Alison Sullivan
The federal minimum wage has remained stagnant at $7.25 for years, not moving up since 2009. On Thursday, President-Elect Joe Biden presented a COVID-19 relief bill which included a proposal to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2025, which activists have also been advocating for, for years.
“No one working 40 hours a week should still be below the poverty line,” Biden said, according to CBS News. Right now, about 2% of people in the U.S. are working for the federal minimum wage. Minimum wage can vary by state, and a number of them have much higher ones, like California where minimum wage is $12 an hour. This proposal would lift over one million people out of poverty.
Many Democrats support this move.
“All labor has dignity. And the way that we give labor dignity is by paying people the respect and the value that they are worth at minimum,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told Vox. “We have to make one fair wage and we have to raise the national minimum wage to $15 an hour, nothing less.”
The thing is, there are lots of people who don’t think this should happen. Some of them think this because they either don’t want to give up some profit or they work for someone who doesn’t want to give up profits.
But some of them seem to think this because they’d rather people be crushingly poor than able to make as much money as they do sitting behind a computer. Or they selfishly think that paying people more might make their McDonald’s burgers more expensive.
They’re wrong. The cost of living continues to go up even as wages stay the same, and that’s just not a sustainable economic model. The people making that money should be the people doing the work, not the ones sitting up in their offices and skimming up the cream. If work is worth doing, it should be paid for fairly—and here are some tweets about why.
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