WASHINGTON (AP) – Trade union activist Terrence Wise recalls being ridiculed when he started campaigning for a national minimum wage of $ 15 an hour almost a decade ago. Nearly a year into the pandemic, the idea is not so funny.
The coronavirus has refocused on the challenges faced by hourly workers who continue to work in grocery stores, gas stations, and other people, even though much of the workforce has shifted to virtual environments. President Joe Biden responded by including a provision in the massive pandemic bill that would double the minimum wage from the current $ 7.25 to $ 15 per hour.
But the attempt faces an unexpected roadblock: Biden himself. The president has apparently undermined the pressure to raise the minimum wage by acknowledging his poor prospects in Congress, where he faces political opposition and procedural obstacles.
This is frustrating for activists like Wise, who are worried that their victory will be snatched away at the last minute, despite a government that is otherwise an outspoken ally.
“To have it that way, they have to do it,” said Wise, a 41-year-old department manager at a McDonald’s in Kansas City and a national leader of Fight for 15, an organized labor movement. “They need to feel the pressure.”
The debate over the minimum wage highlights one of the central tensions that arose in the early days of Biden’s presidency. He won the White House with promises to respond to the pandemic with an avalanche of liberal policy proposals. But as a 36-year-old Senate veteran, Biden is particularly focused on the political dynamics on Capitol Hill and may be blunt in his assessments.
“I do not think it will survive,” Biden recently told CBS News, referring to the increase in the minimum wage.
There is a certain political realism in Biden’s remark.
Since the Senate is evenly divided, the proposal does not have the 60 votes needed to make it to the floor. Democrats can use an insane budget procedure that will add the minimum wage to the pandemic bill and pass it by a simple majority vote.
But even that is not easy. Some moderate Democratic senators, including Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Christian Cinema of Arizona, have either expressed outright opposition to the march, or said it should not be included in the pandemic legislation.
The Senate MP could further complicate matters with the ruling that the minimum wage measure could not be included in the pandemic bill.
For now, the benchmark’s most progressive Senate supporters are not openly pushing Biden to step up its campaign for a higher minimum wage.
Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said he was largely focused on approving the parliamentarian to tackle the provision on the pandemic bill. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who, like Sanders Biden from the left, challenged for the Democratic nomination, only tweeted that the Democrats ‘need to correct this wrong’.
However, some activists encourage Biden to be more aggressive.
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, said Biden had a “mandate” to ensure minimum wage increases, noting that Americans from minority groups “were the first to return to work, first become infected, first become ill, first die ”during the pandemic.
“We can not be the last to get relief and the last to be treated properly and paid properly,” Barber said.
The federal minimum wage has not been raised since 2009, the longest time without an increase since its creation in 1938. Adjusted for inflation, the purchasing power of the current wage of $ 7.25 over the past 11 years has more than ‘ a dollar dropped. .
Democrats have long promised an increase – support for a minimum wage of $ 15 was in the party’s political platform in 2016 – but have yet to deliver.
Supporters believe that the coronavirus has earned a higher minimum wage, all the more urgently because workers who earn it are excessively colored. The Liberal Institute for Economic Policy found that more than 19% of Spanish workers and more than 14% of black employees earn hourly wages that they kept under federal poverty guidelines in 2017.
Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans in the U.S. also have hospitalization and mortality rates due to COVID-19 that are two to four times higher than for whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.
People of color are an important part of Biden’s constituency and form 38% of its support during the November election, according to AP VoteCast, a nationwide poll among voters.
Adrianne Shropshire. executive director of BlackPAC, noted that Biden has promised to address racial inequalities and create a fairer economy. That means he now has the chance to ensure that hourly wage earners ‘get out of the pandemic better in this form than they did.’
“The recovery around COVID should not just be about how to stabilize and bring people back to zero,” Shropshire said. “It has to be about how we create opportunities to move people beyond where they were.”
The White House says Biden is not giving up on the case. His comments to CBS, according to an assistant, reflect his own evaluation of where the parliamentarian would rule based on his decades of experience in the Senate that has handled similar negotiations.
Biden suggested in the same interview that he was prepared to conduct a “separate negotiation” on raising the minimum wage, but White House press secretary Jen Psaki offered no further details on the future of the proposal if it in fact of the final coronavirus. auxiliary account.
One option could be to force coercive passage by enforcing Vice President Kamala Harris, as chair of the Senate, the MP. But Psaki made it clear: “Our view is that the parliamentarian is usually elected to make a decision in a non-partisan manner.”
Navin Nayak, executive director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the political arm of the progressive think tank, said he was not surprised by Biden’s assessment but still felt the White House was making good efforts.
“They don’t put it there to lose it, but put it there to win it,” Nayak said.
Nayak also noted that Biden’s remarks came before a projection from the Congressional Budget Office that the proposal would help lift millions of Americans out of poverty, but would increase the federal deficit and cost 1.4 million jobs as employers scale back more expensive workforce .
Sanders and other supporters argue that the CBO’s finding that raising the minimum wage will increase the deficit means that it affects the budget – and should therefore be allowed as part of the COVID relief bill. But it is ultimately the Senate MP.
For Wise, potential congress hurdles have faded compared to the real-world realities.
He earns $ 14 an hour and his fiancé works as a home health care worker. But when she went into quarantine due to the possible exposure to the coronavirus and he missed the job of caring for their three daughters, the family received an eviction notice.
People “think it’s something we do wrong. We’re going to work. We are productive. We are law-abiding citizens, ”said Wise. “It doesn’t have to be that way.”
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Associated Press writers Alan Fram and Kevin Freking contributed.
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Eds: This story has been updated to Correct the spelling of Terrence Wise’s first name.