In 2009, the federal minimum wage was set at $7.25 an hour. More than 12 years later it’s still $7.25. I agree with a recent tweet by Senator Bernie Sanders in which he indicated “A $15 minimum wage is not a radical idea. What’s radical is the fact that millions of Americans are forced to work for starvation wages, while 650 billionaires became over $1 trillion richer during a global pandemic. Yes. We must raise the minimum wage to a living wage.”
While I would love to see the $15 minimum wage be the national floor for all adult workers, I realize that, given the large disparity in the cost of living nationwide, more than doubling the minimum wage in a single step is unrealistic given where many of the states are currently. There are three states Mississippi, Tennessee and South Carolina that have no minimum wage. Two states Wyoming and Georgia have a $5.15 minimum wage and fourteen states have a $7.25 minimum wage.
On the other side of the ledger, Massachusetts currently has a $13.50 minimum wage and New York City a $15 minimum wage. In New Jersey the current rate is $14.00 per hour for employers with more than 26 employees and $13 per hour for employers with 25 or fewer employees. It will go to $15 per hour in 2025.
I’d very much like to see a version of New Jersey legislation replicated at the federal level. I’d suggest also incorporating an idea from Australia’s minimum wage system where workers age 20 and younger work under a slightly lower minimum wage than adult workers. This would allows employers to pay younger less-skilled workers, who do jobs like stacking shelves and retrieving shopping carts, a lower entry-level wage.
There are currently around thirty million workers in the United States, roughly 19 percent of all workers, who earn less than $15 an hour. Many of these workers are employed with our country’s most profitable companies like Walmart, McDonald’s, Starbucks and Dollar General. The low wages paid by these firms force many of their employees to rely on public assistance, food banks and food pantries to survive because their wages are too low to provide them with the basic necessities of life. Were it not for food stamps, Medicaid and public housing many of these employees would be homeless. In essence taxpayers are subsidizing companies that refuse to pay their employees a living wage.
In many ways Walmart, is the poster child of corporate greed. While a majority of the firm’s 1.5 million employees live paycheck to paycheck, its CEO received $22 million in compensation in 2020.
In his new book, The System: Who Rigged it. How we fix it, former Bill Clinton Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, provides some insight what has happened historically. “Fifty years ago, when General Motors was the largest employer in America, the typical GM worker earned $40 an hour, in today’s dollars. Now, America’s largest employer is Walmart, and the typical entry-level Walmart worker earns $11 an hour. This isn’t because the typical GM employee a half century ago was worth four times what the typical Walmart employee is now worth. The GM worker wasn’t better educated or better motivated than today’s Walmart worker. The real difference is GM a half century ago had a strong union with enough bargaining power to get a substantial share of employee profits for its members.”
This testimony to Congress of Cynthia Murray, of Hyattsville, Maryland, who has worked at Walmart since 2000 and still makes under $15 an hour, says it all: “I’m going to be sixty-five in three months, and I have no retirement plans. My doctor says I need an MRI for my back, but I’m putting it off because I can’t afford the co-payment. People like me are putting off retirement, putting off health care, because people like you have put off raising the minimum wage for twelve years.” Murray went on to tell the committee of coworkers going hungry, sitting in the break room with nothing to eat.
The idea that someone could work 40 hours a week and have to live in abject poverty is an absolute abomination that should not be tolerated. Having a job should keep you out of poverty. That is not the case because today’s minimum wage worker has less buying power than a minimum wage workers did in 2009 when the minimum wage was set at $7.25 per hour.
There is little evidence to support the contention that increasing the minimum wage will harm the economy or employee. In the four years after the last increase, the economy experienced its strongest growth in decades, adding 12 million new jobs and inflation was stable.
The Biden administration has put increasing the minimum wage on the backburner as it attempts to secure passage of the $2.3 trillion American Jobs Infrastructure Improvement Plan. I understand their thinking, but it is very important that President Biden never forget about those white working-class American who felt marginalized by flat and falling wages and turned to Donald Trump for help.
President Biden should not abandon the fight to incrementally increase the minimum wage. And he should never adopt the position of former Governor Chris Christie, who in speech the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said: “I’m tired of hearing about the minimum wage. I don’t think there’s a mother or father sitting around the kitchen table tonight in America saying, “You know, honey, if our son or daughter could just make a higher minimum wage, my God, all of our dreams would be realized, is that what parents aspire to for our children?” No they aspire to lofty goals, but in the meantime we need to insure that their children will stop losing ground and start making a living wage.
