less than $5.15 if they earn enough tips to equal the minimum.) By contrast, just 0.4 percent of manufacturing workers earn minimum wage.
• Of the 6.6 million workers who would be directly affected by the proposed minimum-wage hike to $7.25 an hour, 61 percent are female, 29 percent are age 16 to 19, 21 percent are Hispanic, 16 percent are black, and 9 percent are single parents, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
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Those numbers are all higher than the share of those groups in the total workforce. By contrast, 16 percent of those affected will be married parents - many fewer than the 29 percent of all workers who are in that group.
• Many low-wage workers also face a high level of job insecurity. People with low skills are more likely to be unemployed, according to government data. And many low-wage workers have only part-time jobs. Of those directly affected by the proposed wage hike, 21 percent work fewer than 20 hours per week, whereas just 5 percent of the overall workforce is in that category. In addition to low skills, barriers to employment can include substance abuse or mental illness and other disabilities.
Low wages only a part of the problem
"There are two problems the poor have. One is low wages.... The other is not enough work hours, consistently, over time," says Timothy Bartik, an economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Mich.
Here in Oklahoma, Hosier is grateful for full-time work. He figures that, for now, none of the other jobs available to him would be better paying.
And he likes working for an organization that's in the business of helping others, just as he has been helped by those around him.
"If I had a dollar in my pocket and someone asked me for 50 cents, I would give them that dollar," he adds. "The would make me feel good."
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