So Tell Me Again Why Workers Dont Deserve 15 an Hour
The COVID-nineteen pandemic has inspired an outpouring of gratitude for essential workers, whose critical and often low-paid work has kept the country operation. Millions of these essential workers have risked their health on the COVID-19 frontline, while thousands have lost their lives.
For months, leaders in Washington have said it is not enough just to praise essential workers—nosotros must also pay them. In the long run, the best way for Congress to practice this is to—finally—raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour.
As part of the American Rescue Plan, the Biden administration proposed raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, specifically citing the sacrifices of essential workers. But the fate of the proposed increase in the Senate remains unclear; late last night, senators passed an subpoena to prohibit a higher minimum wage during a pandemic.
Legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 over several years may still be included in a reconciliation nib. But to become law, it would need to pass legal hurdles and gain the support of at least 50 senators.
Despite possible reluctance in the Senate, increasing the minimum wage is a long-overdue necessity—especially post-obit a pandemic that has toll American workers so much already. Below, we outline the reasons why America's essential workforce deserves a heighten.
Half of Americans in low-wage occupations are essential workers
A $fifteen per 60 minutes federal minimum wage would disproportionately do good the country's essential workers. Using our colleagues Adie Tomer and Joseph W. Kane's essential worker classification and 2018 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we notice that essential workers comprised approximately half (47%) of all workers in occupations with a median wage of less than $xv an 60 minutes.
In 2018, 47.7 million U.Due south. workers were in occupations with a median wage of less than $15 per hour. Of these 47.seven meg workers, 22.3 million were in occupations considered "essential" per Tomer and Kane's analysis of Department of Homeland Security guidance.
Today, essential workers likely contain an even larger share of the low-wage workforce. According to data from Opportunity Insights, unemployment during the pandemic has jumped 21% for depression-wage workers earning under $27,000 a yr. Most of those job losses have been concentrated amidst nonessential industries such as hospitality and leisure. At present, among a smaller group of depression-wage workers even so employed during the pandemic, it is probable that essential workers contain even more one-half of all workers in occupations with a median wage of less than $15 per hour.
Many essential workers struggle to make ends encounter
The COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted the indignity that millions of essential workers face up, equally they perform jobs vital to the country without earning a wage that allows them to run across their basic expenses. Even as depression-wage essential workers perform jobs that allow the remainder of u.s. to survive, their meager pay makes it difficult for millions of them to survive.
Yvette Beatty, a home health adjutant in Philadelphia, is ane of them. Beatty cares for some of order'southward most vulnerable people during the pandemic, but she struggles to provide for her own family of six. With only her "itty, bitty" pay of $12.75 an hour, she has had to make difficult choices between medicine and food as she struggles to keep up with her bills.
"It'south very difficult," Beatty told united states this autumn. "Thank God for noodles. Nosotros are eating simply what nosotros can right at present."
Beatty is not alone. The wages for intendance workers like her are then low that nigh 20% of them live in poverty, and more than forty% rely on some class of public assist.
In the grocery sector, meanwhile, a typical cashier makes only $x to $11 an hour—a wage that would put a family of four below the poverty line.
Lisa Harris, a Kroger cashier outside of Richmond, Va., described the financial hardships her grocery colleagues experience: "I have coworkers who stand up all day serving people, and then have to get pay for their own groceries with food stamps."
Raising the minimum wage would narrow the enormous gap between the value that essential workers bring to lodge and the extremely low wages they earn in return. When nonessential businesses and employment shut down, it is their work that keeps the states fed, safe, salubrious, and moving. And long afterward the health risks of the pandemic subsides, their piece of work will notwithstanding be essential.
"I think that $15 an 60 minutes should exist the minimum, and stay in that location," Lisa Harris told us last spring. "Nosotros are heroes every twenty-four hour period, and we deserve to exist paid every bit such. We oasis't gone from unskilled labor to essential personnel. Nosotros always were essential personnel."
Public sentiment and economic research provide strong back up for boosting essential worker pay
Earlier the pandemic, the work of essential workers like Lisa Harris and Yvette Beatty was often overlooked, too as grossly underpaid. Now, public opinion surveys evidence that support for a college minimum wage has grown during the pandemic, including among an increasing number of Republicans. Even in a divided country, an overwhelming majority of Americans back up a $fifteen minimum wage.
This shift in public stance may reflect society'southward gratitude for the sacrifices that depression-wage essential workers have unduly made on the COVID-19 frontline. Compared to college-wage workers, only a small fraction of depression-wage workers tin can work from home. Without the benefit of telework, these workers confront not only economic precarity simply also heightened risk of contracting the virus. Black and brown workers are overrepresented among the nearly 19 meg frontline essential workers in occupations with a median wage less than $xv an hour, half of whom are nonwhite. Raising the federal minimum wage would disproportionately benefit these and other workers of color, who too oft are denied decent-paying work.
Employers have a clear moral case to raise wages for their essential workers. Merely without legislation requiring them to practise and so, most take not. Only a few stand-out retail employers—including Costco, Target, Best Buy, and Amazon—accept voluntarily raised their starting wage for frontline employees to $15 an hour. In a study nosotros published last November, we studied pandemic profits and pay at 13 of the biggest retail and grocery stores in the country. In the beginning iii quarters last twelvemonth, these companies, combined, made an additional $17.7 billion in profit during—and largely because of—the pandemic. Yet few companies shared those windfall profits through sustained take a chance pay, and even fewer raised wages above typical starting pay of effectually $11 an hr.
The benefits of a $15 per hour minimum wage to low-wage and essential workers are enormous. Researchers at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) gauge that it would raise pay for virtually 32 million workers while reducing government expenditures on public help programs by between $xiii.4 and $31 billion. EPI also found that the bulk of the workers who would benefit from a $15 per hour minimum wage are essential and frontline workers. Moreover, a raft of recent enquiry strongly indicates petty risk of widespread job losses from an increase to $15 per 60 minutes.
A $fifteen minimum wage is an important recognition of the societal values of essential workers
To essential workers like Sabrina Hopps, finally earning at least $15 an 60 minutes has fabricated all the difference. Hopps is a housekeeping supervisor at an acute intendance facility in Washington, D.C. She lives with her girl, granddaughter, and son, who is a cancer survivor and has asthma. She described feeling "petrified" as she worked during the pandemic, fearful of bringing home the virus to her family unit. The low wages she earned added to her stress.
Final twelvemonth, Hopps was promoted to supervisor. For the starting time time in more than xxx years, she earns more than $15 per hour.
"It makes me desire to weep," Hopps told u.s.. "I am non stressed anymore. The heighten means I am a footling better able to pay the bulk of the bills and afford the rent on my own if I had to. It allowed me to move. It is peaceful."
Hopps hopes that the federal minimum wage will be raised for all workers, include lower-paid essential workers like housekeepers, nursing assistants, dietary staff, and maintenance workers that she sees struggling through the pandemic.
"We are the ones who are still out here fighting," said Hopps. "Raising the minimum wage to $15 can assistance them have a improve life."
Source: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2021/02/05/essential-workers-deserve-minimum-wage-increase/
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