America has passed the need to debate over whether the minimum wage should be raised.
On March 5 an amendment in the Senate to add a $15 minimum wage onto the latest COVID-19 relief package failed when 8 Democrats voted against it.
One Democrat, Kyrsten Sinema, has drawn the most ire over this because she said there needed to be more debate over raising the minimum wage.
She’s become the focus of this in part due to a tweet she posted in 2014.
Sinema, much like many Americans, didn’t say there needed to be a debate over increasing the minimum wage 7 years ago.
There’s nothing left to debate over. $7.25 isn’t a living wage as debt skyrockets, especially in the middle of a pandemic when people are incurring additional expenses ranging from medical care and purchasing face masks.
Leaving this up to debate is how opponents of raising the wage in the Senate are emboldened and able to propagandize to their constituents that certain people are not entitled to better wages by the nature of their work and their identities.
Black people and women as well as food service workers are disproportionately paid the federal minimum wage, meaning these already marginalized groups are having their livelihoods debated by people who make more in a month than they do in an entire year if they work full time.
The representatives opining about the effect this would have on small businesses are blatantly prioritizing people who are overwhelmingly white and wealthy over the lives of people who can’t even afford to put food on their tables.
And it shouldn’t have to be said, but if a business owner cannot pay their employee a living wage then their business isn’t succeeding enough to be hiring someone.
Other wage bills proposed are already not good enough. The wage won’t increase to $15 until 2025 despite the necessity of that increase needing to be much more expedient.
Even a $15 minimum wage today still isn’t enough in plenty of places and just barely gets people to subsistence living. It shouldn’t require years of experience and school to make a living wage.
And now there’s the risk of an even more pathetic wage increase passing in the Senate with Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton’s plan that raises the minimum wage to just $10 over four years.
For reference, when accounting only for inflation (and not productivity and profit increases) since 1979 the minimum wage would be almost $11 today.
That doesn’t even account for cost of living increases people face as housing prices rise and student debt inflates to $1.7 trillion.
These points alone should settle any convoluted request for debate on whether the minimum wage needs to be increased.
People deserve to live beyond subsistence and questioning whether or not that should be granted in a time where people are dealing with an unprecedented global emergency is spitting in the faces of working people.
