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Weekly Address: President Obama – Calling on Congress to Raise the Minimum Wage

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From the White House – Weekly Address

This week, President Obama took action to lift more workers’ wages by requiring that federal contractors pay their employees a fair wage of at least $10.10 an hour. In this week’s address, he highlights that executive action and calls on Congress to pass a bill to raise the federal minimum wage for all workers.

Transcript: Calling on Congress to Raise the Minimum Wage

Hi, everybody. In this year of action, I said I’d do everything in my power to expand opportunity for more Americans.  And this week, I took action to lift more workers’ wages by requiring federal contractors to pay their employees a fair wage of at least $10.10 an hour.  These are workers who serve our troops’ meals, wash their dishes, care for our veterans – Americans who work hard and will get a raise as these contracts come up.  This will be good for contractors, for taxpayers, and for America’s bottom line.

We know why this is important.  Our economy has been growing for four years.  Our businesses have created eight and a half million new jobs.  But while those at the top are doing better than ever, average wages have barely budged.  Too many Americans are working harder than ever just to get by, let alone get ahead.  And that’s been true since long before the recession hit.

That’s why we’ve got to build an economy that works for everybody, not just a fortunate few.  We’ve got to restore opportunity for all – the notion that no matter who you are or how you started out, with hard work and responsibility, you can get ahead in America.

The opportunity agenda I’ve laid out is built on more new jobs that pay good wages; better training for folks to fill those jobs; a smarter education for our kids; and making sure honest work is rewarded.  And the action I took this week will reward hard work for more Americans.

But to finish the job, Congress needs to act.  In the year since I first asked Congress to raise the minimum wage, six states have passed laws to raise theirs.  More states, cities, counties, and companies are taking steps to join them.  An overwhelming majority of Americans support raising a minimum wage that’s worth about 20% less than when Ronald Reagan took office.

Right now, there’s a bill in Congress that would boost America’s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour.  That’s easy to remember: ten-ten.  And remember, the average worker who would get a raise if Congress acts is about 35 years old.  Most lower-wage jobs are held by women.  And raising the minimum wage wouldn’t just raise their wages – its effect would lift wages for about 28 million Americans. It would lift millions of Americans out of poverty, and help millions more work their way out of poverty – without requiring a single dollar in new taxes or spending.  It will give more businesses more customers with more money to spend – and that means growing the economy for everyone.

You deserve to know where the people who represent you stand on this.  If they don’t support raising the federal minimum wage to ten-ten an hour, ask them “why not?”  The opponents of raising folks’ wages have deployed the same old arguments for years, and time and again, they’ve been proven wrong.  Let’s prove them wrong again, and give America a raise.  Let’s make opportunity easier to come by for every American who’s willing to work for it.

Thanks, and have a great weekend.

Bolding added.

~

Editor’s Note: The President’s Weekly Address diary is also the weekend open news thread. Feel free to leave links to other news items in the comment threads.


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/ 19 Comments

19 comments

  1. JanF

    Five Reasons It Makes Sense For Obama To Back A $10.10 Minimum Wage

    5. Americans support it: A recent poll showed that 80 percent of Americans support raising the wage to $10.10 an hour, and that includes two-thirds of Republicans and nearly 80 percent of those making $100,000 or more. On Tuesday, voters approved minimum wage increases in New Jersey and a town in Washington and they also approved raises in the 2012 elections in three other cities. In fact, when given the opportunity, voters nearly always approve minimum wage raises by substantial majorities.

    In Wisconsin, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke supports a hike in the minimum wage. One term Gov. Scott Walker (R) trots out the discredited GOP talking points that claim it kills jobs (those “studies” are so old that they show that only teenagers earn minimum wages … hello! in 2014 America, minimum wage jobs are what families are trying to support themselves on). It will be interesting to see how that plays out in the general election.

  2. JanF

    Over 600 Economists Sign Letter In Support of $10.10 Minimum Wage

    Dear Mr. President, Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader Reid, Congressman Cantor, Senator McConnell, and Congresswoman Pelosi:

    July will mark five years since the federal minimum wage was last raised. We urge you to act now and enact a three-step raise of 95 cents a year for three years – which would mean a minimum wage of $10.10 by 2016 – and then index it to protect against inflation. Senator Tom Harkin and Representative George Miller have introduced legislation to accomplish this. The increase to $10.10 would mean that minimum-wage workers who work full time, full year would see a raise from their current salary of roughly $15,000 to roughly $21,000. These proposals also usefully raise the tipped minimum wage to 70% of the regular minimum.

    This policy would directly provide higher wages for close to 17 million workers by 2016. Furthermore, another 11 million workers whose wages are just above the new minimum would likely see a wage increase through “spillover” effects, as employers adjust their internal wage ladders. The vast majority of employees who would benefit are adults in working families, disproportionately women, who work at least 20 hours a week and depend on these earnings to make ends meet. At a time when persistent high unemployment is putting enormous downward pressure on wages, such a minimum-wage increase would provide a much-needed boost to the earnings of low-wage workers.

    In recent years there have been important developments in the academic literature on the effect of increases in the minimum wage on employment, with the weight of evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market. Research suggests that a minimum-wage increase could have a small stimulative effect on the economy as low-wage workers spend their additional earnings, raising demand and job growth, and providing some help on the jobs front.

    Sincerely,

    (list of signers)

    It makes sense for the economy and it makes sense for improving the lives of ordinary Americans.

  3. JanF

    Which Kinds Of Interracial Couples Spark Outrage?

    Last year, the cereal brand Cheerios released a commercial that featured an interracial couple and their biracial daughter. The racist backlash against seeing a black man with a white woman was so severe that Cheerios had to disable comments on its YouTube account.[…]

    Many brands over the last several years have had ads that feature black women with white men, and yet they didn’t cause anywhere near the level of controversy as the Cheerios ads. Why does seeing a black man with a white woman stir up a hornet’s nest of racism, but not the reverse? America’s history is rich with fear of black male sexuality, as evidenced in cultural markers such as the silent film Birth of a Nation and the brutal death of Emmett Till, a teenager accused of whistling at a white woman.

  4. JanF

    Wiki:

    Stockholm syndrome can be seen as a form of traumatic bonding, which does not necessarily require a hostage scenario, but which describes “strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.”

    Battered-person syndrome is an example of activating the capture-bonding psychological mechanism.

    Tennessee VW Workers Reject Move To Join Union

    Some 1,500 workers at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee have voted not to join the United Auto Workers union. The tally of the three-day vote follows days of political prodding from both sides of the issue.

    The vote was 712 to 626.

    The Republican governor had threatened to withhold any further tax breaks from Volkswagen if their workers voted to join the union. VW had been planning to expand their facility, which would result in 1,000 new jobs, but they wanted the unionization because they wanted the “work councils” which increase productivity and quality.

    “VW wants a German-style ‘works council’ in Chattanooga to give employees a say over working conditions,” the AP says. “But the company says U.S. law won’t allow it without an independent union.”

    It is unknown whether VW will decide to expand their plant in Mexico instead, given the threats of the Tennessee state government.

    “Battered-Southern-worker syndrome: where your state’s partisan ideology trumps jobs and working conditions but you keep voting them in; see also West Virginia”

  5. princesspat

    $15 wage floor slowly takes hold in SeaTac

    SeaTac has become a testing ground for raising the minimum wage to a more livable level amid widespread concerns about the growing income gap between rich and poor.

    President Obama is pushing for an increase in the national minimum wage to $10.10 an hour from $7.25, the rate it’s been since 2009.

    As of January, 21 states and Washington, D.C., have minimum wages above the federal requirement, compared with 18 two years ago. Nine additional states could join them by the end of 2014.

    In Olympia, House Democrats want to lift Washington’s hourly wage floor from what already is the highest of any state, at $9.32, to $12 by 2017.

    And in Seattle, Mayor Ed Murray used his first news conference Jan. 3 to direct his staff to move toward raising the minimum wage for city workers to $15, with a broader mandate still under review. A task force made up of local business, community and labor leaders is expected to recommend legislation this spring.

    ~snip~

    For now, the clear winners are low-wage workers such as Vicky Castro, 23, a cashier at WallyPark in SeaTac.

    Castro said she’ll use her 60 percent pay raise to jump-start her college savings. She’s studying biology at Highline Community College and hopes to transfer to a state university for her bachelor’s degree.

    “I really want to go full force in school,” she said. “I don’t want to be a cashier forever.”

  6. JanF

    One count, the murder charge, was a mistrial and he can be retried.

    The guilty counts, even without count 1, mean a lot of years in prison. Will this at least make scared people with guns stop and worry about going to prison? I sure hope so.

  7. princesspat

    Crossing Borders and Changing Lives, Lured by Higher State Minimum Wages

    Carly Lynch dreams of a life one day on the professional rodeo circuit, but for now she commutes 20 miles from Idaho to this small city in eastern Oregon to work as a waitress. There are restaurant jobs closer to home, but she is willing to drive the extra miles for a simple reason: Oregon’s minimum wage is $1.85 higher per hour than Idaho’s.

    ~snip~

    Ms. Lynch is one of the many minimum-wage migrants who travel from homes in Idaho, where the rate is $7.25, to work in Oregon, where it is the second highest in the country, $9.10. Similar migrations unfold every day in other parts of Idaho – at the border with Washington, which has the highest state minimum, $9.32, and into Nevada, where the minimum rate tops out at $8.25.

  8. princesspat

    Seattle 1-percenter a leader in push for $15 minimum wage

    Know him or not, in 2014, Seattle venture capitalist Nick Hanauer’s politics are sure to be in your face – and headed for your ballot.

    As a renegade member of the 1 percent, Hanauer is trying to tilt the debate over what makes the economy tick, arguing against the conservative dogma that the wealthy are “job creators.”

    Or, as he likes to put it, “Prosperity isn’t something that squirts out of rich people.” It’s a result of policies that boost the wages of average workers, he says.

    Hanauer has become a leading advocate for spiking the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. While that’s unlikely to happen on a national level, Hanauer is part of a panel appointed by Seattle Mayor Ed Murray working up a $15-minimum-wage plan for the city.

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