While workers continue to demand $15 an hour, Democrats struggle to raise minimum wage that has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009

Democrats prepared another push for an increase in the minimum wage on Thursday. The Democratic leadership will join Washington senator Patty Murray and Virginia congressman Bobby Scott this afternoon as they introduce the Raise the Wage Act that would increase the US federal minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020.

Under the proposed legislation, the federal minimum wage, which is currently $7.25 an hour, would be raised to $8 next year and then go up a dollar a year until it reaches $12 in 2020. According to the lawmakers, the bill would increase wages for nearly 38 million American workers.

Adjusting for inflation raising the minimum wage to $12 by 2020 would return the minimum wage to where it was in 1968, the Economic Policy Institute said Thursday morning. In 1968, the minimum wage was 52.1% of the median wage. Current minimum wage is about 37.1% of the median wage.

“Raising the federal minimum wage to $12.00 by 2020, under the conservative assumption of no real wage growth at the median, would leave the ratio at 54.1%, just above where it was in 1968,” EPI wrote in a report released Thursday.

The proposal comes at a time when income inequality has attracted attention of the likes of the Pope and 2016 presidential candidates. Poverty wages and lack of jobs have also been at the core of the unrest in places like Ferguson and Baltimore, where protests broken out after the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, respectively. In Gray’s neighborhood in Baltimore, more than a third of households are in poverty, and 51.2% of households reported that their annual income is less than $25,000.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Patty Murray, the Washington state Democrat, was once famously dubbed just a mom in tennis shoes. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP

“In our country, no one who works hard in a full-time job should have to live in poverty. But for decades, families across the country have faced stagnant wages that have made it harder and harder to make ends meet,” Murray told the Guardian earlier this month. “I believe raising the minimum wage to $12 by 2020 will allow more families to achieve the economic security they are working so hard for, and help build an economy that works for all families, not just the wealthiest few.”

This congressional session, Murray and Scott are taking over where Senator Tom Harkin and Representative George Miller left off. Harkin and Miller, both of whom retired from US Congress this year, had in previous sessions attempted to increase the minimum wage to $10.10. The $10.10 minimum wage has also been championed by the White House.

“To everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: if you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise,” Obama said in this year’s State of the Union address.



Forget Congress, these US states raised the minimum wage on their own Read more

The US federal minimum wage was last raised in July 2009 and has remained at $7.25 ever since. In 2013, more than 1.5 million workers earned $7.25 an hour while more than 1.7 million workers earned less than that thanks to the tipped minimum wage. Since 1996, the federal tipped minimum wage for workers such as servers and bartenders has been $2.13. The Raise the Wage Act seeks to gradually eliminate the sub-minimum tipped wage. So far, only eight states have passed legislation eliminating this kind of sub-wage, requiring all workers to be paid a statewide minimum wage before tips.

As Congress has been slow to act, a number of states have taken the matters into their own hands and increased their state minimum wage above the federal threshold. In 2015, workers in more than 20 states were paid more than the federally mandated minimum wage.

Congress is out of step with the nationwide efforts to increase the minimum wage, said Miller. According to him, higher minimum wage is “just critical to strengthen the economy”. His efforts to pass a $10.10 minimum wage were repeatedly thwarted by his Republican counterparts. The $12 an hour proposal is likely to face similar challenge.

“I don’t know that the Republicans will vote for anything,” he told the Guardian, adding that Republican leadership in Congress is out of touch with the needs of working Americans. “I think it’s a very interesting lesson why they keep coming out against it based upon just ideology when people who have to make decisions based upon profits and losses are making decisions every day to increase the wages of their workers.”

In the past few months, US companies such as Walmart, Target, Tj Maxx and even McDonald’s vowed to raise the pay of their employees above the federal minimum wage. The workers, who on 15 April took to the streets in what was the largest low-wage workers protest in US history, say that a dollar or two more in pay is not enough and continue to lobby for $15 an hour.

“We are encouraged to see that our elected leaders are beginning to hear our calls for change and discussing wages and inequality in our country. While $12 by 2020 is a good first step, it still falls short of what working Americans need to raise our families,” Shannon Henderson, who works at a Walmart in Sacramento, California, said in a statement emailed to the Guardian. “At just $10 an hour with no guarantee of full-time hours, I’m struggling today to care for my two young children. I simply can’t wait until 2020 for a decent wage. That’s why we’ll keep standing up for $15 an hour and access to full-time consistent schedules at Walmart.”