A $15 minimum wage would be life-changing for many workers and their families — it could mean the difference between poverty and being able to put food on table, building a savings account, or investing in their children’s future.
Raise the minimum wage, lower the dependency on safety nets
Beyond the working families who will get a raise, every single American taxpayer has a stake in raising the minimum wage. When corporations like McDonald’s pay poverty wages, workers often turn to public safety net programs to make ends meet. Our recent study finds that families of half of the workers who would receive a pay increase under the proposed $15 minimum wage bill in Congress are enrolled in one or more public safety net programs, at a cost of $107 billion a year.
Some lawmakers, including Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, are calling on Congress to employ a process known as budget reconciliation, which allows legislation that changes government spending or revenues to pass by a simple majority vote, not subject to a filibuster.
Our study on the public cost of low wages supports Sanders’ contention that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour could have a measurable savings to the federal budget — a key consideration in determining whether the legislation meets the criteria for moving through the reconciliation process. This is backed up by new research finding that a $15 minimum wage could save the federal budget of at least $65 billion per year.
The federal minimum wage has stalled at $7.25 an hour since 2009 – the longest-ever period without an increase since the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938. A $15 minimum wage would bring savings to our safety net system — funds that can be redirected to other essential needs. As we look at recovery from pandemic-related unemployment and recessions, it is especially important that cash-strapped states are able to target public funds for maximum community benefit.
In our study, we look at working families in the 42 states that have not passed a $15 minimum wage law. Two-thirds of fast-food workers, half of childcare workers, and three out of five homecare workers in these states are paid so little that their families rely on public assistance.
Bad things happen when workers lack political representation.
A major reason why the US welfare state is so meager, its union movement so frail, and its working class so divided is that the United States is the only advanced capitalist democracy where parties of big business have always monopolized the political arena. The morbid symptoms of this impasse are everywhere today, from the rise of Trumpism, to the Democratic establishment’s stubborn opposition to Medicare for All in the midst of a pandemic, to the deepening polarization of national politics along partisan lines free from any focus on redistributing wealth and power.
Identifying this problem, unfortunately, has proven to be much easier than effectively overcoming it. Radicals have tried and failed over the past hundred years to make a clean break from the Democrats and Republicans by founding third parties. Yet realignment efforts to transform the Dems into a social-democratic formation have not been any more successful. In response to these setbacks, some socialists have recently questioned the goal of building a workers’ party with its own ballot line.
Given how much the US Left likes to debate its relationship to the Democratic Party, it’s surprising that nobody has yet drawn lessons from the international example most similar to our own: British socialist efforts a century ago to develop a political voice for working people. Britain’s experience not only illustrates why workers need their own party — it shows how we might get there.
Like the United States today, the UK had an entrenched two-party system in which the Liberal Party was politically hegemonic over workers and their organizations in the late nineteenth century. Aiming to win over the Libs’ working-class base, socialists avoided the twin perils of marginalization and co-optation by organizing in and against the party, building workplace militancy, confronting establishment Liberals when possible, and allying with them when necessary.
The result was a decades-long dirty break, culminating in the founding of the Labour Party in 1906 and its displacement of the Liberals as one of the UK’s two main parties in 1918. Though we can’t predict the exact form that such a break will take in the US context, a similar strategy is our best bet to build independent class power and to win the changes that working people so urgently need.
First Steps
As in continental Europe, working-class politics in nineteenth-century Britain emerged from within organized liberalism. While Conservatives held the support of a sizable minority of workers, most supported the Liberal Party, which was popularly associated with the extension of electoral suffrage and, by the century’s turn, socioeconomic reform.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the plan in a speech on Sunday, and the Israeli cabinet met on Monday to discuss the plans further.
The policy will likely attract attention from around the world: Israel has vaccinated more of its population than any other nation, with some 45% of people now given at least one dose.
No formal announcement had been made at the time of publication, though Netanyahu spelled out in some detail the plan he was aiming for.
Speaking at the opening of the country’s coronavirus cabinet meeting, , Israel’s prime minister, said that the country must open “gradually and carefully”, the Jerusalem Post reported. Some in Israel are pushing for him to go faster.
Some details of Netanyahu’s plan were posted on his website on Sunday in the form of a transcribed speech.
The country is planned to open in two stages, it said: a preliminary stage followed by a more comprehensive opening in two weeks’ time.
In that second stage, about two weeks later, those who have been vaccinated “will be able to enter hotels, museums, cultural appearances, restaurants, pools, malls, basketball and soccer games, flights abroad and the like”, he said.
Some media have reported that the opening of the venues to vaccinated people could come sooner.
Data coming from Israel’s vaccine program showed on Friday that the Pfizer vaccine is 93% effective at preventing the disease, giving hope the mass vaccination could allow a return to more normal life soon.
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