WASHINGTON (AP) – Union activist Terrence Wise remembers being ridiculed when he started pushing for a national minimum wage of $ 15 an hour almost a decade ago. Almost a year after the pandemic began, the idea is not so funny.
The coronavirus renewed its focus on the challenges faced by hourly employees who continued to work in supermarkets, gas stations and other personal places, even when much of the workforce moved to virtual environments. President Joe Biden responded by including a clause in the massive pandemic relief bill that would more than double the minimum wage from the current $ 7.25 to $ 15 an hour.
But the effort is facing an unexpected obstacle: Biden himself. The president apparently undermined the pressure to raise the minimum wage, recognizing his bleak prospects in Congress, where he faces political opposition and procedural obstacles.
This is frustrating for activists like Wise, who fear their victory will be stolen at the last minute, despite a government that is otherwise an open ally.
“To get him so close to the door, they need to do this,” said Wise, a 41-year-old department manager at a McDonald’s in Kansas City and a national leader for Fight for 15, an organized union movement. “They need to feel the pressure.”
The minimum wage debate highlights one of the central tensions emerging in the early days of Biden’s presidency. He won the White House with a promise to respond to the pandemic with a barrage of liberal policy proposals. But as a 36-year veteran in the Senate, Biden is particularly in tune with the political dynamics on Capitol Hill and can be straightforward in his assessments.
“I don’t think it will survive,” Biden told CBS News recently, referring to the increase in the minimum wage.
There is a certain political realism in Biden’s observation.
With the Senate divided equally, the proposal does not have the 60 votes needed to reach the plenary on its own. Democrats could use a mysterious budget procedure that would link the minimum wage to the pandemic response bill and allow it to be approved by a simple majority of votes.
But even that is not easy. Some moderate Democratic senators, including Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, have expressed direct opposition to the increase or said it should not be included in pandemic legislation.
The Senate congressman may further complicate matters with a decision that the minimum wage measure cannot be included in the pandemic bill.
For now, the most progressive supporters of the measure in the Senate are not openly pressing Biden to step up his campaign for a higher minimum wage.
Bernie Sanders, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said he is focused on getting parliamentary approval to include the provision in the pandemic bill. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who like Sanders challenged Biden from the left for the Democratic nomination, just tweeted that Democrats should “fix it wrong”.
Some activists, however, are encouraging Biden to be more aggressive.
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-president of the Campaign for the Poor, said Biden has a “mandate” to guarantee increases in the minimum wage, noting that minority Americans were “the first to return to jobs, first get infected, first get sick, first to die ”during the pandemic.
“We cannot be the last to get relief and the last to receive adequate treatment and payment,” said Barber.
The federal minimum wage has not been increased since 2009, the longest period without an increase since its creation in 1938. When adjusted for inflation, the purchasing power of the current $ 7.25 wage has fallen by more than a dollar in the past 11 years. .
Democrats have long promised an increase – support for a $ 15 minimum wage was added to the party’s political platform in 2016 – but they did not deliver.
Supporters say the coronavirus has made a higher minimum wage even more urgent, since workers who earn it are disproportionately black. The liberal Economic Policy Institute found that more than 19% of Hispanic workers and more than 14% of black workers earned hourly wages that kept them below federal poverty guidelines in 2017.
Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans in the United States also have rates of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 that are two to four times higher than among whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
People of color are a vital part of Biden’s constituency, constituting 38% of their support in the November election, according to AP VoteCast, a national poll of the electorate.
Adrianne Shropshire. executive director of BlackPAC, noted that Biden has promised to address racial inequalities and create a fairer economy. This means that he now has a chance to ensure that wage earners “get out of this pandemic in better shape than they got into it”.
“The recovery around COVID shouldn’t just be about stabilizing and getting people back to zero,” said Shropshire. “It must be about how we create opportunities to take people beyond where they were.”
The White House says Biden is not giving up. His comments to CBS, according to an aide, reflected his own assessment of where the congressman would rule based on his decades of experience in the Senate dealing with similar negotiations.
Biden suggested in the same interview that he is prepared to engage in a “separate negotiation” on raising the minimum wage, but White House press secretary Jen Psaki did not offer further details on the future of the proposal if it is in fact cut from the final coronavirus aid account.
One option could be to force approval by having Vice President Kamala Harris, as President of the Senate, annul the parliamentarian. But Psaki was clear in opposing this: “Our view is that the parliamentarian is the one who is usually chosen to make a decision in a non-partisan way.”
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 feels that the White House is making good faith efforts.
“They are not putting it there to lose – they are putting it there to win,” said Nayak.
Nayak also noted that Biden’s comments were made before a projection by the Congressional Budget Office that concluded that the proposal would help lift millions of Americans out of poverty, but would increase the federal deficit and cost 1.4 million jobs as employers reduce the more expensive workforce.
Sanders and other advocates argue that the CBO’s conclusion that raising the minimum wage will increase the deficit means it will affect the budget – and should therefore be allowed as part of COVID’s relief bill. But ultimately, that will be up to the Senate parliamentarian.
For Wise, the potential obstacles to Congress lessen compared to real-world realities.
He earns $ 14 an hour and her fiance works as a health professional at home. But when she was quarantined because of possible exposure to the coronavirus and he missed work to care for his three daughters, it didn’t take long for the family to receive an eviction notice.
People “think it’s something wrong that we’re doing. Let’s get to work. We are productive. We are law-abiding citizens, ”said Wise. “It shouldn’t have to be that way.”
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Associated Press writers Alan Fram and Kevin Freking contributed.
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Eds: This story has been updated to CORRECT the spelling of Terrence Wise’s first name.