Regarding Democratic efforts, unsuccessful so far, to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour, Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell has some insightful observations.
Some Democrats in Congress are unhappy with the Senate parliamentarian, who ruled that the minimum-wage measure could not be included in a pandemic relief bill being passed through a rare procedure that allows a simple majority vote and prevents a filibuster.
Rampell, however, believes the parliamentarian did the Democrats a favor — by helping them avoid a public squabble over the issue.
“The primary hurdle to passing a $15 federal minimum wage isn’t procedural,” she wrote. “It’s that there isn’t unified support within the Democratic Party for the policy.”
Two Democratic senators, from West Virginia and Arizona, have said they’re concerned about such a sharp increase in the minimum wage. With Republicans also opposed, that makes it certain that any bill seeking to raise the minimum wage to $15 in steps over the next few years would die.
“This has been obvious for a while,” Rampell added. “Yet Democratic leaders chose to ignore the discord rather than adopt a compromise policy that might be acceptable to moderates — and still achieve, say, 90 percent of the left’s objectives. Which are, presumably, to raise living standards for as many of the working poor as possible.”
Excellent point. For several years now, the minimum wage goal for many Democrats essentially has been $15 or die. While there seems to be relatively broad support for the idea of raising the minimum wage for the first time since 2009, there is great disagreement over just how far to go.
It’s puzzling that with a narrow majority in Congress, more Democrats fail to see that, even if they can’t reach their $15 goal, they have the votes to take significant steps toward it.
For example, raising the minimum to $10 over three years would help a lot of low-wage workers. Employers would grumble, and probably reduce the hours and number of these workers, but in the end they would adapt to the new pay rates — just as they have every time the government has increased the minimum wage since the 1930s.
Rampell’s column made two other good points. It specifically mentioned Mississippi, noting that the state’s median wage is only $15, which means that raising the minimum pay to that level conceivably could affect half of the state’s work force (not to mention the companies that employ them).
Also, while she supports the $15 rate, she concedes that no one knows what will happen, good or bad, if the minimum wage starts rising just as the country is fighting its way out of a pandemic: “There are risks to raising labor costs during a weak economy, when firms are already reluctant to hire.”
The $15 minimum wage was one of Democrats’ big campaign promises, but they may not have the votes to pull it off. They are letting that promise prevent them from approving significant help for America’s lowest-paid workers.
