Despite Historic Minimum Wage Increases, The South Still Trails Behind

2022 marks 10 years since fast food workers in New York first went on strike to demand higher wages, better working conditions, and the right to unionize — sparking the Fight For $15 movement. Since that time, the movement has gained traction, with California raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour and several other states passing legislation that will gradually do so.

As the ongoing global pandemic has drawn attention to the fact that the people who keep the country running are overworked and underpaid, workers have continued to strike for higher wages and union rights. In many cases, their demands are being met.

Showing the tremendous strides made by Fight for $15, a record number of states and localities are raising their wages this year.

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$15 Wage Becoming New Average In Some Industries

New data show that, as wages have risen across much of the economy, the average pay for restaurant and supermarket workers has risen above $15 an hour for the first time, reports The Washington Post. The milestone marks a win for both workers and, potentially, the Fight for $15 movement.

Employers struggling to fill low-wage positions as businesses reopened over the past year have blamed their problem on a so-called worker shortage. But in reality, economists say, it’s more likely that there was a wage shortage as workers were unwilling to do a job that is more dangerous during the pandemic for the same wage as before COVID-19 was raging through the country.

Now, it seems, employers are responding, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed by The Washington Post.

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Workers Insist The $15 Minimum Wage Fight Isn’t Over

Women comprise the overwhelming majority of frontline workers who risk their lives and the lives of their families during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. But the Democrats who they helped retake the White House and the Senate don’t seem so interested in rewarding that support.

The proposal to set a $15 an hour minimum wage by 2025 in President Joe Biden’s signature $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan could have helped lift some 74 million poor and low-income women out of poverty, according to the Poor People’s Campaign.

But eight Senate Democrats opposed the measure. Team Biden also declined to challenge arcane and non-binding parliamentary procedures, supposedly prohibiting a $15 minimum wage in the coronavirus relief package.

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Doing Too Little In This Crisis Will Come Back To Haunt The US Economy

The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP) is essential to a robust and equitable recovery. The risk of doing too little is far greater than the risk of doing too much, and the American Rescue Plan meets the scale of the crisis.

The overall size and components of the ARP have been carefully studied and considered. Given the balance of risks facing the economy and the danger of delay, passing the plan at its current scale and composition is the most prudent thing policymakers can do to ensure a rapid and fair recovery. Clearly, this is necessary.

As the Senate debates what belongs in the final relief bill this week, policymakers must not shortchange aid to state and local governments, which is essential to a robust recovery.

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Small Acts Can Become A Power No Government Can Suppress

The American Rescue Plan (ARP) was passed in the House this past week and now heads to the Senate, where it will no doubt be changed before it becomes law some time in mid-March. The current unemployment benefits expire on March 14.

While we don’t know what the final bill will look like, at least now we can get an idea of what is in it. Overall, as expected, the provisions in the bill will help to provide some financial assistance to some people, but they won’t solve the crises we face. And the Biden administration is backtracking on promises made on the campaign trail.

As Alan Macleod writes, Biden has abandoned raising the minimum wage, ending student debt and the promised $2,000 checks. His focus is on forcing people back to work and school even as new, more infectious and more lethal variants of the virus causing COVID-19 threaten another surge in cases and deaths.

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Democrats Torpedo $15 Minimum Wage Hike

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.

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It’s Time To Make Large Corporations Pay Living Wages

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.

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The Fake Debate Over A Minimum Wage

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.

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Biden’s First Month Marked By Broken Promises

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.

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

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.

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Red States Cut Worker Pay By $1.5 Billion

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.

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NYC’s $15 Minimum Wage Helped Restaurants Thrive

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.

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CBO Report Shows Broad Benefits From Higher Minimum Wage

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…

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

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.

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

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.

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