Terri Sewell (D-AL) introduced an alternative bill in April, which would create different minimum wage levels depending on the region. The president of the US Chamber of Commerce said earlier this year that he was open to the idea of raising the pay floor.įor a while, Democrats were torn on how much to raise wages. McDonald’s executives recently announced that the company would no longer lobby against minimum wage increases. ![]() It’s no wonder why the vast majority of Democrats running for president have promised to double the federal minimum wage.Ĭorporate America must have sensed the shift in public opinion. And a majority of voters want at least $15 an hour. Poll after poll shows widespread support for raising the federal minimum rate, even among Republican voters. Neither are their Republican allies in Congress, who have long pushed back against any effort to raise the federal minimum wage.īut it’s hard to deny how popular the idea is with regular voters. ![]() The bill, which has more than 200 co-sponsors (all Democrats), would also phase out the lower minimum wage for tipped workers such as restaurant servers and valets, which has been $2.13 an hour since 1996.īig business groups are not happy about the fight for $15. So if middle-class wages go up - or down - so would the minimum wage. The law would also tie future changes to changes in median workers’ pay. In January, House Democrats introduced the Raise the Wage Act, which would eventually raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024. Since then, America’s lowest-paid workers have lost about $3,000 a year when you consider the rising cost of living, according to calculations from the Economic Policy Institute. The current $7.25 minimum hourly rate was set in 2009, right in the middle of the Great Recession. The Raise the Wage Act, explainedĬongress set a record in June: It’s now been more than 10 years since lawmakers have raised the federal minimum wage, the longest period in history that it’s stayed stagnant. And that read may renew debate in Congress over how high to raise the federal pay floor. The CBO score doesn’t necessarily contradict those findings, but it does offer a broader read of the available data. The other study comes from economists at the University of California Berkeley, who released a white paper last Tuesday finding that a $15 minimum wage would go a long way to combat income inequality - while its impact on job loss is likely small to none. ![]() It’s only the second study ever to focus entirely on the impact of a $15 minimum wage, and its findings are less rosy than the first one. The report comes as members of Congress prepare a vote to increase the federal minimum wage for the first time in more than a decade. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released this conclusion in a report that analyzes the economic impact of the Raise the Wage Act, a House bill that would gradually double minimum hourly pay by 2025. A $15 federal minimum wage would likely boost pay for 27 million US workers, lifting 1.3 million households out of poverty, according to an analysis released Monday by congressional economists.īut the income boost may come with a cost: It could trigger 1.3 million job losses.
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