Minimum Wage Fairness Act - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, nearly 7 years ago both parties worked together to pass bipartisan legislation that raised the minimum wage. Nineteen of my Republican colleagues, with whom I serve in the Senate today, voted for that bipartisan legislation, and Republican President George W. Bush signed it into law on May 25, 2007.

Since that time big banks on Wall Street drove our economy into a ditch. We faced a financial sector meltdown and were confronted with the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Hard-working Americans lost jobs. They lost their homes. They lost their retirement savings. Hard-working families paid a steep price for the reckless actions of others when all they ever asked for was that their hard work be rewarded.

Today people are working as hard as ever. Many are working full time. Many are working two jobs just to make ends meet; they deserve to get ahead. Yet far too many are barely getting by or living in poverty.

Middle-class incomes have flat-lined and income inequality in the United States is at a record high. And, today, a full-time minimum-wage worker earns only $15,080 per year.

The sad reality is the minimum wage is not high enough to keep full-time workers out of poverty. That is simply wrong, and it is our job to work together to change it because in America no one who works hard full time should have to live in poverty.

I am here today to urge my colleagues to help lift nearly 2 million people--2 million of their fellow Americans--out of poverty.

I am here today to urge my colleagues to support the Minimum Wage Fairness Act and give 28 million hard-working Americans the raise they have earned.

Some opponents of this bill have dismissed this effort as nothing more than raising the wages of teenagers who are simply working in the summer months. Well, that simply is no longer true. In fact, it never was true.

Eighty-eight percent of minimum-wage workers are adults age 20 or older, and the average age of a minimum-wage worker in America is 35 years old. More than half of minimum-wage workers are women. These are Americans who are working hard to get ahead, and they deserve to have us working together to help give them a fair shot.

Raising the minimum wage is not just the right thing to do to reward hard work; it can certainly boost our economy because studies show that minimum-wage workers spend the extra dollars they earn on basics such as food and clothing at businesses right in their home communities.

For someone earning $7.25 an hour and working full time, raising the minimum wage to $10.10 puts an extra $5,700 into their pockets. That $5,700 provides groceries for a year or utilities for a year, money to spend on gas and clothing for a year, or 6 months of housing--fueling our local economies at a time when our recovery continues to limp along.

Raising the minimum wage would lift 2 million hard-working people out of poverty. Passing this legislation would mean that more hard-working Americans will be able to provide for their families without the help of government programs such as SNAP, otherwise known as food stamps, saving taxpayers $4.6 billion from reduced nutrition assistance payments in 1 year alone.

I believe we need to build a fairer economy and grow the middle class from the bottom up. And I believe our economy is strongest when we expand opportunity for everyone, when everyone gets a fair shot.

I am proud to join my colleagues here today and tomorrow to deliver a call for action. It is simple. The time is now to give hard-working Americans a raise. We can do that if both parties work together to reward hard work so that an honest day's work pays more.

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