WASHINGTON (AP) – Union activist Terrence Wise recalls laughing when he started pushing for a national minimum wage of $ 15 an hour nearly a decade ago. Almost a year after the pandemic, the idea is not so much fun.
The coronavirus has once again focused on the challenges faced by hourly employees who have continued to work in grocery stores, gas stations and other on-site locations, even when much of the workforce has moved to virtual environments. President Joe Biden has responded by including a provision in the massive pandemic relief bill that would exceed twice the current minimum wage of $ 7.25 to $ 15 per hour.
But the effort faces an unexpected hurdle: Biden himself. Apparently, the president has undermined the push to raise the minimum wage by acknowledging his weak prospects in Congress, where he faces political opposition and procedural hurdles.
This is frustrating for activists like Wise, who worry that their victory will be snatched at the last minute despite an administration that would otherwise be a frank ally.
“To have it so close to the door, they have to do it,” Wise, a 41-year-old department manager at a McDonald’s in Kansas City and national leader of Fight for 15, an organized labor movement, said. “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 his promises to respond to the pandemic with a barrage of liberal policy proposals. But as a 36-year Senate veteran, Biden is particularly in tune with Capitol Hill’s political dynamics and can be blunt in his assessments.
“I don’t think he survives,” Biden told CBS News recently, referring to the rising minimum wage.
There is a certain political realism in Biden’s observation.
With the Senate divided evenly, the proposal does not have the 60 votes needed to land on its own. Democrats could use an arcane budget procedure that would attribute the minimum wage to the pandemic response bill and allow it to pass with a simple majority of votes.
But even that is not easy. Some moderate Democratic senators, including West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Krysten Sinema, have voiced direct opposition to the walk or said it should not be included in pandemic legislation.
The Senate MP may further complicate matters with the ruling that the minimum wage measure cannot be included in the pandemic bill.
For now, the Senate’s most progressive sponsors of the measure are not openly pressuring Biden to step up its campaign for a higher minimum wage.
Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said he has focused largely on getting the parliamentarian’s approval to add the provision to the pandemic bill. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who like Sanders challenged Biden to the left for the Democratic candidacy, has only tweeted that Democrats should “correct this evil.”
Some activists, however, encourage Biden to be more aggressive.
The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor Campaign, said Biden has a “mandate” to secure minimum wage increases, noting that minority Americans were “the first to return to the ranks of the poor.” work, first get infected, first get sick, first die ”during the pandemic.
“We can’t be the last to get relief and the last to be treated and paid properly,” Barber said.
The federal minimum wage has not increased since 2009, the longest stretch without an increase since its inception in 1938. When it adjusts to inflation, the purchasing power of the current $ 7.25 wage has decreased more than ‘one dollar in the last 11 years.
Democrats have long promised an increase (support for a $ 15 minimum wage was included in the 2016 party political platform), but they have not kept it.
Proponents claim that the coronavirus has made the higher minimum wage even more urgent, as the workers who earn it are people of color disproportionately. The Liberal Institute of Economic Policy found that more than 19% of Hispanic workers and more than 14% of black workers earned hourly wages that kept them below federal poverty guidelines in 2017.
Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans in the U.S. also have hospitalization and mortality rates for COVID-19 that are two to four times higher than whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
People of color are a vital part of the Biden constituency, which accounts for 38% of their support in the November election, according to AP VoteCast, a nationwide poll of the electorate.
Adrianne Shropshire. the executive director of BlackPAC, noted that Biden has promised to address racial inequalities and create a fairer economy. That means he now has a chance to make sure hourly wage earners “come out of this pandemic in better condition than those who got into it.”
“The recovery around COVID should not be just about stabilizing and getting people back to zero,” Shropshire said. “It should be about how we create opportunities to move people beyond where they were.”
The White House says Biden is not giving up on the issue. His comments on CBS, according to an aide, reflected his own assessment of where the MP would govern based on his decades of experience in the Senate dealing with similar negotiations.
Biden suggested in the same interview that he was ready to start an “independent negotiation” on raising the minimum wage, but White House press secretary Jen Psaki did not provide further details on the future of the proposal if in fact it cuts off the final coronavirus aid bill.
One option could be to force the move if Vice President Kamala Harris, as Speaker of the Senate, overturns the MP. But Psaki was clearly opposed to this: “Our view is that the parliamentarian is the one who is usually chosen to make a decision in a non-partisan way.”
Navin Nayak, executive director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the political arm of the progressive thinking group, said he was not surprised by Biden’s assessment, but that he still feels the White House is making good faith efforts. .
“They don’t put that in to lose it, they win it,” Nayak said.
Nayak also noted that Biden’s comments came ahead of the Congressional Budget Office’s projection that he found 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 would reduce the more expensive workforce.
Sanders and other supporters argue that the OBC’s finding that raising the minimum wage will increase the deficit means it has an impact on the budget and should therefore be allowed as part of COVID’s relief bill. But that will ultimately depend on the Senate MP.
For Wise, the possible obstacles of Congress pale in comparison to the realities of the real world.
He earns $ 14 an hour and his fiancé works as a home health professional. But when he went into quarantine due to possible exposure to the coronavirus and missed work to care for his three daughters, it wasn’t long before the family received a notice of eviction.
People “think it’s something we’re doing wrong. Let’s work. We are productive. We are law-abiding citizens, ”said Wise. “It shouldn’t be like that.”
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Associated Press writers Alan Fram and Kevin Freking collaborated.
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Eds: This story has been updated to CORRECT the spelling of Terrence Wise’s first name.