'The pandemic has been an accelerator': Kamala Harris joins Bernie Sanders in campaign for minimum wage hike
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Kamala Harris has committed to raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, which would more than double the current wage of $7.25, if elected alongside Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. The federally set wage for tipped workers is even lower, at $2.13 an hour.
Mr Bidenâs running mate â appearing at a virtual town hall on Thursday hosted by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to campaign for the candidates â said that the coronavirus âhas been an acceleratorâ that has magnified existing inequities across the US.
âRaising the minimum wage is about the floor and not the ceiling,â she said.
She also said the administration would commit to supporting paid family leave and paid sick leave, ending what Senator Sanders called the âinternational embarrassmentâ that the US does not have either, unlike other industrialised nations, at the federal level.
âWe have to end it,â she said. âItâs not only an embarrassment. Itâs morally wrong.â
The California senator said âno family should pay more than 5 per cent of their income on child care, period,â as she renewed a push for universal pre-kindergarten for three- and four-year-olds.
âThere is this suggestion weâve heard in certain circles â âif you extend this they wonât know what to do with the money,ââ she said about the wage increase and extension of federal assistance programmes. âBecause there is this ugly premise that people who are low income or poor choose to be that way, or donât have the same ethics everyone else has, or are irresponsible. And this is part of whatâs wrong with the way we have crafted economic policy when it comes to what is morally right on a global scale.â
Senator Sanders, who emerged as Mr Bidenâs chief opponent in the primaries, praised the senatorâs âpassion and decencyâ and âwillingness to fight for people who do not have a voice.â
Senator Harris called Senator Sanders, whose platform has centred economic justice and a nationalised healthcare agenda, âan extraordinary leader.â
âThe majority of those debates would not have been on the topic of healthcare in Americaâ without his presence on the debate stage, she said. âYou really are a treasure.â
“When we increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour, one in three women will benefit, one in three Latinos will benefit, four in ten Black workers will benefit.” -@KamalaHarris pic.twitter.com/WmmxceiLzm
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 30, 2020
Senator Sanders has held more than a dozen virtual campaign events during the runup to the general election to support the former vice president and progressive congressional candidates.
Their first appearance together on the campaign trail, five days before Election Day, highlighted the work of labour groups and workers pressuring lawmakers and campaigning for legislation that would raise state and federal minimum wages, which came into sharp relief on the national stage during the final presidential debate on 22 October.
Following the debate, internet searches for âwagesâ spiked in 44 states after moderator Kristen Welker asked the candidates about raising the minimum wage.
The former vice president said he supports raising the federal minimum in the middle of the public health crisis as businesses struggle to stay open amid forced closures and diminishing revenues.
âOne of the things we are going to have to do is we are going to have to bail them out, too,â he said. âWe should be bailing them out now, those small businesses. ⦠You've got 1 in 6 of them going under. They are not going to be able to make it back.â
Donald Trump opposes raising the federal wage, claiming that it would âbe ruinousâ to force employers to raise wages.
âI think it should be a state option,â he said. âAlabama is different than New York, New York is different from Vermont. Every state is different. It should be a state option.â
Seven states and Washington DC â which encompass roughly one-third of American workers â have passed legislation to raise their minimum wages to $15. New York, California and Massachusetts became the first states to do so.
But $7.25 an hour remains the minimum wage in 21 others.
Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Tennessee donât have a state-set minimum wage, instead relying on the federal rate.
Georgia and Wyoming have set their minimum to just $5.15, lower than the federal rate, which applies instead.
In 2019, the Congressional Budget Office reported that a $15 federal minimum wage would raise incomes for 27 million Americans. A wage hike would immediately lift 1.3 million Americans out of poverty.
The Economic Policy Institute reported that the minimum wage, if adjusted for inflation, should have exceeded $15 by 2020.
âYet since the late 1960s, lawmakers have let the value of the minimum wage erode, allowing inflation to gradually reduce the buying power of a minimum wage income,â according to a 2019 report.
The gradual increases in the years that followed have been too small to meet the decline in wage value after 1968, when the minimum wage peaked at its inflation-adjusted terms, the organisation reported.
A $7.25 wage in 2018 was worth 14.8 per cent less than when it was last raised nearly 10 years earlier, after adjusting for inflation, and 28.6 per cent below its peak value in 1968, when the minimum wage was the equivalent of $10.15 in 2018 dollars, the report found.
âThis decline in purchasing power means low-wage workers have to work longer hours now just to achieve the standard of living that was considered the bare minimum half a century ago,â according to the report.
A minimum wage increase would have a significant impact among Black workers and people of colour â Black workers make up 11.8 per cent of the workforce but 16.9 per cent of affected workers who would see wage increases.
It also would impact nearly four out of 10 single parents work work (nearly 40 per cent), including 43 per cent of working single mothers, the report found.
Cris Cardona, a shift manager at a McDonaldâs restaurant in Florida who has joined the Fight for $15 movement, said that his father was laid off during the pandemic, and his mother has worked as a bank custodian ânonstopâ since the pandemic, despite a compromised immune system.
He makes $11.15 an hour. With their combined three incomes, all under $12 an hour, âwe still struggleâ to cover healthcare, food and other costs, he said.
âHow does it happen that in our great country we have millions of workers earning starvation wages?â Senator Sanders said. âYou canât make it on 10 or 12 bucks an hour.â
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