WASHINGTON – Bernie Sanders, Josh Hawley and Amazon are not usually on the same side of an issue.
But years of stagnant wages that failed to keep up with the cost of living and the political realignment spurred by Donald Trump are bringing together more than just Sanders, Vermont’s independent senator; Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri; and Amazon, one of America’s largest companies.
Minimum wage policies were scrambled, dividing the business community and making strange bedmates of populists on the right and left.
Progressives were outraged after the White House consented to a Senate congressman’s decision that an increase in the minimum wage to $ 15 an hour could not be included in the Covid-19 aid bill being discussed in Congress. President Joe Biden promised to try again.
For the first time in years, Democrats can find a receptive audience of big business interests and some Republicans to raise the minimum wage – though not entirely to $ 15. Even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the titan of the Washington business lobby, says the current $ 7.25 federal minimum is “out of date”.
Holly Sklar, who heads a coalition of hundreds of companies that support a $ 15 minimum wage called Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, said, “It’s 2021. Whatever people thought of $ 15 in 2012, 2013, 2014 or 2015, a lot of time has passed. It should be different. The world has changed. “
‘What business do they have?’
Corporate America is in the midst of a reboot, not just because of the Democratic takeover of Washington, but also because of the radical changes that companies say respond to public claims about race and justice.
What the left sees as a realignment has generated some conservative reaction.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference, which was once a bastion of pro-business libertarianism, a panel last month condemned the “Awakening of Corporate America”. But at the same conference, Trump campaign veteran Steve Cortes argued that a $ 15 minimum wage should be a key pillar of a future Republican platform, along with “border sovereignty” and “toughness in trade”.
Amazon, which raised its starting salary to $ 15 an hour, is trying to lead the charge, and is actively lobbying Congress, after placing full-page ads in The New York Times supporting the Salary Increase Act. Target and Best Buy also set their lowest wages at $ 15 an hour, while Walmart set the minimum at $ 11 and Costco’s just jumped to $ 16.
“We saw the positive impact this had on our employees, their families and their communities,” said Amazon in a blog post.
Bipartisan support is growing, though not necessarily for $ 15.
At least six Republican senators have spoken out in favor of raising their wages to $ 10 an hour or more; Hawley proposed a salary of $ 15 an hour for companies with revenues of more than $ 1 billion.
“For decades, the salaries of everyday American workers have remained stagnant while monopolistic companies have consolidated industry after industry, ensuring record profits for CEOs and investment bankers,” Hawley, a potential presidential candidate who faced heat after rooting for Trump supporters outside Capitol on January 6, said in a statement.
Others on the right view Amazon’s action as self-serving. Critics who point to other parts of Washington that are putting pressure on Amazon, part of it because of antitrust concerns and the company’s working conditions, argue that the company could use some points of goodwill.
And they say that Amazon does not speak for business, but rather tries to put its competitors out of the market, forcing an increase in costs that small businesses could not absorb.
“Is it to please the new Biden government? I have to say yes,” said Alfred Ortiz, CEO of Job Creators Network, a conservative small business network founded by Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus. “What business are they dictating to these small businesses that they should pay $ 15 an hour?”
The group recently put up a billboard in Times Square in New York asking, “How does Amazon destroy its Main Street competitors without getting dirty?” The answer: “They get Congress to approve a $ 15 minimum wage.”
Amazon’s move to $ 15 came only after Sanders introduced a bill in 2018 dubbed the “Stop BEZOS Act”, which would have forced companies like Amazon, founded by Jeff Bezos, to pay the bill for network programs. government security used by employees, such as food stamps.
“We listened to our critics, we thought a lot about what we wanted to do and decided that we want to lead,” said Bezos at the time.
Opponents of raising the minimum wage increasingly point to Amazon portraying its struggle as one that pits big companies against small ones, especially as Amazon’s profits soared while small restaurants and family stores were hammered by the pandemic-induced recession.
“If you are already paying more than $ 15, it is in your interest that your competitors pay more than $ 15 as well,” said Jerry Parrish, chief economist at the Florida Chamber Foundation, who fought in a referendum to raise the minimum wage. last year.
‘Make a deal’
Traditionally, the minimum wage has been broken through a simple division in Washington – businesses and their Republican allies on the one hand and workers and their Democratic allies on the other.
But the minimum wage struggle is now divided into three fields, none of which are perfectly in line with the expected ideological or business groups: there are those who support a full $ 15 minimum wage, those who oppose any increase in wages and a large group in the middle open to raise the minimum to, say, $ 10 an hour, but not entirely to $ 15.
The third camp includes centrists in Congress, such as Sens. Joe Manchin, DW.Va., and Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and leading business lobbies, such as the Business Roundtable, which represents some of the most powerful CEOs in the world, and the Chamber of Commerce.
The chamber, with its imposing Beaux Arts headquarters in the White House’s Lafayette Square, supported Republicans almost exclusively in Congressional elections until a turnaround last year, when directors grew tired of Trump’s trade wars and unpredictable governance.
Last year, the chamber supported 23 freshman Democrats – including 18 who voted for a $ 15 minimum wage – and 29 freshman Republicans, compared with just seven Democrats and 191 Republicans in the previous election cycle.
“We are open to discussions about raising the minimum wage,” said Glenn Spencer, the chamber’s senior vice president for employment policy. “The question is whether there are enough Democrats willing to make a deal that will result in an increase in the minimum wage? Or will the progressives keep their $ 15 politically motivated and end up with zero?”
Polls consistently show that the majority of Americans support raising the minimum wage, including a strong contingent of Republicans. An increasing number of large cities and states have set their own wage floors at $ 15.
Florida voters last year overwhelmingly approved the referendum, voting from 61% to 39% to raise the state’s minimum wage to $ 15, even when they voted for Trump. And Arkansas, a relatively low-income and deeply conservative state, has set the minimum value at $ 11.
Some business and Republican groups see what is written on the wall and rush to resolve the problem.
The National Federation of Independent Companies has taken a tougher line of rhetoric against minimum wage increases than the Chamber of Commerce or the Business Roundtable, for example, although all have emphasized the need to isolate small businesses.
“Small businesses are much less likely than large ones to have cash reserves or profit margins to absorb rising labor costs,” wrote Kevin Kuhlman, vice president of the National Federation of Independent Business, in a letter to lawmakers this month past.
Democrats have also been sensitive to this issue. When the minimum wage measure was removed from the Covid-19 relief project, Sanders launched the idea of imposing tax penalties on large companies that pay less than $ 15 an hour and offer tax incentives for small companies that pay more.
The plan was abandoned and an autonomous amendment to raise the salary to $ 15 failed in the Senate on Friday, with eight Democrats voting against it.
With Manchin opposing $ 15, Democrats may have to try to reach an agreement, much to the dismay of the left.
“I think Democrats settling for less than $ 15 is political suicide, given the moment,” said Joseph Geevarghese, who ran the $ 15 Fight campaign and is now the executive director of Our Revolution, a progressive activist group aligned with Sanders.
The negotiations could be the first real test of whether commercial interests are really interested in turning a new page with the new government. They may need to put some pressure on Republican senators to get the necessary 60 votes.
Meanwhile, hard-working activists like Sara Fearrington, a servant at a Waffle House in Durham, North Carolina, say they will continue to fight for a higher salary.
“We will continue striking, we will continue to organize and we will continue to dispute the table until we succeed,” she said.