Opinon: Democrats, keep your promise on the $15 minimum wage - CNN - 0 views
-
Though raising the minimum wage is supported by two thirds of Americans, corporate interests have successfully framed the issue as a give-and-take between better wages and fewer jobs.
-
Their argument was simple: this wasn't a debate about their needs versus the needs of their employers. It was about what kind of society we wanted to be.
-
During the 1930's, the Social Gospel was a popular religious social reform movement in America and offered a moral framing for many of the reforms of the New Deal. Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted this moral argument when he declared that "no business which depends for its existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country."
- ...2 more annotations...
-
This free market libertarianism still captivates the leadership of the Republican Party, which has touted the most extreme projection of job losses from the Congressional Budget Office's report on the potential impact of raising the minimum wage and suggested, in the words of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, that anything more than poverty-level unemployment benefits for service workers who have been hit hard by the pandemic would "discourage a return to work."
-
Raising the minimum wage is not a "far left" or "liberal" issue. It is a moral issue that would, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, lift pay for up to 33 million low-wage workers— including nearly 40% of all African-American workers.