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Minimum Wage

Democrats Torpedo $15 Minimum Wage Hike

March 1, 2021 Marcus Day, WSWS. , , ,
On Thursday, US President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party effectively ended efforts to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour as part of the COVID-19 stimulus package making its way through Congress. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has not been increased since 2009, and the dropping of the raise will leave millions of workers in utter destitution. The White House and congressional Democrats have falsely sought to present themselves as having their hands tied, holding up the advisory ruling of the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth McDonough, as an excuse. McDonough, an unelected official appointed to her role by the Democrats in 2012, ruled that the wage hike is not allowable in a bill using the budget reconciliation process.

It’s Time To Make Large Corporations Pay Living Wages

February 28, 2021 Phil Mattera, DC Report. , , ,
Landing a job in the ’80s with a large corporation was, even for blue-collar workers, a ticket to good wages, generous benefits and a secure retirement. Women and workers of color did not share fully in this bounty, but they generally did better at big firms than small ones. All this began to unravel in the 1980s. Big business used the excuse of global competition to chip away at the living standards of the domestic workforce. Assault on unions, which were key in bringing about job improvements, proliferated. Meatpacking, for instance, what had been high wage and high-density union, turned into a bastion of precarious labor.

The Fake Debate Over A Minimum Wage

February 24, 2021 Richard D. Wolff, Counterpunch. , , ,
Capitalism’s “conservative” defenders yet again oppose raising the minimum wage. They fought raising it in the past much as they tried to prevent the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) that first mandated a U.S. minimum wage. The major argument opponents have used is this: setting or raising a minimum wage threatens small employers. They may collapse or else fire employees; either way, jobs are lost. What is conveniently assumed here is a necessary contradiction between minimum wages and small business jobs. That assumption enables opponents to claim that not setting a legal minimum wage, like not raising it, saves jobs. The system thus presents very poorly paid workers with this choice: low wages or no wages.

Biden’s First Month Marked By Broken Promises

February 20, 2021 Alan Macleod, Mintpress News. , , ,
One month into his presidential career and Joe Biden has already left a trail of broken promises on progressive legislation. Yesterday, it was reported that the president held a closed-door meeting with a group of mayors and governors. At the first sign of pushback from Republicans in the room, he immediately dropped his support for the $15 minimum wage on the basis that he needed bipartisan support to pass it. Given that Democrats control the House, Senate, and the White House, this position seems surprising. “I really want this in there but it just doesn’t look like we can do it because of reconciliation,” the 78-year-old Delawarean said, according to those present. “Right now, we have to prepare for this not making it,” he added. As Politico noted, there was no further negotiation on the minimum wage after that; the topic was simply dropped.

Over 200 Small Business Restaurant Owners And Employers Endorse Raise The Wage Act

February 19, 2021 Brett Wilkins, Commondreams. , , ,
As the small restaurant sector reels from the devastating economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, a report published Thursday by advocates for tipped workers and a $15 minimum wage revealed that phasing out subminimum wages for such workers—which can be as low as a little over $2 an hour—does not cause businesses to close.  In fact, the report—published by the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley and One Fair Wage—found that the five states with the greatest rate of decline in open hospitality businesses during the pandemic are all states with a subminimum wage.  That wage was set at $2.13 under a 1996 federal law resulting largely from lobbying by then-National Restaurant Association president Herman Cain.

Red States Cut Worker Pay By $1.5 Billion

August 17, 2019 By Negin Owliaei, Otherwords.org , ,
Last month, the House voted to incrementally raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. If the Senate passes the bill, it would be the first federal minimum wage increase in more than a decade — far too long for residents of the 21 states that don’t have their own higher minimum wage.  Here’s another sad truth: Plenty of cities in those states have tried to raise their minimum wage, only to be stymied by state lawmakers. That’s thanks to state preemption laws that keep localities from adopting all kinds of policies, from paid sick leave to local fracking bans to wage increases.

NYC’s $15 Minimum Wage Helped Restaurants Thrive

August 11, 2019 Allana Akhtar, Business Insider. , ,
New York City restaurant workers saw their pay increase by 20% after a $15 minimum-wage hike, and a new report says business is booming despite warnings that the boost would devastate the city's restaurant industry. As New York raised the minimum wage to $15 this year from $7.25 in 2013, its restaurant industry outperformed the rest of the US in job growth and expansion, a new study found. The study, by researchers from the New School and the New York think tank National Employment Law Project, found no negative employment effects of the city increasing its minimum wage to $15. Restaurant workers in the city saw a pay increase of 20% to 28%, representing the largest hike "for a big group of low-wage workers since the 1960s," James Parrott, a director of economic and fiscal policies at the New School and an author of the study, told Gothamist.

CBO Report Shows Broad Benefits From Higher Minimum Wage

July 10, 2019 By Heidi Shierholz, Epi.org , , , ,
This afternoon, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report assessing the economic impact of raising the minimum wage to $15 in 2025 in six steps (this is a similar policy to the Raise the Wage Act, which would increase the minimum wage to $15 in 2024). The key fact coming out of the report is that CBO finds that the benefits to low wage workers of a $15 minimum wage far exceed the costs. The report finds that a $15 minimum wage would increase the wages of millions of low wage workers, increase the average incomes of low and lower-middle-income families...

This Is The Longest The Federal Minimum Wage Has Ever Gone Without Being Raised

June 17, 2019 Dave Jamieson, Huffpost.com , ,
Lawmakers set a new record Sunday by leaving the federal minimum wage untouched since July 24, 2009, the first year of former President Barack Obama’s first term. The rate hasn’t been increased from $7.25 in a whopping 3,615 days, making it the longest dry spell since the federal minimum wage was enacted under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1938. That surpasses a previous milestone set between 1997 and 2007, when then-President George W. Bush signed minimum wage legislation.

Millions Of Workers Are Paid Less Than The ‘Average’ Minimum Wage

May 5, 2019 By Ben Zipperer and David Cooper, Economic Policy Institute , ,
After 10 years of inaction at the federal level, so much of the policy work being done to boost wages for low-wage workers is happening at the state and local level. Yet, it is important to recognize that even with state and local governments taking action in many places, there are still millions of workers being paid significantly lower wages than the “average” minimum wage as calculated in the Upshot piece. In fact, raising the federal minimum wage to $11.80 would directly lift wages for 18.6 million workers, or 12.8 percent of the wage-earning workforce. Moreover, calculating the average effective minimum wage is very sensitive to how one defines the workforce affected by the policy. One would arrive at a much lower average minimum wage if considering the broader low-wage workforce for whom minimum wage policy is relevant.

Maryland Becomes Sixth State To Raise Minimum Wage To $15 An Hour

April 8, 2019 By Alexia Fernández Campbell, Vox.com , , ,
Maryland just became the sixth state to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. On Thursday, lawmakers managed to override Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s veto of a minimum wage bill. Maryland’s current minimum wage is $10.10, and the new policy willgradually raise the wage floor to $15 by 2025. Hogan had blocked the bill earlier this week, claiming that such a change would “devastate” the economy. But it was clear early on that he would be unable to stop the national momentum building around a $15 minimum wage.

Illinois Workers Celebrate As ‘Life-Changing’ $15 Per Hour Minimum Wage Signed Into Law

February 20, 2019 By Jessica Corbett, Commondreams.org , , ,
"Fifteen dollars an hour will be life-changing for me. I can barely afford the basic needs for my two sons on my minimum-wage salary. Simple things like whether to buy school supplies for my older boy or formula and diapers for my little one become agonizing choices," said Fight for $15 member Ieshia Townsend, who works a McDonald's in Chicago. Reflecting on the past six years of grassroots organizing to raise wages across the state, Townsend shared that "as a single mom and a Black woman on the south side of Chicago, I felt invisible before I joined the Fight for $15 and a union. But by coming togethe and speaking out, our voices have been heard." While welcoming the victory on Tuesday, she vowed to continue the fight for a union.

I Was A Student Worker Fighting For A $15 Wage. Now, I’m Facing A Criminal Record.

February 4, 2019 Ina Padua, Inthesetimes.com , , ,
On Monday, February 4, I will have my day in court in New Brunswick, New Jersey. That’s not where I’d like to be spending my morning. I’d rather be at my office in DC working on getting back-pay for federal contract workers. But on Monday, 11 of my former classmates and I will march into the courtroom with our lawyer and defend ourselves against the charges brought upon us by our alma mater—Rutgers University. On December 12, 2017, dozens of students, workers, and activists of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) staged a peaceful protest asking the Board of Trustees to give campus workers like me $15 an hour and a union contract.

Abolish Wage Slavery: Productivism As An Extractive Industry

January 13, 2019 Scott Tucker, Counterpunch. , ,
The alienation of labor takes many forms, including the outright ownership of slaves. When big mills and factories were introduced under systems of waged labor, elements of judgment and craft were still preserved among workers because otherwise the machinery would not run at all. Streamlining assembly lines became one of the innovations of the Ford factory system, and his best paid workers were able to buy the basic model cars. In this sense, Fordism was already emerging as an industrial model concurrently with the time and motion studies of the Taylor System.

Movement Victory: Over Five Million Workers Will Have Higher Pay On January 1

December 31, 2018 By David Cooper, Epi.org ,
On January 1, 2019, 20 states will raise their minimum wages, lifting pay for 5.3 million workers across the country.1 The increases, which range from a $0.05 inflation adjustment in Alaska to a $2.00 per hour increase in New York City, will give affected workers approximately $5.4 billion in increased wages over the course of 2019. Affected workers who work year-round will see their annual pay go up between $90 and $1,300, on average, depending on the size of the minimum wage change in their state.
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