U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez isn’t going to sugarcoat what he thinks about America’s minimum wage — “We suck.”
Perez spoke at a Bloomberg News event Thursday and criticized what he sees as Congress’s failure to raise the minimum wage.
“I’ve met with minimum-wage workers in New Jersey,” Perez said at the event. “I’ve met with folks who — the only raise they got, they’re baggage handlers at Newark Airport, and the only raise they got was when the voters increased the minimum wage.”
The Obama administration and Democrats have been pushing hard to get Congress to raise the federal minimum wage up to $10.10 an hour from $7.25 an hour. It has become a major campaign issue for Democrats who try to bring it up at every turn.
The Republican opposition to raising the minimum wage by such a large amount is that it will likely lead to job loss, something Vice President Joe Biden heard about straight from the mouth of small business owners while promoting this idea on the campaign trail. Most of the GOP also believes the minimum wage should be tied to the market.
Perez was speaking in response to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s comments from Tuesday where he said he was “tired of hearing about the minimum wage.”
The labor secretary shot back, “Chris Christie’s got his head in the sand.”
He stated that the U.S. federal wage floor ranks third-lowest — as a percentage of median wage — among the 34 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
“I mean, we suck,” Perez said. “We really do.”
