Sen. Bernie Sanders joins Rep. Justin Jones at Fisk to rally for $17 per hour minimum wage

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vermont, visited Nashville on Friday evening to rally alongside state Rep. Justin Jones, D-Nashville, calling for Congress to raise the federal minimum wage to $17 per hour.

Sanders spoke to a crowd of more than 500 at the Henderson A. Johnson Gymnasium at Fisk University, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in 1960. The crowd welcomed him on stage with calls of “run, Bernie, run!”

“No one in America should be forced to work for starvation wages,” Sanders said. “Poverty is a death sentence, and we’re here to say we will no longer accept that."

Sanders’ speech was part of a national tour to raise support for his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $17 over a five-year period. The legislation is expected for a markup in the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions later this month.

"In the richest country in the history of the world, we demand an economy that works for all – not just a few,” he added. “We want an economy that is not based on an extraordinary level of greed – unbelievable greed.”

Congress last raised the federal minimum wage in 2009 to $7.25 per hour. Since then the U.S. dollar has lost nearly 30 percent of purchasing power, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Tennessee is one of 20 states that has not raised its minimum wage since then, despite proposals in the state legislature.

Jones, who met Sanders during his trip to the White House in April, criticized Republicans in the state legislature for prioritizing corporate incentives and declining to raise the state minimum wage.

“We have money for corporate bailouts for a new Titans stadium… but we don’t have enough money to pay people a living wage above $7.25 an hour?” Jones asked. “We say you cannot survive on $7.25 an hour.”

Sanders and Jones were joined by Rev. William Barber, co-chairman of the Poor People’s Campaign, who described the federal government’s failure to pay workers a “living wage” as “a form of political abuse.” He recalled that during the pandemic, federal officials called working-class employees “essential,” but “treated them like they were expendable.”

A handful of Nashville residents also spoke.

Alanna Royale, a touring artist and server at Henrietta Red in Germantown, told the crowd that the $7.25 minimum wage is outdated, and undercuts the state’s lowest-paid workers’ ability to live in decent conditions.

“As a musician and a restaurant employee I know a thing or two about being overworked and underpaid,” Royale said. “I know about the financial anxiety of managing my career, my health, my mental wellbeing, and my mortgage… we are living in a broken culture of impossibly low wages.”

Honey Hereth, a 20-year veteran paraprofessional at Metro Nashville Public Schools, told the crowd that the school district recently increased her pay to $18 – after efforts from the SEIU calling for higher wages.

“I want to live and play in Nashville just like anybody else,” Hereth said. “We want to be known not just as ‘the place to play,’ we want to be known as ‘the place where they pay.’”

Reach Vivian Jones at vjones@tennessean.com.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Honey Hereth's name.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Sen. Bernie Sanders visits Nashville to rally for $17 minimum wage