House Education and Labor Committee Chairman Bobby Scott (D-Va.) said today he plans to push ahead with his “Raise the Wage” legislation that would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2024, despite opponents’ claims that it might create the loss of jobs and economic disruption.
The bill would require all employers nationwide to raise the minimum wage they pay employees to $15 over the next five years.
“The evidence clearly demonstrates the Raise the Wage Act is a reasonable proposal that would lift millions of workers out of poverty,” Chairman Scott said during his hearing on the subject today.
The hearing “is the first step toward passing a bill that reflects our shared belief that no one working full time should be living in poverty,” continued Scott, freely admitting that he expects to hear a rising tide of criticism from pro-business groups.
“I am confident we will hear dire projections about job losses that would result from gradually raising the minimum. But the overwhelming majority of research from both left- and right-leaning labor economists find few, if any jobs are lost when gradually raising the minimum wage,” Scott said.
“The reality is that -- by 2024 -- $15 an hour is the least a person would need to afford the basic essentials in anyplace in the country,” Scott said.
According to a living wage calculator developed by MIT, single working parents today, even in the poorest counties in the country, need at least $20 an hour to cover basic costs. “Workers should not be forced to work for poverty-level wages, regardless of where they live. And lower-cost regions should not be forced to continue to lag behind the rest of our economy,” Scott said.
New research from the National Bureau of Economic Research examined 138 minimum-wage increases between 1979 and 2016 and found that the overall number of low-wage jobs remained essentially unchanged over five years following minimum wage hikes.
Dr. Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told lawmakers there was no evidence that unemployment results from minimum-wage increases.
“Raising the national minimum wage is well overdue,” Zipperer said. “Workers today paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, after adjusting for inflation, are paid 29 percent less than their counterparts 50 years ago. This is despite the fact the economy’s capacity to deliver higher wages has doubled in the last 50 years, as measured by labor productivity, or the amount of output produced by workers.”