Advocates for $15 an hour pressure Joe Biden, Congress
WASHINGTON – Pam Garrison worked much of her life in low-paying retail jobs, earning wages so paltry that they barely covered even the most basic necessities such as food and shelter.
“We don’t live – we survive,” Garrison, a retiree from Fayette County, West Virginia, said of minimum-wage workers. “And that’s not good enough in America.”
Garrison and other proponents of raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour are pressuring President Joe Biden and Congress to boost the hourly pay scale as part of a $1.9 trillion package aimed at providing relief to Americans recovering from the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.
Advocacy groups consider the relief package their best – and possibly only – chance to raise the minimum wage to $15, which a government report concluded could lift nearly 1 million Americans out of poverty.
Prospects for a $15 minimum wage appear bleak.
Biden has conceded the increase is likely to be stripped from his COVID-19 relief package because of opposition among Republicans and at least two Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
If the minimum wage doesn’t survive that legislation, Biden said, he’s open to pursuing the pay increase through a separate piece of legislation. That would be an even bigger hurdle because 60 votes would be needed in the Senate to overcome a filibuster – a nearly impossible threshold to cross given the Senate’s 50-50 partisan split.
“It doesn’t look like there’s a path to get to $15 an hour,” acknowledged Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank based in Washington.
Activists such as Garrison aren’t about to give up. They are writing, texting and calling senators, demanding that the wage increase remain in the relief bill.
“We are desperate,” said Garrison, 61, an activist with the West Virginia Poor People’s Campaign. “We are not taking no. We are demanding $15.”
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The $15 minimum wage is by far the most contentious part of Biden’s COVID-19 relief package, underscoring the political difficulty of boosting the basic pay for millions of workers. Opponents argue raising the minimum wage would hurt the low-wage workers it’s intended to help because businesses would cut jobs to compensate for the higher labor costs.
A Congressional Budget Office report released this month estimated that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would boost the pay for as many as 27 million Americans but could result in the loss of as many as 1.4 million jobs.
Congress hasn’t raised the federal minimum wage – $7.25 an hour – since 2007, though polls show Americans overwhelmingly favor an increase. Then-President Barack Obama called on Congress to boost the minimum wage in 2014, but the effort went nowhere. The House voted in 2019 to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, only to see the Senate kill the proposal.
Biden promised repeatedly to raise the minimum wage to $15 during last…
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