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WASHINGTON (AP) – Labor activist Terrence Wise remembers being mocked when he started pushing for a national minimum wage of $ 15 an hour almost ten years ago. Almost a year after the start of the pandemic, the idea is not so funny.
The coronavirus has renewed its focus on the challenges faced by hourly workers who have continued to work in grocery stores, gas stations and other places in person even as much of the workforce has shifted to virtual environments. President Joe Biden responded by including a provision in the Massive Pandemic Relief Bill that would more than double the minimum wage from $ 7.25 to $ 15 an hour.
But the effort faces an unexpected roadblock: Biden himself. The president has apparently undermined the drive to raise the minimum wage by acknowledging his weak prospects in Congress, where he faces political opposition and procedural hurdles.
It’s frustrating for activists like Wise, who fear their victory will be snatched at the last minute despite an administration that is otherwise an outspoken ally.
“To get it this close to the door, they have to do it,” said Wise, a 41-year-old department manager at a Kansas City McDonald’s and a national leader of Fight for 15, an organized labor movement. “They need to feel the pressure.”
The minimum wage debate highlights one of the central tensions emerging at the start of Biden’s presidency. He won the White House with promises to respond to the pandemic with a barrage of liberal policy proposals. But as a 36-year Senate veteran, Biden is particularly sensitive to political dynamics on Capitol Hill and can be blunt in his assessments.
“I don’t think it will survive,” Biden recently told CBS News, referring to the minimum wage hike.
There is a certain political realism in Biden’s remark.
With the Senate also divided, the proposal does not have the 60 votes necessary to be elected on its own. Democrats could use an obscure budget procedure that would tie the minimum wage to the pandemic response bill and allow it to pass with a simple majority vote.
But even that is not easy. Some moderate Democratic senators, including Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, have expressed their categorical opposition to the hike or have said it should not be included in pandemic legislation.
The Senate parliamentarian could complicate matters further with a ruling that the minimum wage measure cannot be included in the pandemic bill.
For now, the more progressive supporters in the Senate are not openly pressuring Biden to step up his campaign for a higher minimum wage.
Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said he was largely focused on getting parliamentary approval to insert the provision on the pandemic bill. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who like Sanders challenged left-wing Biden for the Democratic nomination, only tweeted that Democrats should “fix this.”
Some activists, however, encourage Biden to be more aggressive.
The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Campaign of the Poor, said Biden had a “mandate” to secure the minimum wage increases, noting that minority Americans were “the first to return to the country. work, get infected first, get sick first, die first ”during the pandemic.
“We cannot be the last to receive relief and the last to be treated and paid for properly,” Barber said.
The federal minimum wage has not been increased since 2009, the longest period without an increase since its inception in 1938. Adjusted for inflation, the purchasing power of the current wage of $ 7.25 has fallen by more than one dollar over the past 11 years or more. .
Democrats have long promised a raise – support for a $ 15 minimum wage was included in the party’s political platform in 2016 – but have not followed through.
Supporters say the coronavirus has made a higher minimum wage all the more urgent because the workers who earn it are disproportionately people of color. The Liberal Institute for Economic Policy 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 hospitalization and death rates from COVID-19 that are two to four times higher than whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
People of color are a vital part of Biden’s constituency, constituting 38% of its support in the November election, according to AP VoteCast, a national voter survey.
Adrianne Shropshire. Executive Director of BlackPAC, noted that Biden has pledged to tackle racial inequality and create a more just economy. This means he now has a chance to ensure that hourly workers “come out of this pandemic in better shape than they have been”.
“The recovery around COVID shouldn’t just be about how to stabilize and bring people back to zero,” Shropshire said. “It should be about how we create opportunities to move people beyond where they are.”
The White House says Biden is not giving up on the issue. His comments to CBS, an aide said, reflected his own assessment of where the parliamentarian would vote based on his decades of Senate experience in similar negotiations.
Biden suggested in the same interview that he was ready to engage in a “separate negotiation” on the increase in the minimum wage, but White House press secretary Jen Psaki provided no further detail on the future of the proposal if it was in fact cut off from the final coronavirus. help invoice.
One option could be to force the passage by asking Vice President Kamala Harris, as Speaker of the Senate, to override the parliamentarian. But Psaki clearly objected to this: “We are of the opinion that the parliamentarian is the one who is usually chosen to make a decision in a non-partisan manner.”
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 at Biden’s assessment, but still feels the White House is making mistakes. good faith efforts.
“They don’t put that in there to lose it – they put it in there to gain it,” Nayak said.
Nayak also noted that Biden’s comments came ahead of a Congressional Budget Office projection that the proposal would help lift millions of Americans out of poverty but increase the federal deficit and cost 1.4 million jobs as the employers would cut more expensive workforces.
Sanders and other supporters say the CBO’s finding that increasing the minimum wage will increase the deficit means it has an impact on the budget – and therefore should be allowed under the COVID relief bill . But it will ultimately be the parliamentary Senate.
For Wise, the potential obstacles in Congress are pale compared to real-world realities.
He earns $ 14 an hour and his fiancé works as a home health professional. But when she went into quarantine due to possible exposure to the coronavirus and ran out of work looking after their three daughters, it wasn’t long before the family received notice of expulsion.
People “think it’s something we’re doing wrong. We are going to work. We are productive. We are law-abiding citizens, ”said Wise. “It shouldn’t be so.”
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Associated Press editors 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.
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