Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA)
While many states—including red states—have
raised their minimum wages in recent years, the federal minimum wage has stayed stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. Democrats keep proposing to raise it, and Republicans keep blocking it, with House Speaker John Boehner having once
insisted that "I’ll commit suicide before I vote on a clean minimum-wage bill." So, after a couple years of pushing for a $10.10 an hour minimum wage, Democrats are
saying "screw it," but not in a giving-up way:
On Thursday, members of the party will introduce a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $12 per hour, a $4.75 increase over the current rate, which has gone untouched since 2009.
The so-called Raise the Wage Act, which will be introduced in the House of Representatives and Senate, will slowly boost the current $7.25 rate over the next five years, with the first hike to $8 coming in 2016 and $1 annual increases occurring through 2020. The bill’s sponsors—Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, and Congressman Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia—estimate that raising the federal minimum wage to $12 would result in increased pay for 38 million Americans.
If Republicans are going to go to the mat to keep poverty wages, Democrats might as well go to the mat for something a little closer to a living wage—though they're still not pushing for the $15 an hour that fast food, retail, and other workers have been pushing for and that's been passed in Seattle. In other good news, though, the Raise the Wage Act would ultimately link the minimum wage to the rate of inflation so that wages would rise even if Republicans controlled Congress, and it would finally raise the tipped worker minimum wage from $2.13 an hour, where it's been for two decades.
Raising the minimum wage is extremely popular. It would mean fewer working families needing public assistance to get by. Including tipped workers in a raise would mean they'd face less sexual harassment and would change the current situation in which one in six restaurant workers live below the poverty line. And, contrary to what Republicans claim, raising the minimum wage isn't bad for job growth.
But it's never going to happen as long as Republicans are in a position to block it.