A new year is bringing higher wages to many folks who labor for a living in America. Nearly seven million US workers out of a paid labor force of 157 million are getting minimum wage hikes in 25states and the District of Columbia in 2020. Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, a national advocacy group, backs that hourly pay increase partly for how it can cut employee turnover and reduce the price tag to hire and train new workers.
Holly Sklar is the CEO of Business for a Fair Minimum Wage. “When looking at the impact of raising the minimum wage, it’s important to look at it from various angles, not just pay increases at businesses where there are employees affected by the minimum wage increase,” she told The Progressive Populist in an email. “Raising the minimum wage increases consumer spending. It puts money in the pockets of people who most need to spend it, increasing sales at businesses with minimum wage employees as well as others–and boosting the economy.”
Darius Ross owns D Ross Real Estate Capital Partners in New York City. “In my business, I see up close the problem of a minimum wage that’s too low,” Ross told The Progressive Populist via email. “Working people can’t afford rent, and it’s not that they don’t have paychecks, it’s that they don’t make enough.”
The focus on workers as consumers is in part the result of labor unions and the Fight for $15 movement that joined low-wage workers and their allies in public protest for higher hourly pay across the US. Beginning with Sea-Tac Airport (Washington state) workers, religious and secular groups united with employees around the country to demand higher minimum hourly pay, as Jonathan Rosenblum writes in “Beyond $15” (Beacon Press 2017). Movement politics can shape business and politics progressively, at least at the municipal and state levels.
National politics in Washington, D.C., is of course the proverbial different kettle of fish. The influence of corporate America’s money and power over Congress and the White House has been and is driving income and wealth inequality. The Business Roundtable and US Chamber of Commerce are two groups with a big footprint on labor economics, policies and politics in the nation’s capital.
Against that backdrop, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, or $15,080 for a full-time worker annually since 2009, is a poverty wage. Workers earning the federal minimum wage struggle to pay their bills for food, healthcare, shelter and transit.
Business for a Fair Minimum Wage supports upping the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024. Federal legislation to make that happen faces stiff resistance. The Raise the Wage Act of 2019 passed the Democratic House of Representatives in 2019, but stopped after that.
Most all Democratic presidential candidates back a $15 an hour minimum wage. Polls show the public favors a higher minimum wage, too. Business for a Fair Minimum Wage support for boosting the federal minimum wage strengthens that push.
Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2020
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