Sanders blasts Congress for ignoring its own workforce

Sen. Bernie Sanders blasted his fellow lawmakers on Tuesday for looking the other way as contract workers on its payroll struggle to make ends meet.

Speaking at the Lutheran Church of the Reformation just a few blocks away from the Capitol, Sanders joined calls on Congress from low-wage workers and a number of religious leaders to raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $15 an hour.


“There is no justice when millions of people throughout our country, including people working in the United States Senate, are working for wages that are too little to take care of their kids, to take care of their family. That’s wrong, that has got to change,” Sanders said. “There is no justice in America when the largest low-wage employer is not McDonalds, it is not Burger King, it is not Walmart. It is the United States government.”

Sanders, in his short speech, met with loud applause from the crowd of workers striking to highlight Pope Francis' calls to focus more on reducing poverty when he demanded that President Barack Obama sign an executive order raising the minimum wage and giving federal contractors the option to form a union. Obama last year signed an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $10.10 per hour, and Democrats in Congress introduced a bill to boost the federal minimum wage to $12 by 2020.

But Sanders wants more.

“The time has come for federal contractors to pay all of their workers no less than $15 an hour, with decent benefits and with the right to form a union,” Sanders continued.

"When we talk about morality and when we talk about justice, we must understand there is no justice when so few have so much and so many have so little," he said.