Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Virginia Congressman Bobby Scott have introduced legislation that would increase the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 an hour to $17 an hour.
The measure, given the name Raise the Wage Act, proposes phasing in stepped increases over the next five years, getting the minimum wage to the $17 an hour level by 2028.
The proposed legislation, according to Sanders and Scott, would benefit 28 million U.S. workers, roughly 19 percent of the workforce.
“The $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage is a starvation wage. It must be raised to a living wage – at least $17 an hour,” said Sanders, the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. “In the year 2023 a job should lift you out of poverty, not keep you in it. At a time of massive income and wealth inequality and record-breaking corporate profits, we can no longer tolerate millions of workers being unable to feed their families because they are working for totally inadequate wages.
“Congress can no longer ignore the needs of the working class of this country. The time to act is now,” Sanders said.
“No person working full-time in America should be living in poverty,” said Scott, the Ranking Member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. “The Raise the Wage Act will increase the pay and standard of living for nearly 28 million workers across this country.
“Raising the minimum wage is good for workers, good for business, and good for the economy. When we put money in the pockets of American workers, they will spend that money in their communities,” Scott said.
The Raise the Wage Act has the support of 29 Senate Democrats and 150 Democrats in the House, but, no, it has nothing in terms of support from Republicans, who have never met a proposed increase in the minimum wage that you can get them to sign onto.
The lack of Republican support will, of course, make the effort to get any traction on the legislation pretty much impossible, which is frustrating.
“I know there are some people who believe there should be no minimum wage. I’m not in that camp,” said Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat who is among the Senate co-sponsors. “I think we ought to have a minimum wage, that if you work full time, at the minimum wage, it would get you above the poverty level.”
Mark Warner, the other Virginia Democrat in the Senate, hasn’t signed on to the Sanders-Scott bill, but he backs increasing the minimum wage from where it is now to $15 an hour.
“Recognizing that currently, the minimum wage federal minimum wage is $7.25, that’s crazy. Obviously, post-COVID, with the tight labor market, you know, wages have moved up. I still think the $15 number is the right one for right now,” Warner said, noting that while Virginia has taken action to increase the minimum wage here to $12 an hour, “there are a host of states that are still at $7.25, and the fact that if you’re making $7.25 an hour, you can’t put food on the table and a roof over your head.”
“So, keep me at $15, and we’ll, again, look at economic circumstances down the road,” Warner said. “In the meantime, again, in Virginia, we’re not even up to $15 yet in terms of the state minimum wage.”
The minimum-wage issue is a “value statement” to Kaine, “and I think the value statement should be, we preach the value of hard work all the time, that’s what we tell our kids, that’s what we say is the key to success.”
“If we really believe that, we should have a minimum wage so that somebody’s working full time at that wage, and two-thirds of people who work full time at minimum wage are women, people who work full time at that wage should not be below the poverty level,” Kaine said.
“That would then mean that we are true to our values, and when we preach the value of hard work, we really mean it rather than just mouth a platitude about it.”
Share
Chris Graham
