The grassroots energy building around the minimum wage issue may upend former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s plans to ease into proposing specific economic policies.
The issue was in the foreground on Wednesday, when fast-food and other low-wage workers staged a nationwide walkout that drew tens of thousands of people to rally support for a US$15-an-hour minimum wage. The protest was the latest show of strength by the Fight for $15, a campaign that economists partly credit with the recent decisions by employers like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s to raise the minimum wage they pay workers.
The day-long strike might provide the first test for the Clinton campaign at managing the desire of voters and party activists for an aggressive approach to mitigating income inequality. Clinton said she was running for president because “the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” but she has offered few details about how to bridge that gap.
Illustration: Mountain people
“The campaign is clearly going to have to come out with a position on it,” said Dean Baker, a progressive economist who met with Clinton’s economic advisers on other issues. “There is pressure on her to come up with a number.”
Unlike free trade or financial sector profits, the minimum wage issue is not one that in principle creates a political problem for Clinton, who has long supported the policy. The challenge is the sheer speed at which the center of the debate has shifted and the hunger among voters for action.
Already, moderate Democratic politicians around the country have begun to advocate substantial increases in the minimum wage, which is US$7.25 an hour on the federal level but can be higher in states and localities.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a White House aide for former US president Bill Clinton, recently backed a measure raising the minimum wage in the city to US$13 from US$8.25 by 2019. US Senator Patty Murray is lining up support among Democratic senators for a proposal that would raise the minimum wage to US$12 an hour by 2020, then automatically increase it each year in line with inflation.
“The days of debating US$9 or US$10 an hour are over. The active debate is in the realm of US$12 to US$15,” said Adam Green, cofounder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a grassroots organizing group with nearly 1 million members. “In 2016, the Murray US$12-an-hour position will be the floor, not the ceiling.”
It is not just grassroots activists and Hillary Clinton’s fellow Democratic politicians who have come out in favor of a substantial wage increase. Those who attended the semiannual meeting this week of the Democracy Alliance, a network of wealthy progressive donors created with help from billionaire investor George Soros and insurance mogul Peter Lewis, reported that the minimum-wage campaign had become a topic of discussion as the donors grappled with income inequality.
“Fast-food workers in the street for US$15, that changes the conversation,” said Stephen Silberstein, a member of the Democracy Alliance who also was executive producer of the recent documentary, Inequality for All. “You didn’t have that a couple years ago.”
With a recent accumulation of economic literature suggesting that moderate increases in the minimum wage have little to no cost when it comes to employment, opposition even among economists in the business world has begun to melt. On Thursday last week, the economic research department of Goldman Sachs, which is widely followed by policymakers, released an analysis of minimum wage increases that made no allusion to possible job losses.
“It was remarkable to me,” said Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to US Vice President Joe Biden who is now a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “There was no mention in the whole analysis of disemployment effects.”
Even Republicans, whose party has long been skeptical of the minimum wage, have begun to soften their opposition.
“I’m not for repealing the minimum wage,” US Senator Marco Rubio said at a candidate forum in January. “But I can tell you, I don’t want people to make US$10.10 an hour. I want them to make US$30 an hour.”
After the Republican-controlled legislature in Michigan balked at raising the minimum wage early last year, activists collected 300,000 signatures on behalf of a proposed ballot initiative to raise the state’s wage floor to US$10.10 from US$7.40 and index it to inflation thereafter.
One day before activists planned to submit the petition, the Republican legislature passed an increase to US$9.25, including the permanent cost-of-living adjustment.
“There was terror that it would get on the November ballot,” said Saru Jayaraman, whose group, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, fights for wage increases for tipped workers. “There’s a lot of talk in Michigan of coming back and doing it again.”
With the issue so volatile, Republicans are not the only one being overtaken by grassroots developments. US President Barack Obama initially came out for a US$9-an-hour minimum wage in his 2013 State of the Union address, then embraced US$10.10 later that year. Although it was a significant increase for a White House to advocate, many Democrats by that point had already set their sights higher with the Fight for $15 campaign gaining prominence.
“Progressives were pleased we rightly moved to US$10.10,” said Gene Sperling, who was Obama’s top economic adviser between 2011 and early last year and has also advised Hillary Clinton. “But with Republicans blocking it in Congress, advocates understandably decided that it couldn’t compete with the type of impressive grassroots passion they have been able to generate fighting for US$15 city by city.”
The White House has yet to take a position on Murray’s proposal for a US$12 minimum wage.
Hillary Clinton has voiced her support for the “fast-food and domestic workers all across our country who ask for nothing more than a living wage and a fair shot.”
An aide said: “She’s for an increase in the minimum wage, and she wants to have a conversation about the right target and timeline.”
Even progressive economists argue that some caution is merited. Bernstein, a supporter of a substantial minimum wage increase with a reputation as being the Obama White House’s most liberal in-house economist, said that US$15 an hour gave him pause because it was “out of sample.” That is, there was no precedent to demonstrate it would not cost jobs.
The question of speed, though, may be especially sensitive.
Clinton may ultimately align with her party’s base on many economic issues. However, any reluctance by her to say whether she explicitly supports the goals of the Fight for $15 campaign — or even how far toward them she would hope to come as president — could curb enthusiasm for her candidacy among progressives and low-income workers at the very moment she is officially engaged.
Hillary Clinton, after all, promised in her announcement that she wanted to be a champion for “everyday Americans.”
She pledged to labor on their behalf “so that you can do more than just get by. You can get ahead and stay ahead.”
“She has a massive challenge in the general election,” said Zephyr Teachout, the Fordham Law School professor who mounted an unexpectedly strong Democratic primary challenge to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo last year. “The strategy of silence and then gradual coming around does not lead people, even if the sentence polls well, to get out and organize.”
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