WASHINGTON (AP) – Union activist Terrence Wise recalls being laughed at when he started aiming for a national minimum wage of $ 15 an hour nearly a decade ago. Almost a year after the pandemic, the idea isn’t all that funny.
The coronavirus has renewed the focus on challenges faced by hourly workers who have continued to work in supermarkets, gas stations and other personal locations, even as much of the workforce has shifted to virtual environments. President Joe Biden has responded by including a provision in the massive pandemic bill that more than doubles the minimum wage from the current $ 7.25 to $ 15 an hour.
But the effort faces an unexpected roadblock: Biden himself. The president has seemingly undermined the drive to raise the minimum wage by acknowledging the weak prospects in Congress, where it 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 a government that is otherwise an outspoken ally.
“To have it this close to the door, they have to get it done,” 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 must feel the pressure.”
The minimum wage debate highlights one of the central tensions that arose in the early days of Biden’s presidency. He won the White House with pledges to respond to the pandemic with a barrage of liberal policy proposals. But as a 36-year Senate veteran, Biden is particularly well-tuned to the political dynamics on Capitol Hill and can be blunt in his assessments.
“I don’t think it will survive,” Biden recently told CBS News, referring to the minimum wage hike.
There is a certain political realism to Biden’s comment.
With the Senate evenly split, the proposal does not have the 60 votes needed to speak on its own. Democrats could use a secretive budget procedure that would tie the minimum wage to the pandemic response law and pass it through with a simple majority vote.
But even that is not easy. Some moderate Democratic senators, including Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, have either outright opposed the increase or have said it should not be included in the pandemic law.
The Senate MP may further complicate matters by ruling that the minimum wage measure cannot be included in the pandemic law.
For now, the most progressive backers of the measure are not openly pressuring Biden to step up his campaign for a higher minimum wage.
Bernie Sanders, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, has said he is largely focused on getting the MP’s approval to put the provision on the pandemic bill. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who, like Sanders, challenged Biden from the left for the Democratic nomination, has only tweeted that Democrats “need to get this wrong.”
However, some activists are encouraging Biden to be more aggressive.
Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, the co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, said Biden has a “mandate” to ensure minimum wage increases, noting that minority Americans were “the first to return to work, get infected first,” get sick first, die first ”during the pandemic.
“We cannot be the last to get relief and the last to be properly treated and paid,” Barber said.
The federal minimum wage has not increased since 2009, the longest no-increase trajectory since its inception in 1938. Adjusted for inflation, the purchasing power of the current wage of $ 7.25 has fallen more than a dollar over the past 11 years. .
Democrats have long promised a raise – support for a $ 15 minimum wage was included in the party’s political platform in 2016 – but have not delivered.
Proponents say the coronavirus has made a higher minimum wage all the more urgent, as workers who earn it are disproportionately colored people. The Liberal Economic Policy Institute found that more than 19% of Spanish workers and more than 14% of black workers earned an hourly wage, keeping them below federal poverty levels in 2017.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans in the US also have the rate of hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 that are two to four times higher than for Caucasians.
People of color are a vital part of Biden’s constituency, which, according to AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of the electorate, makes up 38% of its support in the November election.
Adrianne Shropshire. Executive Director of BlackPAC, noted that Biden has pledged to tackle racial inequalities and create a fairer economy. That means he now has the opportunity to ensure that the hourly workers “get out of this pandemic in better shape than they got into”.
“The recovery around COVID shouldn’t just be about how to stabilize and get people back to zero,” Shropshire said. “It should be about how we create opportunities to take people further than they were.”
The White House says Biden is not giving up on the matter. His comments to CBS, according to one assistant, reflected his own assessment of where the MP would decide based on his decades of experience in the Senate engaged in similar negotiations.
Biden suggested in the same interview that he is willing to enter into a “ separate negotiation ” about raising the minimum wage, but White House press secretary Jen Psaki gave no further details on the future of the proposal if it is in fact deleted from the definitive coronavirus. support account.
One option might be to force passage by having Vice President Kamala Harris, as Senate President, overrule the MP. But Psaki was clear in his opposition: “Our view is that the MP is usually chosen to make an impartial decision.”
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 believes the White House is making a good faith effort.
“They don’t put this in to lose it – they put it in to win it,” Nayak said.
Nayak also noted that Biden’s comments came before a Congressional Budget Office projection that found that the proposal would help lift millions of Americans out of poverty but increase the federal deficit and cost 1.4 million jobs because employers reduce more expensive labor.
Sanders and other supporters argue that the CBO’s finding that raising the minimum wage increases the deficit means it has budgetary implications – and should therefore be allowed as part of the COVID bill. But that will ultimately be up to the Senate MP.
For Wise, potential hurdles to Congress pale in comparison to real-world reality.
He earns $ 14 an hour and his fiancé works as a home care provider. But when she went into quarantine for possible exposure to the coronavirus and he missed work to care for their three daughters, it didn’t take long for the family to receive an eviction notice.
People “think it’s something we’re doing wrong. We get to work. We are productive. We are law-abiding citizens, ”Wise said. “It shouldn’t be.”
Associated Press writers Alan Fram and Kevin Freking contributed.
Eds: This story has been updated to CORRECT the spelling of Terrence Wise’s first name.