“For the last 10 years, Congress, giving tax breaks to the rich, has forgotten to raise the minimum wage,” Sanders said during a rally in Washington, D.C. “We are here to remind them that a $7.25 minimum wage is a starvation minimum wage. Nobody can live on $7.25. You can’t live on $8. You can’t live on $10 an hour.”
The proposed Raise the Wage Act has attracted 23 Democratic co-sponsors in the Senate, including Vermont’s Sen. Patrick Leahy.
During Wednesday’s rally, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., promised to “fight like hell” to push the legislation in Congress.
“It’s not just about a number, it’s about respect for working people,” Schumer said. “This is a case of economic justice.”
In addition to raising the federal minimum wage for the first time in eight years, the bill would gradually raise the tipped minimum wage, which has stood at $2.13 an hour since 1991. According to the Economic Policy Institute, tipped minimum wage workers experience twice the poverty rate of other Americans, with nearly 13 percent living in economic hardship.
The legislation would also phase out the youth minimum wage, which allows employers to pay workers younger than 20 less than the federal minimum for their first three months of employment.
According to forecasts from the Economic Policy Institute, 22,000 Vermonters would be directly affected by a minimum wage hike.
Sanders’ Senate office estimates the legislation would affect more than 41 million employees, bumping up pay for nearly 30 percent of the workforce. In total, $144 billion of new wages would be paid out by 2024, his office says.
The legislation would immediately raise the federal wage $2 an hour. It would then rise by roughly $1 every year until 2024.
Pressured by strikes and protests organized chiefly by fast food workers, a number of states and cities have raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour in recent years. In 2015 alone, 14 cities and states approved plans to gradually boost hourly wages to $15, including New York and California.
Vermont’s minimum wage increased to $10 this year, up from $9.60. The wage for tipped workers also ticked up to $5 an hour. In 2018, the state’s minimum wage will rise to $10.50.
Democrats in the Vermont Legislature this session have looked to phase in a $15 minimum wage by 2022, but Gov. Phil Scott is opposed to any significant hike. As a candidate for governor, Scott pointed out that the state minimum wage will be indexed to inflation beginning in 2019, and it is already one of the highest in America.
Scott, like many Republicans, has said a wage hike would hurt small businesses like DuBois Construction, which he owned until being elected, and would increase the cost of necessities.
“We are just going to pass it on,” Scott told an audience in Irasburg during the campaign. “I don’t have a magic bank account where there is money available for the cost-of-living increase, so you are going to pay for it.”
With no conservative support in the Republican-controlled Senate for Sanders’ proposal, the chances of the bill’s passage are slim. Still, the 23 co-sponsors stand in contrast to the five Sanders attracted when he introduced similar legislation in 2015. After the introduction of Sanders’ 2015 wage bill, more than 200 economists signed a letter supporting the policy.
During Wednesday’s wage rally in front of the Capitol, Sanders acknowledged the activism that has brought support for the wage fight into the mainstream of the Democratic Party.
“Just a few years ago, if you were to say that we need to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, many people would say, ‘You’re crazy!’” Sanders said. “But a grass-roots movement of millions of workers — led by Good Jobs Nation and the (Service Employees International Union) — refused to take no for an answer.”
“In this great country, if you work 40 hours a week, you should not be working in poverty,” Sanders added.
