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      A $15 minimum wage isn't just about justice. It's good economics | Steven Greenhouse

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      There’s one important aspect of the fight for a $15 minimum wage that is little understood: the fight isn’t so much about raising pay for a few million workers. Rather it’s about the far more ambitious goal of putting the US economy on a higher road, on a different track from being a low-wage economy. In Europe, many people scoff at the US as a country of low-wage McJobs with paltry benefits – often no paid sick days, no paid vacation and no health insurance. In Denmark, a McDonald’s hamburger flipper averages $22 an hour (with six weeks’ paid vacation), while in the US, fast-food jobs pay half that on average.You might wonder: how can the United States, the world’s wealthiest nation, be a low-wage economy? Of the 37 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the unofficial club of rich and near-rich nations, the US has the third-highest percentage of low-wage workers, with nearly one in four workers defined as low-wage. Only Latvia and Romania are worse. (That study defines low-wage as earning less than two-thirds of a nation’s median wage.) In another study, Brookings found that 53 million Americans hold low-wage jobs, with a median pay of $10.22 an hour and median annual earnings of $17,950.The US also has the lowest minimum wage among the G7 industrial nations in terms of purchasing power. America’s $7.25-an-hour federal minimum is 38% lower than Germany’s and 30% lower than Britain’s, Canada’s and France’s. This helps explain why the US has among the worst income inequality of the 37 OECD nations – only Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica and Bulgaria have greater inequality. And the US has the third highest poverty rate; only Hungary and Costa Rica are worse.The US didn’t always have a low-road economy. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, it had a high-road economy: labor unions were at their strongest, American businesses were booming (for the most part), and corporations shared their profits and prosperity with their workers as never before, helping build the world’s largest and richest middle class. But beginning in the 1980s, many corporations pushed the US economy and American workers on to a lower road, as corporate America felt the sting of global competition, as Wall Street pushed companies ever harder to maximize profits, as labor unions grew weaker and as President Reagan and other Republicans weakened worker protections and did little to raise the minimum wage.The US also has the lowest minimum wage among the G7 industrial nations in terms of purchasing powerBecause of persistent Republican opposition, the federal minimum wage hasn’t increased since July 2009 – the longest stretch without an increase since Congress first enacted a minimum wage in 1938. Franklin Roosevelt signed the minimum wage into law during the Great Depression because he thought workers had far too little bargaining power and consumers far too little purchasing power. Roosevelt urged companies to pay fair wages, saying, “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.”Today’s federal minimum wage is just $7.25 an hour –  try maintaining a decent living at that pay level. The minimum wage is down 18% since it was last raised in 2009, after factoring in inflation, and down over 30%, after inflation, since 1968, during Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society years.America’s business community has staunchly opposed any minimum wage increases, warning that they would push up prices and force some companies out of business. Those leading the charge against a higher minimum – corporate executives and well-paid lobbyists and thinktank fellows – repeatedly say that raising the wage floor would be a job killer. They note that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently estimated that increasing the minimum to $15 by 2025 would reduce employment by 1.4 million, although the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, echoing many economic studies, said a $15 minimum’s effect on jobs would be “very minimal, if anything”. The CBO also predicted that increasing the minimum to $15 would raise the pay of 27 million workers nationwide and increase worker pay overall by $333bn – a step that would stimulate the struggling economy.Corporations, along with their Republican allies, overwhelmingly oppose a $15 minimum; in doing so, however, they ignore the will of the vast majority of Americans. According to a Pew poll, Americans favor a $15 minimum by 67% to 33%. While low-wage workers would be most vulnerable to any job losses caused by a higher minimum, lower-income Americans shows even greater support for a $15 minimum. Pew found that 74% of Americans making under $40,000 a year support a $15 minimum wage, as do 56% of Republicans making under $40,000. Last November, Floridians – even as their state went for Trump – voted 61% to 39% in favor of raising their state’s minimum to $15, joining eight other states that have approved a $15 minimum.Despite such strong public backing for a $15 minimum, it looks doubtful that even one Republican senator – even though the Republican party now describes itself as the party of workers – will vote for a $15 minimum. President Biden has championed a $15 minimum: “No matter where you work in America, if you work full time or 40 hours a week, you should not live in poverty,” he has said. “A $15 minimum wage accomplishes that.” A full-time worker making $7.25 an hour earns $15,080 a year; in contrast, a full-time worker earning $15 will make $31,200. In the face of opposition from Republicans and some congressional Democrats, however, Biden has hinted he might compromise on a lower number.The Economic Policy Institute, a progressive research group, predicts that if the minimum rises to $15, nearly one-third (31%) of African Americans and one-quarter (26%) of Latinos will receive a pay increase. Those pushing for a $15 minimum are carrying on a fight that Martin Luther King Jr, championed: the fight for decent pay and dignity at work. In 1967, the year before he died while fighting for higher wages for sanitation workers in Memphis, King wrote, “There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American whether he [or she] is a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer.”Millions of low-wage workers are still waiting for America to heed King’s social vision. More

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      Bernie Sanders: US sick of subsidizing 'starvation wages' at Walmart and McDonald's

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      US taxpayers should not be “forced to subsidize some of the largest and most profitable corporations in America”, Bernie Sanders told a Senate hearing on Thursday.As Congress debates the first rise in the minimum wage in over a decade, the Vermont senator said he had “talked to too many workers in this country who, with tears in their eyes, tell me the struggles they have to provide for their kids on starvation wages” even as the chief executives of companies including McDonald’s, Walmart and others take home multi-million dollar pay packages.Executives from Walmart and McDonald’s were invited to the hearing, titled Should Taxpayers Subsidize Poverty Wages at Large Profitable Corporations?They declined to appear.The senators heard from low-wage workers from McDonald’s and Walmart. Terence Wise, a McDonald’s employee from Kansas City, Missouri, said his low pay had led to his family becoming homeless.“My family has been homeless despite two incomes. We’ve endured freezing temperatures in our purple minivan. I’d see my daughter’s eyes wide open, tossing and turning, in the back seat. Try waking up in the morning and getting ready for work and school in a parking lot with your family of five,” said Wise.“That’s something a parent can never forget and a memory you can never take away from your children. You should never have multiple jobs in the United States and nowhere to sleep.”Sanders cited a government accountability office (GAO) report that found nearly half of workers who make less than $15 an hour rely on public assistance programs that cost taxpayers $107bn each year.Walmart spent $8.3bn on stock buybacks in 2017, the Walton family, the chain’s founders, are worth over $200bn and have increased their wealth by $50bn since the start of the pandemic, said Sanders. And yet the company “cannot afford to pay its workers at least $15 an hour”.“If Walmart thinks they’re going to avoid answering that question because they’re not here today, they’re deeply mistaken. The American people are sick and tired of subsidizing the wealthiest family in America,” said Sanders.The hearing comes at a tense moment for minimum wage advocates. Joe Biden campaigned on a pledge to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour from its current level of $7.25. The proposal is part of his $1.9tn Covid stimulus package.But that package faces stiff opposition from in the Senate with the Republican minority set to vote against it and some Democrats opposing the wage rise.A recent Congressional Budget Office concluded 27 million Americans would be affected by an increase in the minimum wage to $15, and that 900,000 would be lifted out of poverty. But the CBO also said the increase would lead to 1.4m job losses and increase the federal budget deficit by $54bn over the next 10 years. The Economic Policy Institute, and others, have called the report “wrong, and inappropriately inflated”.Republican Senator Mike Bruin told the hearing that an increase would be unfair on states with a lower cost of living and would hurt small businesses.“We need to slow it down,” he said. “The main result is you are going to hurt Main Street,” he said. More

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      US minimum wage activists face their toughest foe: Democrat Joe Manchin

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      Hopes that the US will finally increase the federal minimum wage for the first time in nearly 12 years face a seemingly unlikely opponent: a Democrat senator from one of the poorest states in the union.Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the state’s former governor and the Democrats’ most conservative senator, has long opposed his party’s progressive wing and is on record saying he does not support increasing the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour, the first increase since 2009. “I’m supportive of basically having something that’s responsible and reasonable,” he told the Hill. He has advocated for a rise to $11.None of this has found favor with some low-wage workers in a state where an estimated 278,734 West Virginians lived in poverty in 2019, 16% of the population and the sixth highest poverty rate in the US.Last Thursday Manchin reaffirmed his stance during a virtual meeting with members of the West Virginia Poor People’s Campaign (WVPPC), a group pushing for an increased minimum wage and other policy changes that would benefit the working class.That meeting was closed to the media but at an online press conference immediately afterward, participants said Manchin refused to budge. “He was kind of copping out,” said WVPPC member Brianna Griffith, a restaurant worker and whitewater rafting guide who, due to exemptions for tipped workers, only makes $2.62 an hour.As a result of her sub-minimum wage job, Griffith received only $67 a week in unemployment benefits until that ran out in August. She lost her house and was forced to move in with her grandmother. Although she has now returned to work, business is slow and she estimates tips have fallen by 75%.When Griffith told Manchin about her plight on Thursday, she said he asked about the $600 stimulus check approved by Congress in December. “He seemed to think that $600 … was enough to get me by,” she said. “I feel like he’s got his head in the clouds and he doesn’t understand what’s happening to poor people in West Virginia.”Despite Manchin’s insistence on an $11 minimum wage, according to MIT’s living wage calculator, even a $15 minimum wage would only provide a living wage for single West Virginians without children. For a West Virginia family with two working parents and two children, both parents would need to be making at least $20.14 an hour to make ends meet.Griffith said if the minimum wage was increased to $15 an hour, “I could afford to live on my own. I could afford a car that’s not 25 years old.”The Rev Dr William Barber, co-chair of the national Poor People’s Campaign, was in last week’s meeting and said Manchin agreed the current $7.25 minimum wage was “not enough”.But Barber said he was “amazed” Manchin could hear from people like Griffith and still oppose increasing the minimum wage to $15.“What he is suggesting would just further keep people in poverty and hurting,” he said.Raising the minimum wage was a key part of Democrats’ 2020 platform. The former presidential candidate and now Senate budget committee chairman, Bernie Sanders, has referred to the current $7.25 rate as “a starvation wage”.The wage hike, formally known as the Raise the Wage Act of 2021, is now part of a proposed $1.9tn Covid-19 relief bill. The measure would incrementally raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 over the next four years.With only a razor-thin majority in the Senate, all 50 Democrat senators need to be onboard for the bill to pass. But in addition to Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has told Politico she does not want the minimum wage increase to be part of the Covid relief package.There are some reasons to be hesitant about increasing the minimum wage. A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report detailing the economic impact of the Raise the Wage Act has estimated the legislation would eliminate an estimated 1.4m jobs and would swell the national debt by $54bn over the next decade.But the report also estimates a $15 minimum wage would lift 900,000 people out of poverty nationwide and inject $333m into the US economy.Other economists have disputed the CBO report. Estimates by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute predict 32 million US workers would benefit from the minimum wage increase, which includes a quarter-million workers in Manchin’s home state of West Virginia.WVPPC member Pam Garrison was also on Thursday’s call with Manchin. Garrison is 55 years old and says she has earned minimum wage her entire working life and makes ends meet by taking side jobs cleaning houses. She spoke of the mental, physical and emotional toll that living in poverty has on people like her.“You’re just frazzled,” she said. “If you’ve never lived in poverty, you have no idea what it does to you.”If you’ve never lived in poverty, you have no idea what it does to youGarrison said Manchin ‘heard our side” but is reluctant to embrace a $15 minimum wage because he is worried small businesses could not absorb the increased labor costs. But she said giving low-wage workers more money would also benefit small businesses.“If you give us a decent pay, we’re going to put the money back into the economy [and] we’re going to be able to feed our families,” she said.Members of the WVPPC plan to continue lobbying Manchin on the Raise the Wage Act despite his seeming unwillingness to change his stance on the legislation.The group will hold a masked, socially distanced rally outside his office in Charleston, West Virginia, on Monday. A similar rally will be held at . Sinema’s office in Pheonix, Arizona.Manchin’s office denied multiple requests for comment.Zack Harold is a freelance writer and radio producer in Charleston, West Virginia. He is a regular contributor for West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and formerly served as the Charleston Daily Mail’s entertainment editor and managing editor for WV Living, Wonderful West Virginia and WV Focus magazines More

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      Sanders confident of raising minimum wage as part of $1.9tn Covid package

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      Bernie Sanders said on Saturday he was confident Senate Democrats will be able to raise the US minimum wage to $15, a step firmly opposed by Republicans but a key part of the Biden administration’s $1.9tn coronavirus relief package.In a statement, the Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats and chairs the Senate budget committee said he was “very proud of the strong arguments our legal team is making to the parliamentarian that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour is not ‘incidental’ to the federal budget and is permissible under the rules of reconciliation”.Reconciliation allows legislators to bypass the 60-vote majority needed for most Senate legislation, for items linked to spending and taxation. When Donald Trump held the White House, Republicans used it to force through tax cuts. Under Barack Obama, Democrats used it to help pass the Affordable Care Act.Sanders is championing moves to more than double the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour, its level since 2009, over a five-year period. The move is a key part of the Biden coronavirus relief package, meant to tackle the devastating impact of a pandemic in which nearly 500,000 have died and unemployment has rocketed.“Half of our workers are living paycheck to paycheck and millions of people are working for starvation wages,” Sanders wrote on Twitter on Friday. “We need the minimum wage to be a living wage and that’s why we’re going to raise it to $15 an hour.”Public opinion is heavily in favour of the rise but Republicans are ranged against it, arguing that it would damage small businesses. Sanders counters that the gradual rise over five years should allay such concerns.The Vermont senator is an experienced operator. After a coordinated if symbolic Republican move against the wage rise earlier this month, one Sanders staffer said: “This isn’t Bernie’s first rodeo … we can still try to pass minimum wage through the reconciliation bill.”In his statement on Saturday, Sanders referred to two Republican priorities under Trump which could not reach 60 votes but which were pursued through reconciliation.“The [Congressional Budget Office] has found that the $15 minimum wage has a much greater impact on the federal budget than opening up the Arctic national wildlife refuge to oil drilling and repealing the [ACA] individual mandate penalties,” he said, “two provisions that the parliamentarian advised did not violate the Byrd rule when Republicans controlled the Senate.”The Byrd rule is named for Robert Byrd, a long-serving Democratic senator from West Virginia who died in 2010. According to the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, or CBPP, it “allows senators to block provisions of reconciliation bills that are ‘extraneous’ to reconciliation’s basic purpose of implementing budget changes”.The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, is the first woman to interpret and manage the rules of Senate procedure. She must decide if a minimum wage raise can be pursued through reconciliation.On Saturday, Sanders said he was confident McDonough would do so next week. More

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      The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009. This is indefensible | Hamilton Nolan

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      The minimum wage is a moral issue masquerading as an economic one. Stone-cold capitalism does not demand a minimum wage, any more than it demands child labor laws or workplace safety. Rather, we demand a minimum wage, due to the belief that there must be a floor on human dignity. The public debate on the issue should always happen on those terms, lest we allow it to slide into the insincere wasteland of “What’s best for small business,” where all ideas good for working people go to die.America’s federal minimum wage today sits at $7.25 an hour, unchanged since 2009. In that time we have been through an economic crash, a slow, decade-long recovery and another economic crash, and after all of that it is still legal to pay a full-time employee working 40 hours a week for 50 weeks less than $15,000 a year. Our nation’s billionaires have gained more than a trillion dollars in wealth in the past year, but there are full-time workers who have lived with the same poverty wage since before Barack Obama had any grey hair. Anyone who is not actively trying to raise the minimum wage is asserting that this sickening juxtaposition is OK. It’s not.When the Fight For $15 movement began demanding “$15 and a union” for fast food workers in 2012, it was viewed by even those sympathetic to it as a bit of a pipe dream. Now, as Democrats in Congress work to include a national $15 minimum wage in the pending coronavirus relief bill, that movement’s goals are closer to becoming a reality than they have ever been. Of course, that is not a completely happy story – one reason the number sounds more realistic today is because $15 is not worth what it was in 2012. If you want to grasp how hard the Fight For $15 has been, consider the case of Terrence Wise, its single most famous rank and file leader. He has been profiled in countless media outlets. He has traveled the country for marches and rallies. He has even visited the White House to appear with President Obama. And after all of that, he makes $14 an hour working at McDonald’s. If his movement succeeds, he is still in line for a raise. There is not a billionaire in the world who works as hard as a full-time fast food workerEven if the Democrats succeed on this issue, either in the relief bill or with the standalone “Raise the Wage Act” that has also been introduced in Congress, it could take until 2025 before the $15 minimum wage is fully phased in. Meanwhile, we know that if the minimum wage had kept up with rising worker productivity over the past 50 years, it would be more than $24 an hour today. A victory will not really be a victory. It just puts us less far behind.To the extent that there is any genuine opposition to raising the minimum wage on economic grounds – rather than on the pure winner-take-all greed of the investor class, which is in fact what drives the vast majority of opposition to working people making more money – it is misplaced. Mainstream economists now recognize that raising the minimum wage does not in fact have the automatic job-destroying effect that Econ 101 textbooks assumed. Its biggest effect is making it slightly less miserable to be someone who works a job that society has deemed to be both wholly necessary and also unworthy of respect.It is really not that hard to understand why America has a class war. It is because the rich have chosen it. The rest of us, and in particular the poor, are just being swept along in the storm. No issue crystallizes the many lies behind the class war like minimum wage. It affects not some mythical lazy people without the drive to succeed, but rather the people who work harder than anyone, in the jobs that nobody else wants, but which we all know must get done. There is not a billionaire in the world who works as hard as a full-time fast food worker. The morality tale at the heart of the minimum wage debate is not about a benevolent society deciding how much of a kindly helping hand it will extend to those at the bottom of the economic ladder; it is actually about a merciless, cutthroat society arranged to funnel wealth upwards deciding how far down it can press the weakest parts of the labor force before they break. One thing that all opponents of a higher minimum wage have in common is that they would never dream of valuing their own time as cheaply as they think millions of other, lesser people should be forced to.Democrats must force the $15 wage through Congress while they control it, even if that means they all have to gang up on Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the lunchroom. But even more important, they have to recognize that they have a lot of catching up to do. What morality really demands is not a minimum wage, but a living wage. The Fight For $25 begins on the day after the current battle is won. More

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      Can Biden Save Americans Like My Old Pal Mike?

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      Mike Stepp in McMinnville, Ore., in 2018.Credit…Lynsey AddarioSkip to contentSkip to site indexOpinionCan Biden Save Americans Like My Old Pal Mike?A childhood friend’s deadly mistakes prompt reflection on our country’s — and my own.Mike Stepp in McMinnville, Ore., in 2018.Credit…Lynsey AddarioSupported byContinue reading the main storyOpinion ColumnistFeb. 13, 2021, 2:30 p.m. ET More

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      'Hopefully it makes history': Fight for $15 closes in on mighty win for US workers

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      Fear was the overwhelming emotion Alvin Major felt when, on a chilly November morning in 2012, he went on strike at the Brooklyn KFC where he worked.
      “Everybody was scared,” said Major. He may have been fearful, but what Major didn’t know was that he was about to make American history – an early leader in a labor movement that some historians now see as the most successful in the US in 50 years.
      Major was paid just $7.25 an hour as a cook at KFC, but the consequences of losing his job were dire, as his family was already struggling to make the next month’s rent. “Everybody was scared about going back to work,” he said. “Nobody visualized what this movement would come to.”
      The New York strike by hundreds of majority Black and brown New York fast-food workers was, at the time, the largest in US history – but it would be dwarfed by what was to come. Two years later, strikes had spread across America, and fast-food workers in 33 countries across six continents had joined a growing global movement for better pay and stronger rights on the job.
      In eight years, what became the Fight for $15 movement has grown into an international organization that has successfully fought for a rise in minimum wage in states across the US, redefined the political agenda in the US, and acted as a springboard for other movements, including Black Lives Matter. It now stands perilously close to winning one of the biggest worker-led rights victories in decades.
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      This Tuesday, fast-food workers will walk out again, hoping to push through a change that will affect tens of millions of American workers.
      For Major, now 55, it all began in a hall in Brooklyn, where union and community activists had convened a meeting of fast-food workers to see what pressure they could bring on an industry notorious for its low wages and poor conditions, and a state that had shown those workers little interest.
      With a platform to speak, the workers talked about “how you had to be on food stamps, get rent assistance, all these kinds of things, and we’re working for these companies that are making billions”, said Major.
      At one point, a worker showed the burns on his arm he had suffered at work. In a show of solidarity, workers across the room others rolled up their sleeves to show their scars too. Even when injured on the job, workers said, they were too scared to take time off.
      This was not how Major imagined America to be when he moved to the US from Guyana in 2000. “In our family, with 14 kids, my dad’s wife never worked a day. My dad used to work, he took care of us, we had a roof over our head, we went to school, we had meals every day, he had his own transportation.”
      In America, “the greatest, most powerful and richest country in the history of the world”, he found “[that] you have to work, your wife has to work, when your kids reach an age they have to work – and still you could barely make it”.
      Industry lobbying allied to Republican and – until relatively recently – Democratic opposition has locked the US’s minimum wage at $7.25 since the last raise in 2009. Now a raise to $15 looks set to be included in Joe Biden’s $1.9tn Covid relief package – although it will still face fierce opposition.
      Even Biden, who campaigned on the raise, has expressed doubt about whether it can pass. But more progressive Democrats including longtime champion Senator Bernie Sanders are determined to push it through, and it remains in the House Covid relief bill.

      Rep. Pramila Jayapal
      (@RepJayapal)
      I’m thrilled to announce that after working with leadership, we’ve secured a $15 minimum wage in the House’s COVID relief bill!This provision would lift nearly 1 million people out of poverty. It’s long overdue that Congress enacts a minimum wage that is a living wage.

      February 8, 2021

      The stakes are huge. The Congressional Budget Office said this week that 27 million Americans would be affected by the increase, and that 900,000 would be lifted out of poverty at a time when low-wage workers – and especially people of color – have suffered most during the pandemic. The CBO also said the increase would lead to 1.4m job losses and increase the federal budget deficit by $54bn over the next 10 years.
      Other economists have disputed the CBO’s job-loss predictions – the Economic Policy Institute called them “wrong, and inappropriately inflated”. The long-running debate about the real cost of raising the minimum age will no doubt continue. What is certain is that Biden will face enormous political blowback if his campaign promise to raise the minimum wage falls so early in his presidency – a promise that during his campaign he argued was central to his plans to address racial inequality.
      That backlash will also cross party lines – at least outside Washington. The US may be as politically divided as it has been since the civil war, but polling shows the majority of Americans support increasing the minimum wage no matter their chosen party. In November 60% of voters approved a ballot initiative to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2026 even as they voted to re-elect Donald Trump.
      More people voted for that ballot initiative than voted for either presidential candidate in the state. With Florida, seven states plus the District of Columbia have now pledged to increase their minimum wage to $15 or higher, according to the National Employment Law Project (Nelp) and a record 74, cities, counties and states will raise their minimum wages in 2021.
      The movement, and this widespread support, has changed the political landscape, pushing Democratic politicians, including Biden, Hillary Clinton and the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, to back a $15 minimum wage, against their earlier qualms.
      Cuomo called a $13 minimum wage a “non-starter” in February 2015. By July, he was racing California to get it into law.
      In the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, Clinton went from supporting a raise to $12 an hour to $15 as Sanders made ground on the issue. Even Saturday Night Live parodied the pair arguing about who was most for a $15 higher wage.

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      Big companies including Amazon, Target and Disney have all moved to $15, or pledged to do so. One of Biden’s first executive orders called for federal contractors to pay employees a $15 minimum wage. The federal holdout would be the movement’s biggest win to date, but there is little arguing that they have made significant progress without it – not least for Alvin Major, who now has a union job earning over $17 an hour working at JFK airport and who says he is no longer worried about his bills.
      For Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), this is “the David and Goliath story of our time”. She puts the public support down to the “pervasiveness of underpaid, low-wage work”.
      “Every family in America knows somebody that’s trying to make ends meet through a minimum-wage job. And the pandemic has revealed that essential work in a way that many people hadn’t noticed before, and they now understand how grocery store clerks, nursing home workers, janitors, airport workers, security officers, delivery drivers [and] fast-food workers are all people trying to do the very best job they can, and provide for their families.”
      The SEIU has been a longtime funder and supporter of Fight For $15 and for Henry, the first woman to lead the SEIU, the fight for a higher minimum wage is just the beginning of a greater push for workers’ rights – not least the right to join unions, in a service sector where women and people of color make up a disproportionate number of workers.
      “Eighty per cent of our economy is driven by consumer spending. Service and care jobs are the dominant sectors in the US economy, and we have to create the ability of those workers to join together in unions in this century, just like auto, rubber and steel were the foundation in the last century,” she said.
      “If the US Congress can’t see what the American people are demanding, in terms of ‘Respect us, protect us, pay us’, then they’re going to have a political price to pay in 2022,” she added. “Our nation’s leaders need to get this done. Congress has used its rules to pass trillions of dollars in tax cuts for billionaires and massive corporations, so now it’s time for our nation’s leaders to give tens of millions of essential workers a raise.”
      Backing Henry will be a younger generation of activists who cut their teeth in the Fight for $15 movement and have used it as a springboard into a political debate that is now centered around racial and economic justice. One of those leaders is Rasheen Aldridge, one of the first to take action when the Fight for $15 spread to St Louis, who was elected to Missouri state assembly last November.
      Aldridge was working at a Jimmy John’s restaurant in 2013 when he was approached by a community organizer asking him about his pay and conditions. Aldridge had recently been humiliated by a manager who took pictures of him and a co-worker holding signs they were forced to make, saying they had made sandwiches incorrectly and had been 15 seconds late with a drive-through order. “It was so dehumanizing and just a complete embarrassment,” said Aldridge.
      The organizer talked about the strikes in New York, Chicago and elsewhere, and suggested the same could happen in conservative Missouri. More

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      The First Post-Reagan Presidency

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      Credit…Timo LenzenSkip to contentSkip to site indexOpinionThe First Post-Reagan PresidencySo far, Joe Biden has been surprisingly progressive.Credit…Timo LenzenSupported byContinue reading the main storyOpinion ColumnistJan. 28, 2021, 8:50 p.m. ETDuring Donald Trump’s presidency, I sometimes took comfort in the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s concept of “political time.”In Skowronek’s formulation, presidential history moves in 40- to 60-year cycles, or “regimes.” Each is inaugurated by transformative, “reconstructive” leaders who define the boundaries of political possibility for their successors.Franklin Delano Roosevelt was such a figure. For decades following his presidency, Republicans and Democrats alike accepted many of the basic assumptions of the New Deal. Ronald Reagan was another. After him, even Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama feared deficit spending, inflation and anything that smacked of “big government.”I found Skowronek’s schema reassuring because of where Trump seemed to fit into it. Skowronek thought Trump was a “late regime affiliate” — a category that includes Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover. Such figures, he’s written, are outsiders from the party of a dominant but decrepit regime.They use the “internal disarray and festering weakness of the establishment” to “seize the initiative.” Promising to save a faltering political order, they end up imploding and bringing the old regime down with them. No such leader, he wrote, has ever been re-elected.During Trump’s reign, Skowronek’s ideas gained some popular currency, offering a way to make sense of a presidency that seemed anomalous and bizarre. “We are still in the middle of Trump’s rendition of the type,” he wrote in an updated edition of his book “Presidential Leadership in Political Time,” “but we have seen this movie before, and it has always ended the same way.”Skowronek doesn’t present his theory as a skeleton key to history. It’s a way of understanding historical dynamics, not predicting the future. Still, if Trump represented the last gasps of Reaganism instead of the birth of something new, then after him, Skowronek suggests, a fresh regime could begin.When Joe Biden became the Democratic nominee, it seemed that the coming of a new era had been delayed. Reconstructive leaders, in Skowronek’s formulation, repudiate the doctrines of an establishment that no longer has answers for the existential challenges the country faces. Biden, Skowronek told me, is “a guy who’s made his way up through establishment Democratic politics.” Nothing about him seemed trailblazing.Yet as Biden’s administration begins, there are signs that a new politics is coalescing. When, in his inauguration speech, Biden touted “unity,” he framed it as a national rejection of the dark forces unleashed by his discredited predecessor, not stale Gang of Eight bipartisanship. He takes power at a time when what was once conventional wisdom about deficits, inflation and the proper size of government has fallen apart. That means Biden, who has been in national office since before Reagan’s presidency, has the potential to be our first truly post-Reagan president.“Biden has a huge opportunity to finally get our nation past the Reagan narrative that has still lingered,” said Representative Ro Khanna, who was a national co-chair of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. “And the opportunity is to show that government, by getting the shots in every person’s arm of the vaccines, and building infrastructure, and helping working families, is going to be a force for good.” More