WASHINGTON—Even before unions and lawmakers pushed raising the federal minimum wage for the first time since 2009, to $17 per hour, the Senate’s Republican majority voted their amendment down on April 5.
Confused? Don’t be. The same thing happened the last time, years ago, that Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., tried to raise the wage from its current $7.25 an hour—a sum so small in today’s economy that a family cannot afford a 1-bedroom apartment anywhere in the U.S. The only difference was that the last time Sanders tried to insert the minimum wage hike into a budget blueprint, he proposed $15 per hour. He lost then due to defecting Democrats who were anything but serious about their claims to represent the working class.
After this loss, Sanders and all House Democrats, led by Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., introduced a stand-alone bill on April 8 to raise that current wage to $17 an hour over five years. The Economic Policy Institute calculated that 22.74 million people nationwide would directly get a wage hike if it passed.
But three days—or rather nights—before, in the GOP-run Senate’s “vote-a-rama” on the majority’s budget blueprint, Sanders tried to add the wage hike. He lost, 47-52 on a party-line vote at 12:44 am. Sanders later reintroduced it as a stand-alone complement to Scott’s bill. It, too, may go nowhere.
The vote-a-rama, an annual event when senators cast ballots on budget blueprints, sees them all go down by party-line votes after five to 10 minutes of debate each. That’s what happened to the minimum wage on April 5:
“Millions of Americans today are working for starvation wages,” Sanders said. “What this amendment does is raise the federal minimum wage from an embarrassingly low $7.25 an hour to a living wage of $17 an hour over five years…That is not a radical idea.
“Quite unbelievably, the average American worker today makes $42 a week less than he or she did 52 years ago,” adjusted for inflation. “Almost all of the new wealth that has been created has gone to the top 1%–a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% to the people on top.
“It has been 16 years–16 years–since the federal minimum wage has been raised. Now is the time to address the crises facing working Americans” and increase it.
The lone foe of the minimum wage hike to speak was Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who succeeded Sanders as Senate Labor Committee chairman when the GOP took over the chamber this year.
“This is a one-size-fits-all inflationary amendment,” Cassidy complained. “Increasing the wage by more than 230% even over five years will destroy jobs”—the usual and faulty Republican claim about all minimum wage hikes. “A law mandating a higher minimum wage doesn’t mean much to a worker who loses his or her job because of this,” Cassidy threatened. The ruling Republicans listened to that pro-corporate argument.
Union backers of both minimum wage hike bills include the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, the Teachers/AFT, the Communications Workers, the Painters, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Pride at Work, the Service Employees, the Auto Workers, Unite HERE, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Steelworkers and the National Education Association.
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