Ask yourself: could you live on $14,500 a year? That’s what someone working full-time on the minimum wage makes. If they’re raising kids, that’s below the poverty line. And that’s not right. A hard day’s work deserves a fair day’s pay.
It’s not the first time, and it most certainly won’t be the last, that President Obama urged raising the minimum wage in his weekly address. Even as he touted “the longest uninterrupted stretch of private sector job creation in our history,” he noted this morning that a whole lot of people are still being left out of the prosperity boat, thanks to low minimum wage, which is being obstructed, he pointed out, by Republicans in Congress.
And he took the opportunity to bust a few myths about just who is stuck in this economy in low-wage jobs (spoiler alert: it’s not teenagers with summer jobs):
Raising the federal minimum wage to ten dollars and ten cents an hour, or ten-ten, would benefit 28 million American workers. 28 million. And these aren’t just high schoolers on their first job. The average worker who would benefit is 35 years old. Most low-wage workers are women. And that extra money would help them pay the bills and provide for their families.
He spoke of the rising agreement among diverse elements—business coalitions and small business owners among them—who are coming around to agreeing that a gradual raise in the federal minimum wage is a necessity, even as cities and states around the country are taking action. And in closing, he tied a minimum wage hike directly to this nation’s core beliefs about hard work and fairness:
Because we believe that in America, nobody who works full-time should ever have to raise a family in poverty. And I’m going to keep up this fight until we win. Because America deserves a raise right now. And America should forever be a place where your hard work is rewarded.
To read the transcript in full, check below the fold or visit the White House website.
