If Barack Obama leaves the White House in January without having increased the federal minimum wage during his two terms it will be Republicans’ fault, US labor secretary Tom Perez said.

It’s very likely that this will be the case and the minimum wage will remain at $7.25, where it has been since July 2009. If so, Obama will be the third president to fail to raise the rate since the minimum wage was enacted in 1938.

“What we see throughout the country is people reacting to the fact that the Republican Congress has refused to exercise leadership on minimum wage,” Perez told the Guardian. “It’s very frustrating and totally preventable that President Obama is about to become the third president – only the third president since [Franklin D Roosevelt] – who hasn’t had an opportunity to sign an increase in minimum wage, and the reason that’s the case is Republican intransigence.

“They are so hellbent on making sure they never deliver a legislative victory to this president, and if they hurt their own constituents, so be it. It’s not hard to figure out why there is a revolt in the Republican party.”

This summer marked seven years since the last increase in federal minimum wage, a hike signed into law by George W Bush. The other two presidents who did not enact a hike in the minimum wage were Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. (The minimum wage did go up while Ford was president, though, since Richard Nixon had signed a law increasing the minimum wage just months prior to his resignation.)

According to Perez, GOP lawmakers nowadays often vote against the interests of their constituents – especially on the minimum wage. In 2014, four states that tend to vote Republican – Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota – voted to increase their state minimum wage.

“The American people understand that seven and a quarter is not enough to live on, but the Republican leadership here in the Congress hasn’t gotten that memo,” Perez said.

Donald Trump seems to have gotten the memo. After flip-flopping on the issue, the Republican presidential candidate recently came out in support of increasing the federal minimum wage to $10 an hour.

The minimum wage is not the only issue on which the Obama administration and congressional Republicans have failed to see eye to eye.

Last year, the Republican-held Congress passed Obama’s $300bn highway bill, focused on improving US infrastructure such as roads and bridges, after a long-running dispute over federal tax policy. The five-year funding bill was signed just before a three-month stop-gap bill extending transportation funding was about to expire. Obama previously scolded GOP lawmakers for being unable to agree to a long-term deal on time and for “leaving all the business of the US government until the last minute”.



Another point of contention between Obama and the Republicans in Congress has been GOP opposition to government spending. Whereas the Obama administration has argued that investing in the economy would help the US recover from recession, Republicans have led the charge on spending cuts and even allowed the US government to shut down for two weeks in 2013.

“If we had the investment rates that we saw during the Reagan administration now, we would have an unemployment rate that would be probably two to three tenths of a percent lower than it currently is,” Perez said. “But the lingering effect of sequester [the automatic budget cuts that were included in the 2011 Budget Control Act] has a dramatically negative impact on government hiring and it also had on a federal level and on state and local level.”

Government hiring usually recovers fast during the early stages of the recovery, but it did not do so this time around, Perez said. It took much longer.

“Now we are seeing some real rebound in government jobs, which tend to be solid middle class jobs,” said Perez, pointing to the jobs report released on Friday. “We saw 25,000 jobs gained last month and we have seen 164,000 jobs over the last year. If you look at two years ago, that’s a significant bump from what we saw in the previous twelve months stretch.”

From August 2014 to August 2015, another 130,000 government jobs were added. The twelve months before that, it was just 44,000 jobs.