The Fight for $15 Through Reconciliation

The news coming out about including the $15 minimum wage in the COVID-19 relief bill had been largely positive until last Thursday night a Politico story put an abrupt halt to the momentum that had been building in support of it. In the story Joe Biden supposedly met with a group of governors and mayors and told them that he was not capable of passing the minimum wage hike provision through reconciliation -- the process by which he plans to pass the relief package. The argument has been raised before that the budget reconciliation process limits what the government can do and that raising the $15 minimum wage is outside its purview. I wanted to use my platform to take a minute to dispel that notion. 

Firstly, the limitations of the reconciliation in this case are specific to the “Byrd rule” which bans measures that have no impact on spending or revenue, or where the budgetary impact would be “merely incidental.” So the argument goes that since the government itself doesn’t control the wages of private companies, the budgetary impact of such a provision would be nonexistent. This demonstrates the refusal to face the reality of the wage crisis in this country typical of opponents of the $15 minimum wage.

A worker currently earning minimum wage working a 40-hour work week will make $15,080 a year. That places them $4,000 below the poverty line for a single person and $24,000 below the poverty line for a family of four. This means that that person, who is confined to a starvation wage despite working a full work week, is likely dependent on the government for aid. Medicaid, food stamps, and other federal aid programs are directly funded by the government’s budget. Lifting, per the CBO’s own estimate, one million people out of poverty isn’t just a moral imperative -- it’s a budgetary one. 

To argue that this is merely a byproduct of the wage hike similarly doesn’t engage with the provision in good faith. The purpose of raising the minimum wage isn’t to make the lives of business owners difficult, it’s to lift millions of Americans out of poverty and create opportunity for the government to spend its time moving the country forward instead of leaving a significant portion of our country behind. Right now, nearly 32 million workers -- over 21% of the entire workforce -- earns less than $15 an hour.

I hope President Biden changes his mind as advocates for the $15 minimum wage refuse to give into cynicism here. Senators like Bernie Sanders and Representatives like Pramila Jaypal have continued to advocate for using the reconciliation process for this initiative and civilian leaders have not given up the fight. Raising the minimum wage to $15 is supported by ? of all Americans. They don’t care how our leaders decide to pass it -- only that they do.